The

                                Prelude to Dune

                                    Trilogy

   Bantam Books purchased the rights to a prequel trilogy to DUNE, written by
   Frank Herbert's son Brian (an acclaimed science fiction novelist in his
   own right) and internationally bestselling author, Kevin J. Anderson.
   These novels will be based in part o Frank Herbert's unpublished notes as
   well as conversations he had with his son. Putnam, the original publisher
   of the DUNE series, had the option on the project; they made a pre-emptive
   seven-figure bid for the trilogy, which Simon & Schuster then topped, and
   Bantam topped that, with what is believed to be the largest single science
   fiction contract in publishing history. Agents for the deal were Robert
   Gottlieb and Matt Bialer of the William Morris Agency, and Mary-Alice Kier
   of the Cine/Lit Agency. The trilogy -- HOUSE ATREIDES, HOUSE HARKONNEN,
   and THE SPICE WAR -- is an immediate prequel going back to the heart of
   Dune's readership, to the core characters and situations that made this
   the best-selling science fiction novel of all time: The love story of Duke
   Leto and Lady Jessica, their first battles with Baron Harkonnen, the
   planetologist Kynes sent to the desert world of Dune to investigate the
   precious spice and the sandworms and the Fremen . . . and the power-hungry
   Crown Prince Shaddam, who would do anything to secure the Imperial throne.
   The first novel, HOUSE ATREIDES, is completed and will be published in
   hardcover in October 1999. Brian and Kevin are currently writing HOUSE
   HARKONNEN. We expect the PRELUDE TO DUNE Trilogy to reach a worldwide
   audience, read by DUNE fans everywhere. T date, the prequel trilogy has
   been accepted for British publication by Hodder & Stoughton (with HOUSE
   ATREIDES due to be released in September 1999). French publication will be
   by Editions Laffont, Italian publication by Mondadori, and abridged audio
   cassette (simultaneous with U.S. hardcover release) by Bantam Doubleday
   Dell. Unabridged audio versions of all three books will be released by
   Books on Tape. (Books on Tape also has unabridged editions of DUNE, DUNE
   MESSIAH, and CHILDREN OF DUNE available )

   [[[ INTERVIEWS WITH FRANK HERBERT ]]]

   [[[ FIRST INTERVIEW ]]]

   Vertex Interviews Frank Herbert

   interviewer / Paul Turner

   October 1973

   Volume 1, Issue 4

   VERTEX: What got you started in science fiction?

   VERTEX: Had you been reading science fiction before that?

   HERBERT: Well, I didn't cut my teeth on science fiction. I began reading
   science fiction, I would guess, in the forties, the early forties. I'd
   been reading science fiction about ten years before I decided to write it.

   VERTEX: Who were your favorite authors?

   HERBERT: Well, I did read some Heinlein. I shouldn't really tie it down to
   ten years because I had read H. G. Wells. I'd read Vance, Jack Vance, and
   I became acquainted with Jack Vance about that time. Jack came along about
   six months or so after I'd decided to write science fiction. I heard he
   was in the area where I was living, and just walked in on him one day. We
   wound up, about six months later, our two families, going to Mexico. We
   lived in Mexico for a while and plotted several stories together. We're
   still very close friends. I read Poul Anderson. You know, we could list
   names here for a long while. I read the field when I started writing it. I
   wanted to see what was being done.

   VERTEX: What were you doing at the time you started writing science
   fiction?

   HERBERT:I was a newspaper editor, but I was also writing fiction. I was
   writing short stories. I decided very early I was going to write fiction.
   I came down to my birthday breakfast on my eighth birthday and announced,
   formally and portentously, to my family that I was going to be an author.
   My mother still treasures several hand-scribbled, badly misspelled, early
   eight-year-old attempts at fiction. One of them doesn't have a bad lead on
   it. Even now I can appreciate that I had the sense to put a narrative
   hook on the beginning of a story. even at age eight.

   VERTEX: Dune is probably your most well-known science fiction novel.

   HERBERT: Yes.

   VERTEX: What caused you to write Dune?

   HERBERT: Well, I had been nurturing the idea to write a treatment of the
   messianic impulse in human society for a long while, and my technique is
   to collect material. I collect file folders of material. A character idea
   interests me, and I put that in a folder appropriately labeled. Along the
   way I went to Florence, Oregon, to do an article about the U. S.
   Department of Agriculture's test station there, on the control of sand
   dunes. The U. S. pioneered in the control of sand dunes by planting
   specially developed grasses and other plants to hold a dune in the wind.
   You see, a sand dune is just a kind of fluid, only it takes longer for it
   to move. It creates waves that, when you see them from the air, are
   analogous to waves m a sea.

   VERTEX: A slow-motion sea.

   HERBERT: Yes, that's right. So, I did this magazine article and I started
   collecting material on the control of sand dunes. That lead me into
   ecological matters what we were doing to the planet. One day I woke up to
   the fact that I had a filing drawer fu ll and that I just couldn't do
   anything else but write that book. So I sat down and I plotted a much
   longer work than Dune.

   VERTEX: Dune is a pretty long work to begin with.

   HERBERT:I know! It was much longer. I cut it up into three parts, and held
   out more than a third of it for the first book. I sat down and took about
   a year and a half putting it together, writing it. My reports from the New
   York market were very poor and my treatment by some of the publishers back
   there was just outrageous. Then I went back, even before I knew that Dune
   was being so successful, and wrote Dune Messiah, which was planned as a
   pivotal book, pointing both backward and forward, because I had a long
   range concept of the treatment of this messianic impulse in human
   society. I'm at work on the third and last one, which will probably turn
   out to be as long as Dune. How soon I can finish it, I don't know, because
   life and other immediate and urgent jobs keep intruding. But I'll get to
   it and I'll get it out, probably this year.

   VERTEX: Do you have a title for it?

   HERBERT: No. I have a working title, but I try not to talk about work in
   progress. My advice to any writer is not to use the energies of creation
   in talking about what he's working on; put it into the typewriter. You use
   the same energies to talk about y our work that you use to write it. So
   I'm very cagey on these things, very secretive, and I hold all this back
   and then when I sit down at the typewriter it sort of pours out.

   VERTEX: Talking about your technique, are there any special requirements
   that you use to write? For instance, do you need special environments?

   HERBERT: Oh, I think we all need special environments for various things
   we do. A writer needs time, uninterrupted time, with the tools of his
   trade: paper and a writing instrument of some kind. Jack Vance uses pencil
   or pen. I think he has a rather interesting technique. He uses various
   colored pens; he has a dish of them beside him. When he gets tired of blue
   he writes with green, or red, or orange, or black. I use a typewriter. I
   think that's the newspaper training. I learned to type at about age 14
   and I touch-type. You train the thoughts to come out of the ends of
   your fingers in this particular mechanical way. I think you get a
   kinesthetic link right through the body. The thought comes into your head
   and goes right through your hands onto t he paper, you see. So I need a
   place where I can sit down and not be interrupted for at least four hours
   a day, or six, and often much more.

   VERTEX: Do you write long hours when you get inspired?

   HERBERT: Oh, I don't wait for inspiration. I just sit down and work at
   creating the thing that has interested me from the start. The three books
   of the Dune series still interest me very much because of the way these
   impulses form in the organism we call human society.

   VERTEX: There've been a lot of changes in our human society, our human
   culture, since you first wrote Dune. Are you incorporating these changes?

   HERBERT: Oh, yes. The book is being changed by experience. A man is a fool
   not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is
   creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing
   the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about
   inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and
   working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about
   it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or
   sometimes eve n longer. I'd much rather go fishing. for example. or go
   sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and
   reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between
   what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's
   writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between
   the two.

   VERTEX: That sounds like it might stem from your early newspaper
   experience, where you had to write regardless of the conditions or how you
   felt.

   HERBERT: Yeah, you sit down and you just have conditioned yourself to: now
   it's writing time and you have a deadline sitting out there somewhere and
   you're going to do the very best you can right here at this moment: and so
   You do It.

   VERTEX: What other things are you writing now, besides the last of the
   Dune novels?

   HERBERT: Well, I've been doing the narrative script for a documentary
   about the navy demonstration flight team, the Blue Angels. It attracted me
   because it wasn't a conventional documentary; it wasn't just 'here we're
   going to do some groovy things flying.'' I am a pilot. so I was
   interested from the flying point of view, but I was also interested he
   cause here were these fellows flying very hot aircraft and doing
   extraordinary things with them, and it struck me that they didn't really
   know what they we re doing. They knew flying; they knew they were doing a
   great thing and they were getting all this elation out of it, but they
   didn't understand their relationship to themselves and the airplane and
   the rest of the world. What they were demonstrating to people was that a
   human being could actually do these really extraordinary things: flying
   two aircraft towards each other, for example, at a closing speed of
   eighteen hundred feet a second. You think about that eighteen hundred feet
   a second And pass within three feet of each other. They train themselves
   so that the aircraft flies them as much as they are flying it, only we had
   to tell them that they were doing this. They thought they were controlling
   the aircraft, you see. The idea of absolute control is a hang up of
   Western culture. It is built into our language; it's part of the verb (o
   be: "Well, you either do it or you don't!" It's the old Cartesian
   dichotomy--the separation between body and mind. Well, there is no
   separation between body and mind .

   VERTEX:You talked earlier about the world culture, a composite of all the
   cultures on the Earth. Apparently you've thought about this at some
   length. Do you see lines, trends, things that are common to all cultures,
   a trend that this culture is following now?

   HERBERT: Well, I don't see trends if you're thinking of "where are we
   going,'' but I see many, many influences which are going to be mutually
   interactive, creating something new. Of course, you can talk then about
   certain things that are going to happen. I think that, barring a
   tremendous breakthrough in energy sources. which is always a possibility
   (it's our hope, our belief in miracles, you see), we are going to see
   animal dieback in human populations in some areas of the world.
   Specifically, in at le ast one area, I have other areas in mind, but the
   island of Java, which I visited last summer, now has a population of more
   than 80 million effectively living on land which is about the size of
   one-third of the state of Washington . . . 80 million people . They have
   urban density in the countryside. Now, they do not occupy all of the
   available land on Java, all of the available surface, but some of it is
   non-usable for human purposes under present circumstances. So, again
   barring some tremendous breakthrough in energy and food sources, an
   animal dieback will happen there because they are doing nothing about
   their growing population. They still have one of the largest population
   growth rates in the world. Now, and let's be conservative about it, if
   they double their population before the year 2000 that land will not be
   able to support them with present energy sources. It is barely able to
   support them now. So they are very close to a crash, to a population
   crash. Now, I think that the rest of the world will effectively be
   helpless in the face of it. You could not get enough food there and if you
   did you would only exacerbate the problem if you just gave food.

   VERTEX: Why is that?

   HERBERT: Because the pressures on a society, the pressures of danger,
   including the pressures of starvation, tend to increase the population.
   There is a thrust of procreation.

   VERTEX: That's what happens during war times.

   HERBERT: Yes, we come out of a war with more population than when we go
   into it, despite the losses in the war. So I am predicting that Java is
   going to experience a population dieback, a population crash, within at
   most fifteen years. That's going to have one hell of an effect on the
   rest of the planet. Not just the inability to cope with it in conventional
   terms; that is, produce food and give it to them, or whatever. But people
   are then going to look inward. at their own populations. Whole societies
   are going to look inward at their own efforts. I really believe that what
   we popularly call 'the change in morality.' that is, sex as recreation
   rather than procreation, is a social effort to cope with the necessity to
   limit the population and still deal with sexual drives.

   VERTEX:So it's a high speed evolution.

   HERBERT: Yes, I see it that way. Japan has been able to deal with its rate
   of growth rather dramatically. I see the same sort of thing happening in
   the United States. I do not see the same sort of thing happening in Muslim
   countries or in Latin America. Latin America is another area we want to
   look at in this respect, where the potential of population crashes exists
   because they are failing to deal with the problems in the face of the
   necessity to do so. If they do not limit population they must find uot her
   ways to deal with the increase, you see.

   VERTEX:To get back to science fiction, what do you feel is the role of
   science fiction? Do you feel that science fiction can help, or is helping
   to solve some of these problems?

   HERBERT:I think science fiction does help, and it points in very
   interesting directions. It points in relativistic directions. It says that
   we have the imagination for these other opportunities, these other
   choices. We tend to tie ourselves down to limit ed choices. We say, "Well,
   the only answer is...." or, "If you would just. . . ." Whatever follows
   these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision
   right down close to the ground so that you don't see anything happening
   outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required,
   in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on
   the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I
   don't think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or
   1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from
   happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that
   possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that
   direction. We may be contriving a strictly controlled police culture. B.
   F. Skinner worries the hell out of me. He is right out of Huxley. He is
   standing there like a small boy saying, "Please let me have a world like
   this because I feel safe in it!" He is saying, "I want to control it." He
   may be very accurate in his assessment that our total society is going in
   that direction and that maybe he is opting for the lesser of numerous
   evils, in his view. But what kind of a society would that produce?

   VERTEX: We'd like to touch on some of the personal aspects of your life.
   You mentioned earlier that some of your hobbies included electronics. What
   are some of the other things that you do for recreation?

   HERBERT:I like to do cabinetry; I like to do things with my hands when I'm
   not writing. I feel that I'm getting as far away as I conveniently can
   from the activity of sitting at a typewriter and putting words on paper by
   doing these other things. It's helpful to me; it's a kind of a catharsis.
   I garden. I have six and a half acres in the northeast corner of the
   Olympic peninsula in the state of Washington. I am in the process of
   developing what, I hope, will be a demonstration plot of land in which the
   demonstration will be that one can live a relatively high quality of life
   without an enormous, irreplaceable energy drain. I am going to do some
   hand work on the land. I shovel dirt and move rocks. I am in the process
   of creating a very small lake/pond/marsh combination by staggering the
   depth of it. I am going to plant wild rice and a new upland rice which has
   been developed for high altitude use in the Philippine Islands. I am not
   one of those people who believes in the "hot" gospel of ecology that man
   should keep his hands off the land. I believe that when he changes the
   land he ought to do it with an eye to the future, and with a little loving
   care so that when he has finished changing the land something is there
   that is more sustaining than what was there before. I will be able to
   plant trout in this pond and frogs and that sort of thing. It will attract
   birds that feed on the rice. That's why I'm planting it there. I'm going
   to build a kind of meeting house there--a guest house for friends to come
   m and have seminars and that sort of t hing so that we can rap and
   exchange ideas. I hope to build it out of stabilized adobe, which is a
   very fine insulating material. As I dig the adobe out of the ground it
   will provide me with a basement in this guest house. Some of the land we
   scoop back for this lake-cum-pond will also provide us with adobe. I felt
   I had to put my hands where my mouth was. I was going around speaking
   about these things and it's one thing to say, "We ought to be doing," and
   it's another thing to just go ahead and do it a nd say, "Well, this is the
   way I think we ought to do it and here is the example. I wasn't right
   about this aspect of it. I found that to do this particular thing my
   original approach had to be modified this way." This is what we always
   find out when we get our hands dirty. The element of doing it always
   teaches us much more. That is one of the hangups of education. You wanted
   to know more about my personal life I've been teaching at the University
   of Washington up until the last quarter. Now I've taken a two year leave.

   VERTEX: What courses were you teaching?

   HERBERT:I was teaching a lecture course called Utopia/Dystopia, which was
   an examination of the myth of the better life; how we carry it in our
   heads. We don't do anything without resorting to this myth: growing hair
   on our faces, our choice of friends, the clothing we wear, the kind of
   government we choose, who we say is the best leader, who we say is a bad
   leader. We don't go into a voting booth without taking this myth with us.

   VERTEX: Have you developed the course materials for this?

   HERBERT:I developed the course materials. It struck me that academe is far
   gone down this long road of "education can be done with power." Now, all
   of academe is not down there. We have many, many beautiful people in
   education who manage to work in spite of the administrative power
   intrusions. But when you come right down to it, a school is a "person" who
   has information which works. He can demonstrate that it works and it is
   people who want to do what this person does. They want to learn how to
   make things work that way.

   VERTEX:Do you enjoy teaching this course?

   HERBERT:I enjoy it. I teach it on the basis of pass/fail. I have to grade
   for the system, but I give everybody an 'A'. Grading intrudes on
   education. It's quite obvious that we are an unique and different species.
   That being a sexually reproduced species , we are not all equal. Not in
   our abilities, our desires, or anything else. Each of us is one-of-a-kind.
   This happens in a class too. There are people with certain capabilities in
   one direction which, if you developed a measuring system in that direction
   , you could say are better than others; but this effectively blocks what
   you can learn from everyone in the class. Class ought to be a place where
   teachers learn too. I have what I think is a very effective way of
   measuring whether people are getting anything that I have to give in a
   class situation, and that's whether I'm getting anything from them. If I'm
   learning from them I know they're learning from me. Now, I am not saying
   by this that we should immediately start medical students on a pass/fail
   system. Don't read me wrong on this. We have developed a set of parameters
   for a certain thing. But, we ought to recognize what we're doing, how we
   have developed those parameters, and how tightly we constrict them so that
   the end products are supposed to be stamped out the same. Really, this
   effectively stops development. Somewhere down the line, you have to have a
   man who can do something that others cannot do and can demonstrate this
   capability. He will say, "What I can do is this...."

   VERTEX: He would be transferring that information.

   HERBERT: Yes. "Here's how I do it." Now, obviously, this might not be the
   only way to do it for all time. It may not be the best way. We may develop
   far more effective ways of doing these things. But, under a power-oriented
   society, power adheres to people who have knowledge of how a thing works,
   no matter how temporary that "working" may be.

   VERTEX: And the power seldom goes away afterwards.

   HERBERT: Well, yes. Power tends to attract power, so that it effectively
   constricts avenues of development.

   VERTEX: What would be a way out of that? How could you widen those avenues
   of development?

   HERBERT: Well, if you're not to go to a completely chaotic society, with
   all the problems inherent in that, and that's not the answer, then we need
   ways that test the most outrageous concepts.

   VERTEX: Do you have any idea how that can be done?

   HERBERT: It was done under so-called "primitive" conditions by several
   avenues. The hermit could go out and do his thing. But we're running out
   of hermit space. The man with an idea that if you cut sections off a log
   and put a limb through the middle of them and put a load on the limb--you
   could carry a heavier load, drag it anyway, roll it--that man could just
   go do it. But our total society has found that if you let the physicists,
   say, build their wheel and cut their logs--then the resultant product
   becomes something that is used in a power context and, eventually, maybe a
   war. Eventually, maybe the destruction of the total planet. In this
   respect, I'm not as much worried by atomic weapons as I am by the whole
   structure and how it uses the products which accumulate in it. Far more
   dangerous to world society, in terms of springing upon us from an unknown
   corner, is the ability of a chemist and a pharmacist working in a
   basement, say, in South Africa to produce a mutated disease that would
   spread like wildfire throughout the world. Very cheap....

   VERTEX: Just like the old science fiction stories.

   HERBERT: It's very real, and a real potential in our world today.

   VERTEX: We're really kind of living in a science fiction world today,
   aren't we?

   HERBERT: Yes. I see this very clearly, that all of these things are
   accumulating around us. There are developments in several fields. There's
   no way to control these, no effective way to channel them and stop them in
   terms of present social directives, such as governments and social
   arbiters. There is no way, for example, to prevent the pharmacist or
   chemist from working in that basement in South Africa.

   VERTEX: That's true. Well, don't we really have to find ways to do that in
   order to survive?

   HERBERT:I think we are going at it in the wrong direction. We're thinking
   of controlling it rather than having a world society where people just
   don't want to do that sort of thing, don't want to destroy their fellows.

   VERTEX: If we could learn how to do that we would have most of our
   problems solved.

   HERBERT: It's not I he answer and it's not an easy thing. Part of it is in
   recognizing the essential humanity, that all other humans are like me in
   some way. You know, when you come right down to it, a society defines that
   word, hum am We think we know w hat a human being is. I begin the class by
   having them define human. I don't say homo sapiens, I don't say I want a
   medical definition, a physical definition, or anything else. I just say,
   define it. And, with a little gentle nudging here and there, we come to
   my assumption, which is that most societies define human as "like me." If
   they are sufficiently like me I'll let my daughter marry one. If they are
   not like me, they are somehow not quite human. They're Books, or niggers,
   or wops, or chinks. You k now, everybody knows, they're not human . . .
   not quite. Or they're dirty Indians, or mixed. All you have to do is look
   at them to see they're not like me. They don't feel things the way I do.
   So that, if it's necessary, for some reason that I define, to kill off a
   few of them, well, the world hasn't lost much.

   VERTEX: Those are hard basic assumptions to overcome.

   HERBERT: Right. They are very hard basic assumptions to overcome, because
   they are ground into our tribal ancestry and they go so far as, say, a
   person who works for AT&T and has really "bought it" knows that he is
   better than somebody who works for US Steel. The guy from US Steel, of
   course, is just a little less than human, thereby.

   VERTEX: There are a great many people out there who respect your writings,
   Mr. Herbert, and your abilities. Would you like to say something to them?
   . . . to all the young people, especially.

   HERBERT: Yes. I would like to tell them to be very careful about finding
   scapegoats. Technology is not a thing out there to be destroyed, thereby
   solving all our problems. How far back do we cut it? Do we go back to hand
   saws and hand axes? Which element s of the technology will we discard? I
   would say to let their imaginations run free. Go ahead, try to imagine
   things that would be fun and humorous and whatever, things that would be
   interesting to make. Do it with an eye to how many ripples these things
   will create and who those ripples may inundate. Eventually, you have to
   sing for your supper.

   VERTEX: Thank you very much, Mr. Herbert.

   Contents Copyright (c) 1973 by Mankind Publishing Company.

   Reprinted without permission. Originally published in Vertex Magazine,
   Volume 1, Number 4, October 1973. Published bimonthly by Mankind
   Publishing Company. Business offices: 8060 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA
   90046.

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