Dreamer of Dune (66 page)

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A
The Dragon in the Sea
(Doubleday, 1956): Accurately predicted the worldwide petroleum shortage that would occur two decades later.
(B)
Dune
(Chilton Books, 1965): Considered an environmental handbook by many, the novel extrapolated existing world conditions in which deserts were encroaching upon arable land, and envisioned an entire planet covered by sand.
(C)
The Green Brain
(Ace Books, 1966): Based upon insects that actually developed a resistance to insecticides, such as DDT, Frank Herbert extrapolated and described a society that created a massive and powerful insect intelligence in reaction to human attempts to exterminate them.
(D)
Hellstrom's Hive
(Doubleday, 1973): Extols the benefits of insect society as opposed to human society, including the way insects co-exist better with their environment than humans do.

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Laetrile was developed in France in 1840, and by the 1970s it was a fad cancer cure, replacing another fad cure of the 1960s, krebiozen. By the 1980s, most medical authorities felt there was no evidence of any anti-cancer properties in laetrile.

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My mother and father rarely spoke to me of religion when I was living with them. Mom explained this was because religion had been shoved down their throats when they were children, and they did not want to inflict anything like that upon Bruce, Penny, or me. They wanted us to make our own decisions about God, with all choices open to us. Later in her life, Mom would have a change of heart, saying our lack of religious experience gave us nothing to fall back upon during times of extreme difficulty. In her own way, she would one day form a strong relationship with God.

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The 1982 movie
An Officer and a Gentleman
was filmed there.

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Due to the danger of methane explosion, the reader should not attempt to replicate this system.

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But Bruce was brilliant. In the 1960s, he invented the “karaoke” music system. Without naming it or attempting to exploit it commercially, he simply set it up for personal use in his own household.

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Frank Herbert, while not formally religious, knew scripture. In Luke 10:37 of the New Testament, Jesus told his followers the story of the good Samaritan, and then said, “Go, and do thou likewise.”

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Milton Howell had been the attending physician for aviator Charles Lindbergh when Lindbergh died at Hana in 1974. Lindbergh loved this tropical paradise, and it was where he chose to live during the final months of his life.

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Dad had read a medical report to the effect that complex carbohydrates could reduce the effects of jet lag. For that reason, he and Mom invariably ate pasta after returning home from trips.

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One of the people he helped, Mom's friend Frankie Goodwin, said that he taught her to never use the word “very” in anything she wrote. If she ever had the urge to use it, he told her to substitute the word “damn” instead.

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For years Dad had been on a regimen of twelve to fifteen vitamins daily. Bottles of them were lined up on the bathroom counter. Since vitamin A was retained in the body and he could overdose on it, he took it every other day. And, since vitamin D came from the sun, he took it on alternate days while in Hawaii and daily on the mainland. He said that every person should take a different quantity of vitamin C, and that it had to be taken with vitamin B for best assimilation. He based this on the fact that some people needed sixty milligrams a day to avoid scurvy, while others only needed five milligrams. He said each person could determine his proper amount by loading up on the vitamin until the stool started to loosen—and then backing off a little on the dosage. When vitamin E became popular in the early 1980s, ostensibly for its ability to inhibit the aging process, both of my parents took it. They found an additional property for it as well, which my mother described for me. A gelatin capsule of vitamin E could be opened and spread on a cut, she said, in order to make it heal faster.

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Victoria Schochet—the wife of noted author Eric Van Lustbader.

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One evening we were enjoying a sparerib dinner, along with a big bottle of Chianti. Dad told a story about a group of literati gathered in New York City, discussing which foods went with certain wines. Science fiction writer Ben Bova was talking about Chianti, and a pretentious woman asked, aghast, “What food could possibly go with a wine like that?” To this, Bova responded, “Peanut butter.” When the diners thought about it, they realized he was absolutely right. Only one wine, Chianti, had a strong enough flavor to keep from being drowned out by the flavor of peanut butter! My father found the discussion highly amusing.

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While my father admired the special effects, he had a contractual reason for disputing the use of Edric in the
Dune
movie, as noted in Chapter 44.

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New apartment wing, attached to the main house by a covered walkway.

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In
Frank Herbert
, William Touponce said that “many strong independent women's voices” could be heard in
Chapterhouse: Dune
. This is an indication not only of my father's grief concerning my mother, who died during the writing of the book, but of his recognition of the contribution she made to the
Dune
series and to his other writings.

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I learned later that this plane—a twelve-seat, twin-engine turbojet—had originally been reserved for by Dad in order to fly Mom back to the mainland to see their children and grandchildren. Unfortunately she never felt up to such a trip.

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In 1985 the prose piece would appear as a testimonial in
Chapterhouse: Dune
, eliciting an outpouring of supportive letters from fans.

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Frank Herbert was not the only one of us to report the paranormal influence of my mother after her death. When Margaux was eight years old, she was about to step in front of a truck on a busy street. Suddenly she felt “a gasp of air” that pushed her back onto the sidewalk to safety. No one was near her. Thinking back, however, she recalled seeing a dark-haired woman beside her, just before the incident. Years later, as I was completing this biography, I was contacted by Frankie Goodwin, who had been Mom's best friend back in the 1940s. Frankie filled in details on the courtship of my parents. Then she added, “I don't know what made me write to you after all these years.” I smiled and said, “My mother had a hand in this.” As proof, I described a number of events to Frankie, many of which are detailed later in this biography.

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Actually he had experienced writer's blocks before, but not since the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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In
Frank Herbert
, William Touponce postulated that
Man of Two Worlds
“is obviously a send-up of many science-fiction themes—creator figures and races, their responsibilities, and the chance that humankind may be a casual toy.”

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One of our characters in the story, a Dreen alien named Prosik, had changed the shape of his body for security purposes, taking the form of a snake. Dad wrote a passage in which Prosik, while in that shape, was caught in a sliding door and then run over by a power mower.

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Director David Lynch and director of photography Freddie Francis did put their trademark on the film, bringing a somber darkness to the screen. According to
The Making of Dune
, a promotional book written by Ed Naha for the Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, the art director Tony Masters said, “Dino visited the set one day when it was being built and he was very worried about the film being too gloomy and black-looking. He wanted everything lightened up. More color. As I was lightening things up and putting more color around, David showed up. He wanted things darker. So, I was struck between the two of them. Eventually we compromised…a little. Dino has accepted everything now. I don't know if he gave up on us or what.” (Considering this with 20/20 hindsight it does seem to me that the film might have benefited by more light, emphasizing the blinding brilliance of the desert planet
à la
the film
Lawrence of Arabia
instead of cave-dark sietches and gloomy castles.)

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If singer Michael Jackson had been a member of the Academy, he might have voted for
Dune
. After seeing the costumes in the movie, he had similar clothing designed for himself, which he wore on stage.

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Many fans, upon reading
Man of Two Worlds
, assume that I wrote the humorous passages…because of my earlier satirical novels. To a large extent, this is not the case. In the first draft, I wrote it as a serious novel, and Dad later added most of the funny, wacky stuff.

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This involved the use of a key
Dune Messiah
character in the film version of
Dune
, Edric the Spacing Guild Steersman. Because of Frank Herbert's poor health, the issue was dropped, without ever having been resolved.

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Dino De Laurentiis does not agree with this statement. A few years ago, he indicated to Mary Alice Kier, the literary and film agent for the Herbert Limited Partnership, that he, like Universal, had lost money on
Dune
. I am only reporting what Frank Herbert said, and cannot comment one way or another on details of the accounting.

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The new short story collection was a contractual obligation to G. P. Putnam's Sons, as part of a package deal that included the “
Dune
7” novel.

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Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom worked on plotting and characterization for
The Ascension Factor
, but the writing had to be done by Bill, after the death of his collaborator.

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See Chapter 4. My mother was born Beverly Stuart but changed her maiden name to Forbes later after her mother remarried.

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For more details on our collaboration, refer to the Afterword of
Dune: House Atreides
by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

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Dune, Dune Messiah
, and
Children of Dune
formed a trilogy.
God Emperor of Dune
was a bridging work to a new trilogy that included
Heretics of Dune
and
Chapterhouse: Dune
. “
Dune
7”—only a working title that would eventually be changed—was to be the third book of that trilogy.