Frank Herbert

Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. (Tacoma, Washington, October 8, 1920 - Madison, Wisconsin, February 11, 1986), known as Frank Herbert, was an American science fiction writer, best known for the 1965 novel Dune and its five sequels. Although he gained recognition for his novels, he also wrote short stories and worked as a journalist, photographer, literary critic, ecological consultant, and lecturer.

Set in the distant future and taking place over millennia, the Dune saga explores complex themes such as the long-term survival of the human species, human evolution, planetary science and ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, economics and power in a future where humanity has long since developed interstellar travel and settled on thousands of worlds. Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, and the entire series is widely considered among the classics of the genre.

Biography

Early Years

Frank Herbert was born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington, the son of Frank Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen (McCarthy) Herbert. Due to a poor family background, he ran away from home in 1938 to live with an aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon. He enrolled in Salem High School (now North Salem High School), graduating a year later. In 1939, he lied about his age to get his first job with the Glendale Star newspaper. Herbert returned to Salem in 1940, where he worked for the Oregon Statesman newspaper (now Statesman Journal) in a variety of positions, including photographer.

He served six months as a photographer for the US Army Seabees during World War II, then received a medical discharge. He married Flora Parkinson in San Pedro, California, in 1940. They had a daughter, Penny (born February 16, 1942), but divorced in 1945.

After the war, Herbert attended the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Ann Stuart in a creative writing class in 1946. They were the only students to have sold any work for publication; Herbert had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, the first to Esquire in 1945, and Stuart had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. They were married in Seattle, Washington, on June 20, 1946, and had two sons, Brian Patrick Herbert (born June 29, 1947, in Seattle, Washington) and Bruce Calvin Herbert (born June 26, 1951, in Santa Rosa, California, and died June 15, 1993, in San Rafael, California; Bruce was a professional photographer and gay rights activist).

In 1949, Herbert and his wife moved to California to work for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. There they became friends with psychologists Ralph and Irene Slattery. The Slatterys introduced Herbert to the work of a number of thinkers who would later influence his work, including Freud, Jung, Jaspers, and Heidegger; they also introduced Herbert to Zen Buddhism.

Herbert did not graduate from college; according to his his son Brian, he wanted to study only what interested him and therefore did not complete the required curriculum. He returned to journalism and worked at the Seattle Star and the Oregon Stateman . He was a writer and editor for California Living magazine of the San Francisco Examiner for a decade.

In a 1973 interview, Herbert stated that he had been reading science fiction "about ten years" before beginning to write in the genre, and listed his favorite authors as H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson, and Jack Vance.

Herbert's first science fiction story, Looking for Something, was published in the April 1952 issue of Startling Stories, and then edited monthly by Samuel Mines. Three more of his stories appeared in 1954 in Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories. His career as a novelist began in 1955 with the serial publication of Under Pressure (Under Pressure), in the November 1955 issue of Astounding; it was later published as a book by Doubleday, under the title The Dragon in the Sea (The Dragon in the Sea). explored the sanity and madness surrounding a 21st century lowercase submarine and predicted global conflicts over oil consumption and production It was a critical success but not so much commercially. During this time, Herbert also worked as a speechwriter for Republican Senator Guy Cordon.

Dune

The Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area (National recreational area of Oregon dunes), near Florence, Oregon, served as inspiration for the saga Dune.

Herbert began researching Dune in 1959. He was able to fully devote himself to his writing career because his wife returned to work full-time as an advertising writer for department stores, becoming the breadwinner for the family. during the 1960s.

He later told Willis E. McNelly that the novel originated when he was supposed to do a magazine article about sand dunes at Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. Oregon), near Florence, Oregon. He got too involved and ended up with far more raw material than needed for one article. The article was never written, but he planted the seed that led to Dune .

Dune took six years of research and writing to complete and was much longer than what was supposed to be commercial science fiction at the time. Analog (renamed Astounding, still edited by John W. Campbell) published it in two parts comprising eight installments, Dune World ( World of Dune), in December 1963, and Prophet of Dune (Profeta de Dune), in 1965. twenty book publishers. One editor presciently wrote: "I might be making the mistake of the decade, but...".

Sterling E. Lanier, publisher of the Chilton Book Company (known primarily for its auto repair manuals), had read the Dune periodicals and offered an advance of $7,500 plus future royalties for the rights to publish it as a hardcover book. Herbert rewrote much of its text. Dune was soon a critical success. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the award. Hugo in 1966 with ...And Call Me Conrad (...And call me Conrad), by Roger Zelazny. Dune was the first great ecological science fiction novel, encompassing a multitude of broad, interrelated themes and multi-character points of view, a method that ran through all of Herbert's mature work.

Dune was not an immediate sales success. By 1968, Herbert had made $20,000 from it, far more than most science fiction novels of the day brought in, but not enough to allow him to start writing full-time. However, the publication of Dune opened the doors for him. He was an educational writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from 1969 to 1972 and a professor of general studies and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington (1970-1972). He worked in Vietnam and Pakistan as a social and ecological consultant in 1972. In 1973 he was director-photographer of the television program The Tillers .

I don't care about inspiration, or any of that... later, returning and reading what I've produced, I can't detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's time to write and now I'll write."

Frank Herbert

Herbert's novel The Priests of Psi (The priests of Psi) was the cover story of the edition Fantastic. February 1960.

By the end of 1972, Herbert had retired from newspaper writing and had become a full-time fiction writer. During the 1970s and 1980s he enjoyed considerable commercial success as an author. He divided his time between his residences in Hawaii and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington; his residence in Port Townsend on the peninsula was intended to be an “ecological demonstration project.” During this time he wrote numerous books and advanced ecological and philosophical ideas.

He continued his Dune saga with Dune Messiah (The Dune Messiah), Children of Dune (Sons of Dune) and God Emperor of Dune. Other notable milestones included The Dosadi Experiment, The Godmakers, The Godmakers, The White Plague (The White Plague), and the books he wrote in collaboration with Bill Ransom: The Jesus Incident (The Jesus Incident Jesus), The Lazarus Effect and The Ascension Factor >), which were sequels to Destination: Void.

He also helped launch Terry Brooks' career with a highly positive review of his first novel, The Sword of Shannara, in 1977.

Success, family changes and death

Herbert's turnaround in fortunes was overshadowed by tragedy. In 1974, Beverly underwent an operation for cancer. He lived for another ten years, but his health was adversely affected by the surgery. During this period, Herbert was a featured speaker at the Octocon II science fiction convention held at El Rancho Tropicana in Santa Rosa, California, in October 1978. In In 1979, he met anthropologist James Funaro, with whom he conceived the Contact Conference. Beverly Herbert died on February 7, 1984, the same year Heretics of Dune was published; In her epilogue to Chapterhouse: Dune ( Dune Chapter House ), from 1985, Frank Herbert wrote a eulogy for her.

In 1983, British heavy metal band Iron Maiden requested permission from Herbert's publisher to name a song on their album Piece of Mind "Dune", but were told that the author had a marked dislike for his style of music. Instead, they titled the song 'To Tame a Land'.

1984 was a tumultuous year in Herbert's life. During the same year as his wife's death, his career took off with the release of David Lynch's film version of Dune. Despite high expectations, a big-budget production design, and a top-notch cast, the film garnered mostly poor reviews in the United States. However, despite a disappointing response in the United States, the film was a critical and commercial success in Europe and Japan.

After Beverly's death, Herbert married Theresa Shackleford in 1985, the year he published Chapterhouse: Dune, which tied up many of his the threads of the story of the saga. This would be Herbert's last individual work (the collection Eye was published that year, and Man of Two Worlds, El hombre de dos mundos, was published in 1986). He died of a massive pulmonary embolism while recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer on February 11, 1986, in Madison, Wisconsin, at age 65.

Work

Writings

• The dragon in the sea (1956)
• Dune's Chronicles
  • Dune (1965)
  • The Month of Dune (1969)
  • Children of Dune (1976)
  • God emperor of Dune (1981)
  • Herejes de Dune (1984)
  • Dune Capitular House (1985)
• Destination: the vacuum (1966)
• Heisenberg's eyes (1966)
• The green brain (1966)
• The Santaroga barrier (1968)
• Flagned star (1970)
• The Creators of God (1972)
• Project 40 (Hellstrom's Hive) (1973)
• The Dosadi experiment (1978)
• The white plague (1982)

In collaboration with Bill Ransom he published:

• The Jesus incident (1979)
• The Lazarus Effect (1981)
• The ascension factor (1988)

In collaboration with Brian Herbert, he published The Man of Two Worlds (1986).

In addition, The Chronicles of Dune was completed with two novels written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson made from notes left by Frank Herbert in a deposit box that had to be opened with drill, and that they were only found after his death:

• Dune Hunters (2008)
• Dune sandblas (2009)

Filmography

Cinema

• Duneof David Lynch (1984)
• DuneDenis Villeneuve (2021)

Syfy Miniseries

• Dune (2000)
• Children of Dune (2003)

Spanish edition

Ediciones Debolsillo has published the complete saga of Dune, of which only the first six volumes correspond to Frank Herbert: