Dune

As their son, I watched my parents interact and strengthen each other in countless ways. I can honestly say that I never heard them raise their voices to each other, though they did have subtle disagreements that others might not have noticed. The words and signs that passed between them were on a different, barely perceptible level. My parents were symbiotic, highly intelligent human organisms, so closely linked that thoughts seemed to pass between them as if contained within one mind.

Frank Herbert’s best friend, Howie Hansen, put it this way: “There are two Frank Herberts—the one I knew prior to Bev and the one that you know who was created by Bev. Frank Herbert the author would not exist had there not been a Beverly [Herbert] to marry him and . . . coalesce him mentally . . .”

After my mother passed away in Hawaii, Dad wrote a long and poignant tribute to her that is published at the end of Chapterhouse: Dune, describing their life together and what they meant to each other. For years afterward, I thought that this moving testimonial was the best place to conclude the entire series. After all, they had been a writing team and had embarked on their marriage in 1946 with dreams that both of them would become successful writers. They achieved that, and along the way they shared numerous great adventures together—a remarkable story of love and sacrifice that I described in Dreamer of Dune (2003), the biography of Frank Herbert.

Chapterhouse: Dune carries on the suspense-filled account of the destructive Honored Matres that was begun in Heretics of Dune. Brutal women who are rumored to be renegade Bene Gesserit, they threaten to obliterate the ancient Sisterhood, and a great deal more. They seem unstoppable. And yet there is something else out there in the universe that is chasing the Honored Matres, but its identity is unrevealed by Frank Herbert. Cleverly, the author sprinkled clues throughout the novel about what it might be, and at the end the reader is left wondering and considering the options.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Frank Herbert attempted to sell a number of mystery stories and—encouraged by his friend and fellow author Jack Vance—even joined Mystery Writers of America. In 1964, Dad did sell a short story to Analog, “The Mary Celeste Move,” which was a well-drawn science fiction mystery about the investigation of a peculiar phenomenon of human behavior. Aside from that, however, his mystery-writing efforts in those days went largely unrewarded. He kept running into problems with story length and genre, and publishers were not interested. So back he went to science fiction, where he enjoyed unparalleled success.

After all of the rejections my father suffered with his mysteries, it is particularly interesting and satisfying that he wrote a widely published mystery story and immersed it into the Dune universe. For more than a decade after his death from an illness in 1986, the solution to this mystery was the most intriguing and widely debated subject in science fiction. How fitting this was for the legacy of a man who was so often rejected by publishers and who might never have reached a wide audience if not for the brave editor Sterling Lanier, who took a chance and accepted Dune for hardcover publication after more than twenty other editors had turned it down.

Just before Frank Herbert passed away, he seemed to his family like a much younger man than his sixty-five years, filled with boundless enthusiasm and energy. His passing left us with a feeling that he might have accomplished a great deal more in his already productive life if he had only lived longer . . . that even more remarkable achievements might have flowed from the marvelously inventive mind that created the Dune universe, the acclaimed Native American novel Soul Catcher, and other memorable novels.

Sadly, the additional works were taken from him. And from us.

My father left loose ends when he died, many uncompleted dreams. Like the painter Jean Gericault, at the end of his life Dad spoke of all the things he would do when he was well again. He wanted to spend a year in Paris, wanted to be the oldest man to climb Mount Everest. There were more Dune stories to tell, along with an epic novel about Native Americans, and maybe even a movie to direct. But like Gericault, he never got well.

The fifth and sixth novels in Frank Herbert’s Dune series—Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune—were intended to be the first two books in a new trilogy that would complete the epic story chronologically. Using my father’s outline and notes, I eventually co-wrote the grand climax with Kevin J. Anderson in two novels—Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007).