Surprising Facts about Frank Herbert 🪱🏜️🤺
Three Things #54: February 5, 2023
I spend a lot of time reading books and have several favorite authors. But I rarely if ever think much about the authors behind my favorite books. I can tell you almost nothing about the lives of Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George R. R. Martin. I don’t know precisely why I’ve not done this but I feel that the thing that matters is the book, not the author. And to the extent that the author does matter as a person, it’s the author as expressed through their writing. It’s not that the human behind the book is unimportant or totally uninteresting, it’s that the object in question is the book not the person—and it’s important to separate people from their work. In particular it doesn’t really matter to me if an author is or was a terrible person “in real life,” if they were a drunkard or a womanizer or a terrible parent or whatever, if their writing is brilliant. The writing speaks for itself.
My favorite story is the Dune Chronicles, as conceived by Frank Herbert (and, later, continued by his son Brian Herbert and coauthor Kevin J. Anderson). Despite being obsessed by Dune, Frank Herbert has always been just a name to me. To the extent that I had any understanding whatsoever of him as a human being, it was limited to a couple of low res photos I saw of him late in life, grinning through his massive beard. I was vaguely aware that his wife and longtime companion had fallen ill and that his taking time off from writing to care for her slowed his work on several novels including the final Dune books. I had a vague sense that he was from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. That’s literally all I knew.
I can’t help but write about Dune and its author given the impact this story arc has had on me over the past 22 years since I read the first book. As I’m finishing the final book in the Dune series—23 novels in all, plus a smattering of other books, short stories, graphic novels, etc.—I finally got around to reading Dreamer of Dune, Brian Herbert’s biography of his father. It’s a long, detailed, touching story of the life of Frank Herbert and his family, and it’s given me much greater depth of understanding not just of the man himself, but also of the various influences that went into the conception and development of Dune.
And, I have to admit, I may have been wrong about not taking the time to investigate the authors of my favorite books. Understanding more about Frank Herbert and his world has given me a great deal more appreciation for and depth of understanding of my favorite story.
Thing #1: He Was a Polymath
Frank Herbert wasn’t just good at writing or telling stories.
On one level—to a fan of Dune or Herbert’s other writings—this fact comes as no surprise. On top of being a thrilling adventure, Dune is a masterpiece of ecology, war, philosophy, psychology and sociology, religion, historiography, language and rhetoric, anthropology, and political philosophy, just to name a few of the subjects it touches upon. And yet on another level it is quite remarkable because, above all, Frank Herbert was a writer. He held many odd jobs, most often in journalism and political speech writing but also in photography, social and ecological consulting, television directing, in the Navy, and even a brief stint as unofficial village doctor in a small Mexican village! How does a journalist and author find time to study and become conversant in such a wide array of subjects? Herbert didn’t merely dabble in these subjects, he explored them deeply and demonstrated real understanding of them in his writing.
Herbert studied classics and rhetoric as part of his speechwriting work on four political campaigns. This shines through in Dune in the strong Greek influence: story arcs, common tropes, and characterizations all come directly from Greek tragedies like the Odyssey. The name “Atreides” is derived from the Greek House of Atreus, Leto is named after a Greek goddess, and Gaius Helen Mohiam is partially named after Helen of Troy, just to cite a few examples. All told, the Dune story arc feels a lot like a Greek epic, and the Greek references intensify as the series progresses.
Of course, Dune includes references to many other religions and cultures besides, including Jesuit (“Bene Gesserit”), Persian, Indian (“Padishah”), and Eastern (“Zensunni”). The Fremen are an amalgam of Native American, Middle Eastern and North African cultural elements. Herbert cast a wide cultural net, which is probably why Dune has such universal human appeal. His strong grasp of languages and cultures comes through in the rich names he created for people, places, and practices, and in the way he crafted believable peoples and practices. While he wasn’t particularly religious in his personal life, Herbert was especially drawn to Zen Buddhism, out of curiosity and through friendships with people like Alan Watts.
Another area of deep personal interest for Frank Herbert was ecology, which he also studied as part of articles he was commissioned to write on the subject. More on this in a moment.
What all of this amounts to is a story arc that seems to capture the entire breadth and depth of humanity. In writing Dune (and, to a lesser extent, his other stories), Herbert was exploring the very foundations of human society: what it means to be human, how humans can and should relate to one another and govern themselves, the connection and interdependencies between humans and nature, and the deep, underlying meaning of myths, legends, heroes, and religions.
This is the most unique and appealing aspect of Dune to me: that it’s an adventure story on the surface but also has such great depth. One can literally reread the story many times, follow many different threads of meaning, and have a different experience each time.
Good sci-fi authors excel in one or two fields: they can write competently about, say, astrophysics, AI, or biotech. Great sci-fi authors combine this technical ability (the “science” of sci-fi) with an innate grasp of the power of storytelling (the “fiction”), embed the technical details in the story, and prop up the story with believable science. The only author I’ve encountered who was capable of doing this across such a broad array of important and interesting fields was Frank Herbert.
In one of my favorite lines from Dune, Herbert wrote, “Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.” To paraphrase, “Deep curiosity about humanity and its oldest, deepest myths and truths comes close to being the basis for all the best stories ever told.” Frank Herbert’s curiosity about and passion for so many of the facets of humanity is the core reason Dune is the best story ever told.
Thing #2: He Was Deeply Committed to Ecology
Dune, which as mentioned is not really one story but rather many stories told in parallel on many levels, is, to many people, first and foremost a story of ecology, and of ecological disaster more specifically. Dune tells the story of an entire planet become nearly uninhabitable due to an extreme lack of water and a collapsed ecosystem (not to mention the presence of giant sandworms). Only the hardiest, strictest, most conservative societies, as embodied by the Fremen, are able to survive and thrive in such an environment. Later books in the series tell of the incredible, multi-generational transformation of that ecology, and of similar stories playing out on other planets.
Frank Herbert cared deeply about ecology and thought, researched, and read a great deal about the topic over the course of his life. He was an outdoorsman and spent a lot of time on the water from the time that he was a child. He lived closed to the land, often growing his own food out of both preference and necessity. These aspects of his life are clearly visible in Dune. Ecology isn’t just a passing theme or a throwaway motif in the story. It pervades every element of it, and of the broader Dune Chronicles story arc. As much as it is a political, religious, or historical tale, Dune is also intended as a warning about what might happen to our planet, too, if we don’t take better care of it (sandworms or no).
Herbert came of age in the postwar era when fuel was plentiful and cheap, and when Americans were first taking to the roads in great numbers. And yet he foresaw that this age would end and that, in the not too distant future, fossil fuels would become scarcer and more expensive. As Brian Herbert points out in Dreamer of Dune, his father predicted the fuel shortages of the nineteen-seventies. He traveled to a number of developing countries, including Vietnam and Pakistan, to survey damage wrought by climate change.
In addition, Herbert famously set up “ecological demonstration projects” at his “Xanadu” home in Port Townsend, WA, including an early, handmade solar panel system used to heat a swimming pool, a windmill tower, and a bird coop heated by methane from bird droppings. While he would decide to discontinue these projects a few years later as they were too time-consuming and were taking him away from his precious writing, they demonstrate his serious commitment to the cause, which went far beyond writing.
Herbert was acutely aware of how wrong things can go when humans don’t live in harmony with nature. These beliefs were strengthened through relationships with Native American friends and a good deal of exposure to Native American beliefs, customs, and culture.
Indeed, one of the key questions Herbert explores in Dune and in his other writing is, how should humanity live in accordance with nature? Throughout the Dune Chronicles there are stories of people, like the Fremen, who live well in accord with nature, and those, like the Harkonnens, who suffer because they do not or cannot. Groups that do the best are those that accept that they cannot defeat nature, but choose to live in accord with it, and in doing so shape both themselves to fit into the ecosystem and in turn shape the ecosystem as well, in a symbiotic fashion.
At the same time, he did not believe in living entirely off the grid and felt that humans should depend on one another. In an age when the challenges Herbert predicted (with at least a hint of prescience!) are more acute than ever, we’d do well to heed his warnings and follow his advice.
Thing #3: Dune Did Not Come Easily
Frank Herbert declared on his eighth birthday, in 1928, that he would become “a author.” His first short story was published in 1945, and his first novel, Under Pressure, began publication in serial format in 1955 and appeared the following year in book form under a different title. It was another ten years until Dune first appeared.
None of this came easily. Herbert struggled through the first decades of his writing career. He moved about 20 times, up and down the west coast. He married, had a baby girl, and divorced. He did a stint in the Navy. He remarried, had two boys, and, in search of inspiration, moved to Mexico and back, twice. All the while he struggled financially, and all the while he worked odd jobs, in journalism, photography, and political speech writing.
And all the while he kept writing, with whatever time he could find.
Eventually, a few of his short stories were published, for which he was paid a pittance—not nearly enough to focus on writing full time. Even once he began to find his groove, his writing improved, and he began to write science fiction, publishers declined to publish nearly all of his works because they were the wrong length (too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel). His works were considered too long and too complex for sci-fi readers of the time. He couldn’t pick a genre and was reluctant to embrace sci-fi. Under Pressure was a sci-fi novel but he subsequently shied away from the genre because it wasn’t considered a genre for serious authors or serious stories. He felt that people wouldn’t take him seriously as a sci-fi author. (Needless to say, they did, and he went on to redefine the genre, setting the stage for many other serious authors and works of sci-fi to follow.)
For decades he continued to struggle to find acceptance as an author, and he and his family continued to struggle financially, always behind on bills and taxes. They drove broken-down cars. They grew their own food in order to economize. Even after Dune was completed and published in serial form in Analog magazine (for which he received only a few thousand dollars), it was famously rejected by 20 book publishers, one of whom wrote, “It is just possible that we may be making the mistake of the decade in declining Dune by Frank Herbert” (actually, it turned out to be the mistake of the century). Eventually, Herbert found editor Sterling Lanier who fell in love with Dune and published it in book form in 1965 at a little-known publishing house called Chilton. The book was not an immediate success, but first gained popularity on college campuses as something of a cult classic. The rest is history.
It’s a tale as old as time: in retrospect, it seems easy, but success clearly didn’t come easily to Herbert. As a young man, when he asked a successful author for advice, he was told, “Work like hell, kid.” He took the advice to heart, and he did. He wrote a handful of novels and published at least a dozen short stories before Dune. Many of his stories were never published. Dune eventually came to life not just as a product of Herbert’s remarkable talent but also through the enormous effort he put in over decades exploring and studying many fields, and because of his life experiences. Especially the difficult ones.
And needless to say, he didn’t rest on his laurels after the success of Dune. He wrote five more Dune Chronicles novels, with plans for more before his untimely death. In addition to the Dune series he wrote 10 other novels, dozens of short stories, and even more poems and essays. He was prolific.
The moral of the story is work like hell, and don’t expect a masterpiece to appear out of nowhere. We all have to do the hard work and put in our time. Success doesn’t happen overnight or out of thin air.