Dune

INTRODUCTION BY BRIAN HERBERT

In the summer of 1980, I was visiting my mother and father at their home in Port Townsend, Washington. On a small table beside my mother’s favorite chair, I noticed a draft of God Emperor of Dune. She had the manuscript open to page 516, near the conclusion of the novel. When I asked Dad how it was going, he said it was a totally new kind of love story, unlike anything ever written before. When I finally got the opportunity to read the story, I found it was that, and a great deal more.

To understand this complex novel, it is important to realize that Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune form a trilogy. The fourth entry in the series, God Emperor of Dune, is a bridging work leading to a new trilogy. Before Frank Herbert died in 1986, he wrote the first two books in that trilogy, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, and made notes for the third volume, to which he gave the working title Dune 7. (In collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson, I later wrote Dune 7 as two novels: Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune.)

God Emperor of Dune also marks a change in writing style for the series. The first three novels are filled with action and layers of important messages about politics, philosophy, religion, ecology, women’s issues, history, and the very nature of humanity. While God Emperor begins with action, and ends with it, there are many pages of dialogue in between. In those pages, there is a great deal of conversation about important, interesting subjects—much of it spewing from the God Emperor, Leto Atreides II. The thoughts are so brilliant, springing as they do from the mind of Frank Herbert, that I scarcely notice the difference in writing style when I’m reading. I like the book very much, and it was my mother’s favorite in the series. But it is different, and it marks a change in style that the author carried forward to the next two books in the series, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune.

Think of the style of Dune, with its adventure story following the classical hero’s journey of Paul Atreides, and so many important messages layered beneath. The presentation is accomplished so expertly on the pages, so seamlessly, that when you get to the end, you hardly realize you’ve just learned a great deal about ecology and things that matter to this planet and to all of humankind. You only know that you want to read the book again, spending even more time with Paul Atreides, Duncan Idaho, the Lady Jessica, and the other characters in the incredible Dune universe. Bits and pieces of the story cling to you afterward, luring you back into it. So you return again to page one and continue on. This time you might focus on other aspects, other layers, things you didn’t notice before.

God Emperor of Dune is different. When you finish it, you realize that you’ve just absorbed a large amount of data from a great mind, so much that you need to go back and study the material to see what the author intended. Realize, though, that in this novel Frank Herbert was exploring some of the layers of Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune that he had already established, taking the dangers of government and organized religion to new levels, merging them, and extrapolating to an extreme, providing a scenario of what it might be like if a holy tyrant led humanity and if that despot could not die. The stakes could not be any higher. And what a fantastic concept, combining human flesh with supernatural elements of nature to create a godhead. A frightening notion—and even more terrifying than the dangers of following a charismatic leader that Frank Herbert wrote about so eloquently in the second and third books of the series.

It is also interesting to note that Frank Herbert often wrote about beings with godlike powers, entities that took on differing forms. In his own Destination: Void and its sequel The Jesus Incident (cowritten with Bill Ransom), the entity is a supercomputer. In Whipping Star, it is a celestial body, a star. In The Godmakers and Dune, the gods are in human form. In God Emperor of Dune, the entity is part mysterious sandworm, part human, a creature that contains a vast storehouse of knowledge.

The God Emperor, Leto Atreides II, is one of the most unusual characters in the annals of science fiction. He has lived for more than 3,500 years and possesses a wisdom that spans time and space. He seems capable of living forever, of leading humankind into the eternal future. For millennia after the events in the novel Dune, Leto has enforced a peace—a “Golden Path”—under which he has ensured the continued existence of the human species. As Leto puts it, “The Golden Path . . . is the survival of humankind, nothing more nor less.”

But Frank Herbert, who saw the dark side of the hero, also saw the dark side of the perfect civilization. He called this way of thinking “myth-busting” or seeing the “dystopia in the utopia.” As a newspaper reporter for many years, he often turned over stones to see what would scurry out. At the University of Washington in Seattle, he taught a political science class about shattering the myth structures under which we live. A modern-day Socrates, he tore into what he called “unexamined linguistic and cultural assumptions.”

My father knew how to do his research. Back in the 1950s, he was a speechwriter for a U.S. senator and worked in Washington, D.C. With C-9 security clearance, Frank Herbert had special access to the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, through which he could use virtually any document or book in the vast library. He just got on the telephone, ordered what he wanted, and presently it arrived in a cart, with blue bookmarks designating the pages that were of interest to him. Notes were included on material available at other government facilities, including the National Archives and the Army Corps of Engineers. If he wanted any of the additional materials, he simply ordered them through the Library of Congress and soon they were in front of him.

A man of boundless energy and enthusiasm, Frank Herbert possessed a mind that went in fifty directions at once. He was always thinking, always reading at every opportunity, always researching something. For each novel he wrote, he first pored over as many books as he could get his hands on about particular subjects, then spoke with scientists, doctors, and other experts. Time was critical to him, and he didn’t like to waste a moment of it. Physically and mentally, he went from point A to point B quickly. Sometimes he learned what he needed with a phone call. To see how easy it might be for an unbalanced, dangerous person to obtain the ingredients and materials necessary for recombinant DNA research (for the novel The White Plague), Dad acted as if he were a doctor and telephoned medical suppliers.

Frank Herbert was a man full of intriguing ideas, the most interesting person in any room. His personality, like the characters he created in his stories, was larger than life. He had a full, fantastic beard, and with his twinkling eyes, you never quite knew what he would say next. A reviewer for the New York Times once quipped that Frank Herbert’s head was so overloaded with ideas that it was likely to fall off. In God Emperor of Dune, my father described Leto II, who, through genetic processes, had acquired all human information. In “Pack Rat Planet” and Direct Descent, he wrote of a vast Galactic Library, a storehouse containing the written wisdom of humankind. Frank Herbert, like Leto II and the Galactic Library, was a repository of incredible, wondrous information. His words captivated millions of people all over the world.

My father respected his readers. He challenged them by using words they might have to look up in the dictionary, and kept them turning the pages with surprising twists and turns of plot and characterization. Who could have predicted that he would turn the hero myth of Paul Atreides upside down in the space of the first two novels in the Dune series, and show a dark path that humanity might find itself on if it followed a charismatic leader? This is a significant message, an urgent social warning that governments and leaders lie.

It is just one of many thought-provoking messages that Frank Herbert layered into his novels beneath the ongoing adventures, causing his readers to think about deep issues. But in his hands, the material never seems oppressive or boring, because he accomplished his art so cleverly, by deftly intertwining the messages with the unfolding action of the series. He was not pedantic, did not preach to his readers. He sought to entertain first, while teaching along the way.

I wrote a comprehensive biography of my father, Dreamer of Dune, a book that succeeded in capturing the essence of Frank Herbert. But he was more than any words could possibly describe, even those of a son who loved him. As much as I struggled to understand this complex, great man—and I made significant strides on that journey—I came to realize that he was always a step beyond any attempt to describe him, to capture him on the page. Even in death, he was still moving ahead, eluding discovery. I think about him every day, and about my incredible mother, Beverly Herbert. She understood him better than anyone, and I learned about him through her, as well as through my own observations and conversations I had with him. But often, thinking back, I find myself realizing something new and intriguing about Frank Herbert, something I had not previously noticed or considered. Concerning the spice melange, he wrote in his magnum opus, “It’s like life—it presents a different face each time you take it.” He was like that himself, different each time you looked at him.

My father’s Dune novels are like that as well, revealing something new about the author on each pass through the pages. I like that. In life, Frank Herbert had such tremendous energy that he never walked beside me in the customary fashion of two people; he was always a half step ahead, leading the way. Dan Lodholm, his best friend from childhood, told me something similar. He remembered hikes they took together on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State in the 1930s, and how he was always looking at the back of Frank Herbert’s head, following him on the trail.

Now in God Emperor of Dune, we are treated to an intriguing look inside the head of Frank Herbert—through his character Leto Atreides II. This is a remarkable novel and another fantastic journey through the unparalleled Dune universe.

Brian Herbert

Seattle, Washington

May 8, 2008