Dreamer of Dune (33 page)

Shortly after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May 1980, we spent the weekend with my parents. At the conclusion of a Friday evening dinner, Dad said to me, “Let's talk story.” Dutifully I followed him up to his writing loft, carrying my
Sidney's Comet
manuscript in a gray-and-white box under my arm. He reviewed my work, which I hoped was now complete at almost 250 typed pages. He read and scanned rapidly, pausing occasionally to speak about certain sections, making numerous suggestions.

As he spoke, I scribbled notes on sheets of newsprint. Since Dad worked in the newspaper business during many of the years when I grew up, newsprint was a common sight in our household. Many of Dad's manuscripts, typed on newsprint, bore further evidence of his journalism career—the number “-30-” on the bottom of the last page. This was a coded instruction from copy editors to typesetters, confirming that a news story had ended at that point.

The following day, a Saturday, was drizzly in Port Townsend. In the living room, Dad and I worked on my novel. He said it was good through the first hundred pages, but after that it lapsed too frequently into narrative, somewhat like an expanded outline. He thought I should expand the book, fleshing out many of the narrative passages into action and conflict among the characters.

Just past lunch, an architect brought the Hana house plans over and we reviewed them. They were for the main house, not yet under construction. Dad wanted to change the graceful shape of the living room, but Mom and Jan convinced him otherwise.

When the architect left we continued the writing session, and Dad spoke about plot—the importance of keeping a story rolling so that the reader wants to turn the next page. Then he took me upstairs to his writing loft and went over two hundred pages of
Sandworm of Dune
with me in detail to show how a plot and suspense should be set up.

Afterward Jan and I treated Mom and Dad to dinner at Lido by the Sea, a restaurant near the city marina. I was rather depressed after the writing session. After so much work on my book, I thought it was close to being done. It would take me three days to recover, during which time I didn't work on the manuscript at all. Then, determined, I set to work on it again, in every spare moment of time I had.

W
HEN MY
father began to discuss my writing with me, he took great pains to say that no one could teach another person how to write. It was a craft best learned in the performance, he said, by placing the seat of one's pants on a chair for long periods of time with some sort of writing instrument before him. It wasn't as glamorous a profession as people believed.

A writer was similar to a carpenter in his estimation; they were just different jobs. The writer even had a toolbox, except his was full of words. “A carpenter carps and an author auths,” he quipped.

He thought he might counsel me, working with my basic writing style to make it more clear, more organized. And then he intended to get out of my way. “I can't write for you,” he said. “You must put in the long hours yourself.”

Frank Herbert could write at tremendous speed.
Hellstrom's Hive
, an eighty-five-thousand-word novel, was written in seven weeks, and during that period he corrected two sets of proofs on other novels of his that were about to be published. On one of his
Dune
sequels, he produced six hundred single-spaced pages of scenes, notes and characterizations in just a month and a half! He let it flow, overwriting, knowing he would cut the material way back later. To produce a one-hundred-thousand-word novel, he said he often wrote two hundred thousand words.

Once when I said I was going to leave some items out of a story, saving them for another work, my father shook his head and cautioned, “Never hold anything back. Put it all into your story. Don't worry that you won't have enough left for next time. It'll be there when you need it.”

The time he spent writing was not always productive. He recalled staying up into the wee hours one night working on a novel, writing what he thought at the time was some of the best material he had ever produced. But when he looked at it the next day, it was so bad he had to throw it all away.

Dad didn't talk about his secret worlds while they were in development, except to my mother and occasionally to other members of the family. This was a piece of advice given to him in the 1950s by the noted western writer Tommy Thompson, the favorite author of President Eisenhower. “Save your energy for putting words on paper,” Thompson counseled. “You use the same energies talking about a story as you use writing it.” He said young writers often talked their stories to death and never actually wrote them.

My father took this advice to heart, and as he adopted it he rather enjoyed playing a little game with anyone questioning him, rarely letting out the secrets he was conjuring until they were printed. His conservation of energy was an interesting example of the man…almost mirroring a facet of his most famous story,
Dune.
In his writing he conserved energy as if it were precious water in the desert.

This technique was also an effective psychological ploy used by the writer on himself, as the energies of his story became pent up, needing release. Ultimately ideas exploded through his fingertips to the typing keys to the page.

Frank Herbert believed his creative processes were partly in his fingers, the result of natural processes enhanced by years of training at a typing keyboard. He described it as a kinesthetic link, in which thoughts flowed from his brain through his body to his fingers and onto the paper. He tapped into something in that process, a powerful creative vein, and stories emerged.

Some of his favorite ideas came from examining what he called “our dearly beloved assumptions.” One set of assumptions, found in the Jorj X. McKie stories (
The Dosadi Experiment, Whipping Star,
and other tales) was that big centralized government structures helped people cope with rapidly growing, bewildering technology and that justice could always be achieved through perfected systems of laws.

His fervent political views provided an endless source of story ideas. He was particularly intrigued by the myths in which we live, by the “unconscious assumptions” we make regularly—assumptions that cause us to behave in predictable ways.

In
Children of Dune,
he wrote:

Myths are not always old, he taught. Mankind is constantly in the process of creating its own. The Camelot of John F. Kennedy was the myth of a better society, in which leisure was king and everything man could desire was obtained effortlessly. It was linked with the long familiar, ever-recurring myth of a heroic young leader, fulfilled in the minds of millions of Americans by the youthful President Kennedy.

Other story ideas of my father's were extrapolations of present world conditions, a common source for science fiction writers. In the industry, the process is known as “What if?” What if a new form of humans could be created, whose members could pass unnoticed in our society? (
Hellstrom's Hive
.) What if mankind could travel instantaneously from one side of the universe to the other? (
Whipping Star, Man of Two Worlds, Dune
.) What if women dominated a political and/or religious hierarchy? (
The God Makers, Dune
.)

The setting of
Dune
was my father's best-known extrapolation, in which a historical pattern of desert encroachment upon arable land was taken to the extreme, creating a world entirely covered by sand. In his 1959 short story “Missing Link,” which later became part of
The God Makers,
he described “planet-buster” bombs, which were an extrapolation of city-buster atomic weapons then available. In
The Dragon in the Sea,
historical oil shortages were extrapolated, and he postulated technology that might exist in a world where oil was far more precious than it was today.

There are many themes in the stories of Frank Herbert. Frequently he wrote about politics, religion, philosophy, water and water worlds, ecology, machines, genetics and myths. I found a number of subthemes or motifs particularly interesting as well, since he employed them as plot vehicles.

He went to the well many times with stories of investigators traveling to far-off lands or strange places to unravel mysterious events, not unlike an investigative reporter going out to do a story. His variations were highly creative and interesting, and show how he successfully accomplished the Ezra Pound adage, “Make it new.”

Dad's first novel,
The Dragon in the Sea,
employs this motif. Ensign John Ramsey is assigned to the subtug Fenian Ram on a dangerous wartime mission to determine why crews on prior missions have not been able to endure psychological stresses. It is suspected that an enemy “sleeper agent” may be aboard as a saboteur, and it is Ramsey's duty to find out for certain.

Perhaps my father's most memorable use of the investigator technique in a novel occurred in
The Santaroga Barrier.
A supermarket chain has not been successful in expanding to the insular town of Santaroga, and sends a university psychologist, Gilbert Dasein, to find out why. Prior investigators sent to the town have met with unfortunate “accidents.” Dasein becomes immersed in the affairs of the town and comes to empathize with the reasons the townspeople don't want his company's supermarkets. Still, he feels a strong obligation to his employer—and thus we have the seeds of conflict within the protagonist.

In
The God Makers,
a galactic empire is trying to reassemble itself after a series of terrible “Rim Wars.” The story's protagonist, Lewis Orne, is charged with investigating various planets to ensure that all is peaceful and that no seeds of warfare are germinating anywhere. One of his investigative missions, the climactic one, involves a trip he must take for his own sake, to the priest planet of Amel.

Hellstrom's Hive
concerns a mysterious underground hive of humans that is being investigated by a government agent. The hive, it turns out, is secretly a staging ground for humans who are adapting insect methods to improve the odds of survival of the species. An earlier agent has disappeared on this dangerous assignment.

In
The Dosadi Experiment,
Jorj X. McKie is sent to investigate a secret psychological experiment in which the population of an entire planet is confined—an experiment that threatens to harm the whole galaxy.

Other Frank Herbert short stories and novels involve the investigator motif, sometimes involving colonization, exploration and experiments away from Earth—all used as plot vehicles. In
Destination: Void,
scientists are trying to develop an artificial intelligence, but due to failures and deaths in prior experiments they plan to perform future experiments away from Earth, on the distant planet Tau Ceti. The experiments are highly secret, and are concealed in an apparent colonization mission to Tau Ceti.

The colonization plot is closely allied with another recurring motif in my father's work—survival and adaptation to difficult circumstances. This is the subject of his early short stories, “Survival of the Cunning” and “The Jonah and the Jap,” as well as of the novel
Dune,
where the planet is covered with sand and the most precious commodities are water and a mysterious spice-drug, melange, found only on Dune. Expressing his philosophy about the necessity for adaptation, Dad wrote that this drug is “like life—it presents a different face each time you take it.”

In
The Dragon in the Sea,
Captain Sparrow's definition of sanity is “The ability to swim…the sane person has to understand
currents
, has to know what's required in different waters…Insanity is something like drowning. You go under, you flounder without direction…” In
Dune,
this variation appears as a Bene Gesserit axiom: “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”

Hellstrom's Hive
is about species adaptation and survival—about whether mankind might survive longer on Earth by utilizing insect methods.

In
Destination: Void
, a complex ship's computer (Organic Mental Core) fails entirely while the ship is in deep space, stranding three thousand passengers. To avoid certain death, the occupants must come up with a method of performing mind-boggling calculations previously done by the computer.

There are inhospitable planets in a number of stories, where characters must adapt to new and dangerous conditions. These include the desert planet Arrakis (Dune) of the
Dune
series, the water world Pandora of
The Jesus Incident
and two sequels, and the overcrowded war-torn world Dosadi of
The Dosadi Experiment.

He wrote often of beings with godlike powers, entities that took on differing forms. In
God Emperor of Dune,
the entity was part sandworm, part human, with a Frank Herbertlike mind containing a vast storehouse of knowledge. In
Destination: Void
and
The Jesus Incident,
the entity was a supercomputer. In
Whipping Star,
it was a celestial body, a star. In
The God Makers
and
Dune
, the gods were in human form.

Sometimes story ideas came to my father in dreams, or as he lay in bed half-awake. These would be scribbled on a notepad by his bed. He called them his “dream notes.” One night he came up with the most remarkable story idea of his entire life, even better than
Dune.
Upon awaking in darkness, he flipped on the lamp by his bed and scribbled the story idea down, intending to work on it the following day. When he awoke the next morning, he read the notepad. It said only, “Great idea for a story!”

When I began writing novels, my father told me rather ominously that editors made decisions about stories based upon the first three pages. “If you don't hook them by that time, they'll probably toss it.” A powerful narrative hook is essential in the beginning of the story, he said. Sometimes Dad placed his narrative hook in an epigram preceding the text of the story, and sometimes it was enmeshed into the early action of the tale. But always it was there.

He taught me how to ground a reader quickly and solidly, much in the fashion of a newspaper story, and how to coax the reader to delve further into the tale. As with so many facets of writing, it was a balancing act, he said, as the writer doesn't want to overwhelm his reader with too much information too soon…like turning on a fire hose.

Dad liked to end scenes and chapters on a note of suspense, and did this to keep the reader turning the pages, to maintain his interest. This was Frank Herbert's definition of plot: “Stringing words together to make a reader want to read the next line.” He put his characters under mounting tension in a story, pressure situations where they had to improvise and adapt in order to survive. Mirroring real life, his story-people were constantly presented with surprise situations, wild-card events. In
Destination: Void,
each leading character had what he called “a dominant psychological role” to perform, based upon Jungian archetypes. This squared the characters off against one another, and made the predicaments in which they were placed more challenging and suspenseful than they might normally have been.

After examining one of my early attempts at novel-writing, Dad looked at me and said, “I can't see what you're trying to describe. It's not coming alive for me.” The answer lay in providing more details, he said, but only the right kind of details. During a writing session on
Sidney's Comet,
he was wading through a number of my passages in which I described characters getting up, sitting down, walking around, moving their heads and the like. “Too much business here,” he said, using a ballpoint pen to line things out. Another time he said, “Cut, cut and cut again.”