Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

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Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

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http://www.the-trades.com/articles/2009 ... -heir-dune


Interview: Brian Herbert:
The Chronicler Heir of Dune
by R.J. Carter
Published: August 15, 2009



Frank Herbert is regarded as one of the few holy names of the science
fiction pantheon of authors. His 1965 novel, Dune is the bestselling science
fiction novel of all time. His passing left behind big shoes and a tall shadow,
but Brian Herbert has been more than up to the task of carrying on the Dune
legacy. Working with author Kevin J. Anderson, he has added over a dozen
more novels to the history of his father's creation, setting up a tradition of
New York Times best sellers in his wake.





With so many years of Dune history still available to be explored,
is there any planned end in sight for the franchise?


So far, Dad published six novels and I published ten major novels with
Kevin, and then a secondary Dune novel, so there's -- depending on how
you count -- either 16 or 17 published now. We have two more under
contract, which would get us up to 18 or 19, and after that -- I think there
might be three more and that would be it. That would be about the founding
of the Great School -- The Bene Gesserit. So that would be The Sisterhood
of Dune, The Mentats of Dune, and The Swordmasters of Dune. But beyond
that, I'm feeling like it would be too many books, and these are all major
novels that follow Frank Herbert's outline that he laid out for this 23,000 year
epic. But I don't want to branch off the main river -- at least with major novels.
Now, there's some talk about intelligent graphic novels that could tell some
smaller stories, but as far as the major novels go, I do see the end in sight.






Are there any future plans for anthologies of short stories by other authors,
done inside the Dune setting?


To do that, it would require a huge amount of fact-checking, so it would be
easier for Kevin and I to just write short stories ourselves, as we have. So I'm
not sure how we would do that. Kevin and I have a six hundred page Dune
concordance that I've prepared, that took about a year, so I know all the page
numbers where Frank Herbert described everything. So I'm not sure how another
writer would get into all that and figure out all the details.






Maybe after you've written the last book, you could publish the concordance?

(laughs) We've thought about it, but by then we'd need to add all the other
books to the concordance
.





The latest book, The Winds of Dune, has just debuted and quickly made it
onto the New York Times bestseller list. What, in a nutshell, can fans expect
to find in The Winds of Dune that will expand the mythos? What will they
come away with that will be the reason they needed to read this one?


It's about something really important. At the end of the novel Dune... The whole
novel is the story of Paul Atreides, basically, and he's on this heroic journey and
by the end of the novel he marries the emperor's daughter -- so everything is
looking rosy and he's followed a typical heroic journey that seems kind of familiar
to people from hearing old stories of other heroes.

But by book two, Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert flipped that myth over, the myth
of us following a "charismatic leader," as the way Dad put it. He flipped that myth
over, and he pointed out that a charismatic leader, basically, can be very dangerous.
So that's why he made Paul Atreides dark in book two, and there's billions of people
who have been killed in his name.

The Winds of Dune is the direct sequel to Dune Messiah, and at the end of Dune
Messiah Paul has abandoned his emperorship, he's walked off into the desert, he's
presumably dead -- he doesn't want this huge mythos that's developed around him.
And Frank Herbert was that way himself. He was referred to as a guru of science
fiction He was asked if he was going to form his own religion, and Dad insisted he was
not. He would then go another step and say about himself, "I am nothing." And so he's
doing that with Paul Atreides, too, and showing that we need to doubt our leaders,
that governments lie. Sometimes we need charismatic leaders, but we need to question
them and make sure we don't just follow them blindly.






While Dune fans know of "Frank Herbert, the Legend," you had the unique
privilege of relating to him as "Dad, the Human Being."
What are some of your strongest memories of your father?


I wrote a detailed biography of him, Dreamer of Dune. First of all, I didn't get
along with him when I was growing up. But he and I later became best friends
because I saw some wonderful things he was doing for my mother when she
had terminal lung cancer. My mother had been a professional writer who gave
up her own writing career for him earlier in their marriage, and so she was
supporting our family with a "real job" while Dad could do his creative writing. But
later, when I was in my twenties, I saw my dad just completely sacrifice himself for
her: he became her maid, her cook, her nurse when she could hardly walk. She was
only given six months to live, but through his loving care she lived ten years. He
built this house for her in a remote part of Hawaii, Ohana, where she could breathe
easier with her condition. He and I became best friends, and we were very close.
The last book that he wrote, Man of Two Worlds, he wrote with me.

My memories of him growing up were sometimes strained, but always exciting.
We never knew what was going to happen next. He showed up one day when I was
eight years old. He'd gone out and purchased a car. Well, the car turned out to be a
hearse -- a 1941 Cadillac LaSalle hearse with yellow chapel doors on it -- and he
announced that my brother and I were getting shots, we were not going to be in school
in Tacoma anymore, we were going to Mexico in the hearse. So we piled all of our worldly
belongings into the hearse and headed through Mexican villages, and the peasants would
fall to their knees with their sombreros over their hearts thinking that we were a funeral
procession going through town.

We arrived at this village in the heart of Mexico, and since we were outsiders -- Norte
Americanos -- they didn't like us for about a month. I would play marbles with the kids in
the streets, and the mothers would call their kids in and say that I couldn't play with the
kids because I was a bad influence on them. In the meantime, all of the hubcaps were
stolen from our hearse, the windshield wipers, the mirrors, everything.

But one day, the curate, who was the priest of about five villages -- he was a very
powerful priest -- got an infection in his hand. The doctor was out of town in Mexico
City. So Dad, who knew literally everything about everything, had antibiotics and a
medical kit and he cured this curate of his infection. The man would have lost his hand.
Later Dad said the man could have died.

After Dad saved this man's life, he became the hero of five villages, and then all the
parts reappeared on our car, the kids could play marbles with me again, and we had a
great time.

That was one of the rare instances where I was close to my dad. We had a period in
Mexico where it really went well, and other than that in my childhood I was pretty well
excluded from the house. But he was creating a great work in there, he was creating
characters from his imagination in the Dune series. Becoming a writer later, I'm a lot more
understanding of what he was trying to do, and I was kind of a rambunctious noisy kid.






Do you have children?


Yes, I have three children -- three daughters -- and we have five grandchildren.
Early on when I started writing, I tried to lock my three daughters out of the house.
One day my wife got home from work and found all three of them out in the front
on the grass, and they said Daddy locked them outside. Well, I never did that again.
(laughs) I only did that once.






In the Legends of Dune trilogy, you introduced two characters -- Omnius and
Erasmus -- who we then see neatly dovetailed into the follow-up to
Chapterhouse: Dune. Was this the plan all along, or was it more serendipity?


No, it was the plan, and it's the reason we didn't write Dune 7 -- actually, Dune 7
turned into two novels. What Dad called Dune 7 was the grand chronological
conclusion to the series. He envisioned one novel, but by the time Kevin and I started
writing all the stories about The Butlerian Jihad 10,000 years before Dune and other
stories, there was just too much -- we had to do it as two novels. But the two novels
that we did, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, that were Dad's Dune 7 basically,
we had his plot, we had his notes, so we knew exactly where he was going with it, and
we wove the old events -- Erasmus and Omnius -- we wove that all in, knowing where
Dad wanted to go with the series.






Some people see Dune as a parable about oil and the Middle East.
Do you have any elucidation on that?


Dad was very much interested in finite resources, and one of the reasons that
Dune became a huge best-seller -- and it was slow, gathering momentum; I
mean, the first printing was 2,200 copies in 1965. But by 1970, the environmental
movement was just getting going in a big way, and there was word that this was
an ecological handbook that Frank Herbert had written in fiction form. So Dad spoke
at the very first Earth Day, and he toured college campuses speaking to young
people all over the country. He was very much concerned about our environment.

I mentioned earlier that Dad had this warning about charismatic leaders, that they
could lead us off the edge of a cliff. Well, he was flipping a myth there, but he was
also flipping a myth when you look at the environmental situation in that he was
stating that we can't just keep living this high lifestyle and littering the planet and
this and that, and he took it to an extreme and said the whole planet could turn into
a desert. He was not only talking about a parable for water or oil or that kind of thing,
very limited resources, but he made that planet the source of spice, Melange, and that
spice is an incredible material that's needed in a multi-planet galactic empire.
So then you have all these power structures surrounding the spice, and it's only attained
on this one planet.

Dune was only his second novel. His first novel, Dragon in the Sea was also about finite
resources. It was about oil, and he invented containerized shipping in that novel in 1955.
The Japanese afterward took it from his novel and enlarged it into a huge commercial operation.






Still with the political aspects of the books, there's the famous quote, "He who can
destroy a thing controls a thing." Do you see any current parallels to that line today?


Well, I think we're trying to get off of oil. If our oil supply can be destroyed and we're
dependent upon it, we've got major troubles. But I'm heartened by what I'm hearing
that there are cars out there that may get 230 to 340 miles to the gallon.

So yeah, that's the threat that Paul Atreides issued to some powerful interests of the
Spacing Guild and some other interests. He basically said, 'I will destroy Dune. I will
destroy the spice.' And that was one of the main ways he gained control. And Dad was
really talking about -- he had read copiously from all sources and history in particular,
and he'd studied Mesopotamia where they had "hydraulic despotism" as he termed it.
Whoever controlled the water there controlled a large political area. So he very much
understood the power structures that surround finite resources if they can be controlled.
He also understood the power structures that can surround a heroic figure like Paul Atreides,
and the dark things those power structures can do in order to maintain their own interests.






There's a small but loud contingent of hardcore Dune fans who seem to
react to any addition to the Dune legacy as one might expect fundamentalist
religions would react to someone trying to expand the Pentateuch.
Was that a surprise, and how did you come to cope with that kind of criticism?


There was a group on the Internet before House Atreides was published -- that
was our first novel that came out in 1999 -- and there was a hue and cry before
that book was published asserting that we should not write a new novel in the
series. Later, after they read the first novel, many of them actually apologized to
us in writing. So we appreciate that. And I understand the fans that feel... I guess
"an interest" in the series. They don't have a legal interest in it, but they have a
stake in it of sorts, in that they love the stories, they love the universe, they love
what my dad set up. But I try to write for the most demanding of fans. Kevin does
too. I spent a year before writing a word with Kevin doing a concordance of all six
novels that Frank Herbert wrote in the Dune series, so I know the whole history of
the Mentats, the Swordmasters, the Bene-Gesserit; I know the eye colors of the
main characters, I know their family histories. It's all in a 600-page, single-spaced
concordance. The only better thing would be if Frank Herbert were to write these
stories, but Kevin and I have immersed ourselves in this universe, and we really
have done our homework.

Frank Herbert died in 1986, and when he died he was intending to write another
novel. He was using a yellow highlighter on books five and six in series -- Heretics of
Dune and Chapterhouse Dune -- and it turned out that there were thirty pages of
notes in which he had an outline of the unwritten book, and he died before he could
finish it. Somebody had to write that novel, because it's an important story, it's an
important chronological grand conclusion to the series. So Kevin and I have written
that novel as two novels. In the series, we've tried to maintain the quality. We do not
intend to write a hundred Dune books -- at least the major novels, here. I'm seeing that
the series should conclude at a certain point.

So that's my thoughts on the most difficult of fans, and I do understand.
I'm a fan myself, so I want the quality to be maintained.






Dune has been adapted to film a couple of times now. Are there any plans
to adapt any of the works you've created with Kevin J. Anderson?


Just getting Dune onto the screen by David Lynch in 1984... In Dreamer of
Dune, I went into all the history of many attempts. We appreciate that David
Lynch got it to the screen. He didn't follow the plot in all instances, but we
feel like it's still a very good film, and it feels like Dune. After that was a
television series produced by Richard Rubinstein called Frank Herbert's Dune.
He also produced another series of the next two books called Children of Dune
which included Dune Messiah, and he followed the plot, and he was very careful.

Now we have a deal with Paramount Pictures. Kevin and I had pitched various
movie studios Dune: House Atreides, which was our first novel. We thought that
would be a good movie. Paramount ultimately has decided to do a classic
interpretation of the novel Dune. It's in the script writing phase right now, and
we're very hopeful that it will go to the next stage. They're putting a lot of time
and effort into this project right now.






Are you providing any input on the script?

I met with the script writer and the director, Peter Berg. Kevin and I met with
them, and gave them a lot of detailed advice about the Dune universe, and
they listened very carefully. We're sure that it's going to be a good screenplay.
Right now it's going through the writing process, and we're looking forward to
seeing it go further.






Aside from copious Dune notes and the family-Bible sized concordance,
what else do you have sitting on your bookshelf to read?


I read a lot of history. I read biographies. I'm reading a book right now about
medieval machines. I read Aldous Huxley, George R.R. Martin, Terry Brooks -- I
read in the genre. You have to read the things you're writing about. I like Greg
Bear for the excellence of the science that he puts into his novels. Of course
there's Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury -- I love Bradbury's short stories. I went
to Sri Lanka and met with Arthur C. Clarke before he died -- I'm a great admirer of his.






Albert Einstein once said about the use of atomic energy, "If only I had known,
I should have become a watchmaker." In a parallel universe where Frank Herbert
chose to be a watchmaker instead of an author, what is Brian Herbert doing?


I've often said that my father could have been a winemaker or he could have been
a shoemaker. I could be working in a vineyard improving the wine. It is a family
business -- writing is the Herbert family business, and I'm trying to maintain the
"quality of the wine." Dune is a Grand cru -- it's one of the great wines in the world
of literature. So I'm working very hard to maintain that.






Any non-Dune books in your future?

Yeah, I just completed a series called Timeweb. It's three books -- Timeweb,
The Web and the Stars, and Webdancers. It's about an ecological disaster
that goes beyond one planet. I postulate that several planets in a galaxy are
an ecosystem and it's all disintegrating, and I have a galactic ecologist who's
my hero in that series.

Kevin and I are also writing a brand new series of our own called Hellhole. It's
about a world that's been blasted by an asteroid 500 years ago, and it's the
worst place anyone could imagine. We have a Napoleon-style character who
is exiled there, and a lot of other events going on. And there'll be some alien
archeology and some interesting things going on with that. So we're busy.






Any Dune-related merchandising on the horizon to be explored? Action figures or
bottled "Water of Life (Not responsible for intense visions)" that fans can look forward to?


(Laughs) You do have some friends that know something about the Dune universe.
I don't know that we could create that kind of a product.

There were action figures around the David Lynch movie, and some of those are
collector's items now. The merchandising right now would depend upon what's done
with the movie. In the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, there
could be a really, really good Dune game, and we've talked about it with various parties,
but I think that would have to be done in coordination with the new movies. So we're
just balancing everything right now, and seeing where we go with the movie first. And
then a lot of other things would fall into place around that.





...
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
D Pope
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Re: Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

Post by D Pope »

Brian wrote:And I understand the fans that feel... I guess
"an interest" in the series. They don't have a legal interest in it, but they have a
stake in it of sorts, in that they love the stories, they love the universe, they love
what my dad set up. But I try to write for the most demanding of fans.
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
D Pope
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Re: Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

Post by D Pope »

In the Legends of Dune trilogy, you introduced two characters -- Omnius and
Erasmus -- who we then see neatly dovetailed into the follow-up to
Chapterhouse: Dune. Was this the plan all along, or was it more serendipity?


No, it was the plan, and it's the reason we didn't write Dune 7 -- actually, Dune 7
turned into two novels. What Dad called Dune 7 was the grand chronological
conclusion to the series. He envisioned one novel, but by the time Kevin and I started
writing all the stories about The Butlerian Jihad 10,000 years before Dune and other
stories, there was just too much -- we had to do it as two novels. But the two novels
that we did, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, that were Dad's Dune 7 basically,
we had his plot, we had his notes, so we knew exactly where he was going with it, and
we wove the old events -- Erasmus and Omnius -- we wove that all in, knowing where
Dad wanted to go with the series
.
It's a pity there aren't any preeqs left who could benefit from this admission of guilt.
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
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Re: Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

Post by ULFsurfer »

D Pope wrote:
But the two novels
that we did, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, that were Dad's Dune 7 basically,
we had his plot, we had his notes, so we knew exactly where he was going with it, and
we wove the old events -- Erasmus and Omnius -- we wove that all in, knowing where
Dad wanted to go with the series[/i].
*BARF*
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Re: Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

Post by D Pope »

Maybe after you've written the last book, you could publish the concordance?

(laughs) We've thought about it, but by then we'd need to add all the other
books to the concordance.
Had to give this a second look, is Brian admitting that there's no
reason for him, the author, to keep track of what he's written?
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
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Re: Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

Post by Omphalos »

D Pope wrote:
Maybe after you've written the last book, you could publish the concordance?

(laughs) We've thought about it, but by then we'd need to add all the other
books to the concordance.
Had to give this a second look, is Brian admitting that there's no
reason for him, the author, to keep track of what he's written?
Sure feels that way.
Something is about to happen, Hal. Something wonderful!

-James C. Harwood, Science Fiction Writer, Straight (March 5, 1956 - May 25, 2010)



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Re: Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

Post by Freakzilla »

Well, in their defense, they do remind you what happened in the last chapter, in every chapter. :P
They were destroyed because they lied pretentiously. Have no fear that my wrath
will fall upon you because of your innocent mistakes.

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Re: Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

Post by Hunchback Jack »

Is it bad that *every* *single* answer in this interview pisses me off?

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Re: Aug 09 The Trades Chronicler Heir of Dune, BH by RJ Carter

Post by Freakzilla »

Hehe, the non-dune question and answer didn't piss me off. :P
They were destroyed because they lied pretentiously. Have no fear that my wrath
will fall upon you because of your innocent mistakes.

~Leto II, God Emperor
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