1999: Afterword from Dune: House Atreides Brian Herbert wrote:the safety deposit boxes were opened. Inside were papers and old-style floppy computer disks that included comprehensive notes for an unpublished "Dune 7"--the long-awaited sequel to Chapterhouse: Dune! Now Kevin and I knew for certain where Frank Herbert had been headed, and we could weave the events of our prequels into a future grand finale for the series.
July 1999 by Crescent Blues,KJA: Pumped on Dune wrote:
Kevin J. Anderson: We had to create a lot, but there were a couple things that helped. We found Frank Herbert's full and complete outline for "Dune 7," the last Dune book that he was going to do, which is set far in the future from the original ones.
But there are also thousands of pages of his own character notes, background notes, his cogitations on the Bene Gesserit and how they formed, some back-history on the Butlerian Jihad…
After we had already agreed to do it, we plotted some things. We decided to do the prequel instead of the sequel at the moment -- we will eventually do the last one. And after we had already plotted the prequel, that's when Brian, by digging through all the stuff we had on Dune, came upon the key to the safe deposit where he found the [Dune 7] outline.
Then Brian was trying to turn his garage into an office. Inside there, in a back corner, he found a Xerox (tm) box with thousands of pages of Frank Herbert's handwritten notes. It had all been put away at his father's death. Nothing was happening to them. It was like discovering this lost treasure or going into the C.I.A. warehouse and finding the Ark of the Covenant somewhere.
http://www.crescentblues.com/2_5issue/anderson.shtml
Nov. 10, 1999 KJA, BH, Transcript from Time Chat Event wrote:
Inside those boxes were the notes for an unpublished Dune novel, which Dad was just beginning to work on at the time of his death. We also located more than 1,300 pages of Frank Herbert's Dune notes in a storage loft of my home. We had plenty of material to work with.
Kevin and I have been able to use the clues that Dad left over for such characters as Duncan Idaho, and we also have Frank Herbert's notes for the original series, so we are able to fill in details about characters' early years. It is very important to make the early events that we are describing consistent with the characters' later lives, as written by Frank Herbert.
KJA;We also have many of Frank Herbert's notes, including the complete outline of Dune 7, the sequel of Chapterhouse Dune, and we also are considering the story of the Butlerian jihad.
http://www.time.com/time/community/tran ... 9dune.html
January Magazine // 2000 The Sons of Dune by Linda Richards wrote:BH;I started looking through my attic. I hadn't intended to write a Dune book, but I had some of dad's manuscripts. So I started looking through them and not only were there manuscripts, but there was 1300 pages of working notes up in my attic. So my mother not only directed us to the safety deposit box, but to the notes.
http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/duneprofile.html
2001 infinity plus KJA Interview by Nick Gevers wrote:
Brian and I have uncovered over 3000 pages of Frank Herbert's working notes as well as the complete outline for the climactic Dune novel he intended to write.
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intkja.htm
pre Butlerian Jihad, Wormhole Books: Interview, BH, KJA wrote:KJA;an old safe deposit box key that had belonged to Frank.
Inside the box was, among other things, the full and complete outline for Dune 7, the climactic novel Frank had intended to write.
Later, while clearing out his garage to convert part of it into a writing office,
Brian also found a large box of Dune notes Frank had stored there years before. Suddenly, we were faced with an overwhelming amount of material, clues, details, storylines, quotes-all of which we have incorporated into our books.
http://www.wormholebook.com/interviews/brian_kevin.htm
2001 Frank Herbert Lives by Byron Merritt wrote:
The boxes were laid onto a table and Brian watched as the lids yawned open, as if waking from a deep slumber. From the first box, the attorney handed Brian volumes of recipes his father had cooked up (the "I write" man was also an excellent chef). In the second box were a few very old five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks with stacks of papers underneath.
What Brian saw was beyond imagination and hope. He'd uncovered an item that'll be shared with millions of people. On the cover of the first page, scribbled in Frank Herbert's unmistakable hand, were two words: 'Dune 7.'
(Penny calls her boy,"We've found notes for a seventh Dune book. They were discovered in a safety deposit box in Seattle after all these years."
After confirming that she wasn't 'joshin me,' we (Penney & Byron) talked about what this meant to us and to literature. But mostly we talked about what it meant to us, to our family.)
http://www.sffworld.com/authors/m/merri ... ives1.html
June 11, 2002 Landsraad Website Interview wrote:
KJA;With all of Frank Herbert’s notes, we have a basic framework of major events, which is like having a flashlight in a big, dark room.
From Frank Herbert’s voluminous notes, we had a broad-strokes outline of the epochal events that establish the DUNE universe, but none of the details.
The Butlerian Jihad has always been the tale that most fascinates DUNE fans, and we finally lay out the answers. It was a process of learning and discovery for us as much as it will be for the reader.
We have the outline for the Grand Finale and how it wraps up all the storylines, so we are laying the basis for much of it in our prequels.
Fed2K,2003 Byron Merritt interview by Dwight Steven Pavlovic wrote:
This new series has opened up Brian and Kevin's imaginations. In the first three prequels (The House series), they were constrained by what happens immediately after their stories ended -- that being the original Dune material by Frank Herbert. So they had to tread veeeery carefully. But with this new series, they've gone back nearly 10,000 years to a time that my grandfather only hinted about. They've got a lot of leeway to play around with (in fiction writing terms).
2003: Merritt Interview, KJA wrote:
Frank Herbert left so much material for us to draw on, it's like having a giant pantry in the kitchen and a shelf full of cookbooks. We aren't going to run out of things to cook!
In The Butlerian Jihad, The Machine Crusade, and The Battle of Corrin, we're set 10,000 years earlier in "history." The planets, cultures, people, and technology are completely different. Brian and I had to create that world from scratch (using Frank Herbert's notes and details).
We have Frank Herbert's outline for Dune 7, which ties together all of the threads he laid down in his original Dune chronicles - and Brian and I needed to do our House trilogy and the Butlerian Jihad trilogy to set up many of the necessary details for the story.
Oct 2003 Writers Write, KJA interview by Claire E. White wrote:
So Brian went to a bank in the Seattle area and they opened up the boxes that had been there unknown and untouched for all these years, and there were some old disks, some recipes, some letters and things …and the full and complete outline for Dune 7.
At the time, Brian wasn't so much writing at home; he was a full-time insurance agent. And he was doing a few other projects. But when he realized that we were going to be tackling these big projects that he needed to have a big writer's office himself, like I did. At home, he has a three-car garage. And like most of us with a three car garage, he parks cars in two of the spaces, and piles junk in the third space. So they cleaned out all the junk from the third garage , all the bikes and boxes and old things, to make room for his writing studio and there, up in the back corner, by the rafters that had been stashed for fourteen years or so, was a big xeroxed box of papers on which Frank Herbert had written "Dune Notes". There were like 3,000 pages of Dune notes. There were character sketches, a lot of the epigraphs that go at the top of the chapters, files and files of those.
Once you read our books, you will say, "Oh, that's what it's all about." Frank Herbert did seem to have it all mapped out. And what's amazing to me is that - and remember, that I've re-read these six books over and over - but now we have to be like these religious devotees, looking over every little niche here and there. He did this all without computers -- he did it all in his head. It's just all notes on note cards and things. I defy anybody to find any major mistakes in the original six books which took him approximately twenty years to create.
It's amazingly complicated. There are one or two little glitches,(in Dune) that if you are a fanatic like we are then you could maybe spot them, although if we have spotted the glitches it's our job, as Kevin and Brian, to find some explanation that makes sense.
http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/oct03/anderson.htm
Nov. 2003 Sand In My Shoes,An Interview with BH and KJA by Sandy Auden wrote:"We found some of Dad's notes in a safe deposit box that had been locked for eleven years and we've been using them for Dune 7,"
Feb29,2004 Inoculator9, dune2k KJA interview wrote:
In his papers, Frank had left the complete outline for “Dune 7” -- so it’s just not accurate for some of the surly fans to claim that we’re concocting books that Frank Herbert never intended to write.
We had plotted out the general storyline and knew where we wanted to go -- and then, within days after I had gone back home -- Brian received a call from the estate lawyer about newly discovered safe-deposit boxes. Inside, were the working notes and full outline for DUNE 7, so suddenly we had the roadmap for where we had to end up.
And now we saw that Frank Herbert’s plans for the Butlerian Jihad, and the stories leading up to DUNE 7 all tied wonderfully together.
http://forum.dune2k.com/index.php?topic=13650.0
2004: Russian FanSite Interview (BH/KJA) wrote:
" Frank Herbert’s outline was so vast,"
...but if we publish the notes and outline, then people will know the whole story! We want readers to get all the details from the published novels.
After we already had our general outline written and the proposal sent to publishers, then we found the outlines and notes.
http://www.thedune.ru
June 2004 The Roads of Arrakis, Byron Merritt wrote:
And, of course, HUNTERS OF DUNE and SANDWORMS OF DUNE will finish off the outline of ‘Dune 7' that was left behind by my grandfather just prior to his death
http://arrakis.ru/merritt_eng.shtml
2004 amazon, Before Dune , After Frank Herbert wrote:Then Brian was cleaning out his garage to make an office space and he found all these boxes that had "Dune Notes" on the side.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/fe ... 28-5924624
December 2004 Russian Dune Fansite Byron Interview by Dicramack & Agamemnon wrote:
No one can be sure what my grandfather's history of the machine wars was supposed to be. Or can they? Oh, that's right! Brian and Kevin have his notes! Okay, sarcasm's over. But seriously, Brian and Kevin have the notes and know what Frank had in mind. I think the issue some "Dune fans" are having is that Brian and Kevin don't have the same prose as Frank. But how could they?
I've seen the papers, and Brian and Kevin have taken A LOT of these items that Frank left behind and put them into their prequels. The basic history is straight out of my grandfather's notes, too.
http://www.thedune.ru
Ian Ascher, Int, KJA Before book#90 wrote:
They opened up the safe deposit box and found inside the full and complete outline for "Dune 7," the final installment in the epic saga.
Later, when Brian was cleaning out his garage, in the back he found a Xerox box filled with over three thousand pages of Frank Herbert's other notes, background material, and character sketches. We felt very gratified now that we had a roadmap, and it also seemed that Frank Herbert was giving a nod to us to do the projects.
Then we will write the two volume grand climax as was outlined in Frank Herbert's detailed notes for "Dune 7." It's such a huge story we had to break it up into two volumes.
http://web.archive.org/web/200707032136 ... erson.html
2006: Hunters of Dune Audiobook Interview (BH/KJA) wrote:BH: Yeah, it's just a three-page, er, maybe two-and-a-half page outline, but it's er ... it's... it's concise, we've, um ... we've ... we've added a lot, a lot to it, I mean, it was, it was more of a ... an inspiration for us in kind of a general concept, than a detailed scene-by-scene outline, so Kevin and I have, have fleshed out the characters and the scenes and, ... um, and I think, er, oh a few weeks later, I started rummaging around in my storage and I ... and I found additional general er, Dune ... Dune notes of my father's that have really helped us too. So, it was kind of amazing to have these things appear right after Kevin and I met.
SB: So, you all had started making plans and then, essentially you found, a roadmap?
[KJA and BH talk over each other, then ...]
BH: Well, I wouldn't say we found a roadmap, I'd say we found ... clues.
SB: Okay.
BH: It's been more clues than ... than precise roadmaps.
SB: I was curious, because you had written about this in The Road to Dune, about having found this. I was always curious how detailed an outline it was, and how much room it gave you for improvisation, shall we say?
[KJA takes a breath, but BH answers ahead of him]
BH: No, it wasn't that detailed, it was more general.
SB: Got it.
KJA: But it answered the questions that we needed to have answered, I mean, there's ... there's some big mysteries that's [sic] left at the end of Chapterhouse: Dune and Frank Herbert could say more in a sentence than some people can say in chapters, so we were able to find ... what we had to do in order to write the rest of the story, and in fact it's ... it was such a huge story that was kind of sketched out in this outline, that it took us, er, either one 1500-page book to tell it, or two much smaller, 700-page books. So that's why Hunters of Dune is the first half of the grand climax.
SB: Right.
Thanks HBJ, you're the best!
9Aug2006 New Dune Books Resume Story,John Joseph Adams wrote:
Anderson said that Frank Herbert's notes included a description of the story and a great deal of character background information. "But having a roadmap of the U.S. and actually driving across the country are two different things," he said. "Brian and I had a lot to work with and a lot to expand, now that we had Frank's original six novels and our six prequels to wrap up."
August 14th, 2007 Sci-Fi Week Chat with BH & KJA wrote: we found the outline and disks for "Dune 7" -- that story's been told many times. We did a lot of work with our prequels to both set up many of the details for the grand climax, and also to generate a lot of new interest in the Dune series. Now, with HUNTERS and SANDWORMS, we're bringing the story to its chronological end, as Frank Herbert envisioned it in his outline.
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xf_scifi_week_dune_transcript/
Apr8,2009 by SebastianPiccione,Project Fanboy wrote:
After his death, Brian found some items he had left in a safe deposit box, including computer disks containing his last outline, for Dune 7. Among other boxes in storage, we found thousands of pages of notes, unpublished chapters, character backgrounds, epigraphs. So when we started work on the books, we had a great deal of material to work with
http://www.projectfanboy.com/vb/showthread.php?t=3006
Aug 17 2009 BH on Flipping the Myth of Jihad by Clayton Neuman wrote:
and in them were the notes to Dune 7 -- it was a 30-page outline. So I went up in my attic and found another 1,000 pages of working notes.
http://www.filmcritic.com/features/2009 ... -interview
Nov2009 Jérôme Vincent, Interview de KJA VO wrote:
When we found Frank Herbert’s notes detailing other parts of the history of the Dune series, we realized there were many other stories to be told.
http://www.actusf.com/spip/article-8561.html
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE