2005: Preface to The Road to Dune (w/ KJA)
Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 8:14 pm
PREFACE
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
— FROM FRANK HERBERT'S Dune
It was like finding a buried treasure chest.
Actually, they were cardboard boxes stuffed full of folders, manuscripts, correspondence, drawings, and loose notes. Some of the box corners were sagging, crumpled by the weight of their contents or partially crushed from languishing under a stack of heavy objects.
As Brian described in his Hugo-nominated biography Dreamer of Dune, Frank Herbert's wife, Beverly, was very ill in her last years and unable to keep up with the deluge of paper. For a long time before that, she had kept her prolific husband highly organized, using an ingenious filing system to keep track of old manuscripts, contracts, royalty reports, correspondence, reviews, and publicity.
In the boxes we found old manuscripts for Frank Herbert's various novels, along with unpublished or incomplete novels and short stories, and an intriguing folder full of unused story ideas. There were old movie scripts, travel itineraries, and legal documents from Frank Herbert's work on various films, including The Hellstrom Chronicle, Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience, The Tillers, David Lynch's Dune, and even Dino de Laurentiis's film Flash Gordon, on which Frank had worked in London as a script consultant. There were contracts and screenplays for numerous uncompleted film projects as well, including Soul Catcher, The Santaroga Barrier, and The Green Brain.
Salted among the various boxes full of materials for Dune Messiah and God Emperor of Dune (under its working title of Sandworm of Dune), we found other gems: drafts of chapters, ruminations about ecology, handwritten snippets of poetry, and lyrical descriptions of the desert and the Fremen. Some of these were scrawled on scraps of paper, bedside notepads, or in pocket-sized newspaper reporter notebooks. There were pages and pages of epigraphs that had never appeared in Frank's six Dune novels, along with historical summaries and fascinating descriptions of characters and settings. Once we started the laborious process of sifting through these thousands of pages, we felt like archaeologists who had discovered a verified map to the Holy Grail.
And this was just the material in the attic of Brian Herbert's garage.
It didn't include the two safe-deposit boxes of materials found more than a decade after Frank's death, as we described in the afterword to our first Dune prequel, House Atreides. In addition, Frank had bequeathed dozens of boxes of his drafts and working notes to a university archive, which the university generously opened to us. After spending time in the silent back rooms of academia, we uncovered further bounty. Kevin later returned for more days of photocopying and double-checking, while Brian tended to other Dune projects.
The wealth of newly discovered material was a Dune fan's dream come true. And make no mistake: We are Dune fans. We pored over hoards of wondrous and fascinating information, valuable not only for its historical significance but also for its pure entertainment value. This included an outline (along with scene and character notes) for Spice Planet, a completely different, never-before-seen version of Dune. We also found previously unpublished chapters and scenes from Dune and Dune Messiah, along with correspondence that shed light on the crucial development of the Dune universe—even a scrap of paper torn from a notepad on which Frank Herbert had written in pencil: "Damn the spice. Save the men!" This, the defining moment in the character of Duke Leto Atreides, might well have been written when Frank Herbert switched on his bedside lamp and jotted it down just before drifting off to sleep.
The Road to Dune features the true gems from this science-fiction treasure trove, including Spice Planet, which we wrote from Frank's outline. We are also including four of our original short stories: "A Whisper of Caladan Seas" (set during the events of Dune) and three connecting "chapters" surrounding our novels in the Butlerian Jihad saga: "Hunting Harkonnens," "Whipping Mek," and "The Faces of a Martyr." We also wrote an original lead-in to Hunters of Dune, "Sea Child", which was first published in ELEMENTAL, the tsunami relief anthology.
Had Frank Herbert lived longer, he would have presented the world with many more stories set in his fantastic, unparalleled universe. Now, almost two decades after his untimely death, we are honored to share this classic legacy with millions of Frank Herbert's fans worldwide.
The spice must flow!
—Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
— FROM FRANK HERBERT'S Dune
It was like finding a buried treasure chest.
Actually, they were cardboard boxes stuffed full of folders, manuscripts, correspondence, drawings, and loose notes. Some of the box corners were sagging, crumpled by the weight of their contents or partially crushed from languishing under a stack of heavy objects.
As Brian described in his Hugo-nominated biography Dreamer of Dune, Frank Herbert's wife, Beverly, was very ill in her last years and unable to keep up with the deluge of paper. For a long time before that, she had kept her prolific husband highly organized, using an ingenious filing system to keep track of old manuscripts, contracts, royalty reports, correspondence, reviews, and publicity.
In the boxes we found old manuscripts for Frank Herbert's various novels, along with unpublished or incomplete novels and short stories, and an intriguing folder full of unused story ideas. There were old movie scripts, travel itineraries, and legal documents from Frank Herbert's work on various films, including The Hellstrom Chronicle, Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience, The Tillers, David Lynch's Dune, and even Dino de Laurentiis's film Flash Gordon, on which Frank had worked in London as a script consultant. There were contracts and screenplays for numerous uncompleted film projects as well, including Soul Catcher, The Santaroga Barrier, and The Green Brain.
Salted among the various boxes full of materials for Dune Messiah and God Emperor of Dune (under its working title of Sandworm of Dune), we found other gems: drafts of chapters, ruminations about ecology, handwritten snippets of poetry, and lyrical descriptions of the desert and the Fremen. Some of these were scrawled on scraps of paper, bedside notepads, or in pocket-sized newspaper reporter notebooks. There were pages and pages of epigraphs that had never appeared in Frank's six Dune novels, along with historical summaries and fascinating descriptions of characters and settings. Once we started the laborious process of sifting through these thousands of pages, we felt like archaeologists who had discovered a verified map to the Holy Grail.
And this was just the material in the attic of Brian Herbert's garage.
It didn't include the two safe-deposit boxes of materials found more than a decade after Frank's death, as we described in the afterword to our first Dune prequel, House Atreides. In addition, Frank had bequeathed dozens of boxes of his drafts and working notes to a university archive, which the university generously opened to us. After spending time in the silent back rooms of academia, we uncovered further bounty. Kevin later returned for more days of photocopying and double-checking, while Brian tended to other Dune projects.
The wealth of newly discovered material was a Dune fan's dream come true. And make no mistake: We are Dune fans. We pored over hoards of wondrous and fascinating information, valuable not only for its historical significance but also for its pure entertainment value. This included an outline (along with scene and character notes) for Spice Planet, a completely different, never-before-seen version of Dune. We also found previously unpublished chapters and scenes from Dune and Dune Messiah, along with correspondence that shed light on the crucial development of the Dune universe—even a scrap of paper torn from a notepad on which Frank Herbert had written in pencil: "Damn the spice. Save the men!" This, the defining moment in the character of Duke Leto Atreides, might well have been written when Frank Herbert switched on his bedside lamp and jotted it down just before drifting off to sleep.
The Road to Dune features the true gems from this science-fiction treasure trove, including Spice Planet, which we wrote from Frank's outline. We are also including four of our original short stories: "A Whisper of Caladan Seas" (set during the events of Dune) and three connecting "chapters" surrounding our novels in the Butlerian Jihad saga: "Hunting Harkonnens," "Whipping Mek," and "The Faces of a Martyr." We also wrote an original lead-in to Hunters of Dune, "Sea Child", which was first published in ELEMENTAL, the tsunami relief anthology.
Had Frank Herbert lived longer, he would have presented the world with many more stories set in his fantastic, unparalleled universe. Now, almost two decades after his untimely death, we are honored to share this classic legacy with millions of Frank Herbert's fans worldwide.
The spice must flow!
—Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson