My most recent book is "Dune: House Atreides" it is the very first of a trilogy that is
the prequel to Frank Hebert's classic "Dune"
Now Dune was always my favourite Science Fiction book I read it when I was 10 or 11,
I've since read it maybe 7 or 8 times, and I get something more out of it each time.
Frank Herbert, before he died in 1986, had written 6 different Dune novels
and the last one, "Chapterhouse: Dune" ends on a cliff-hanger.
He passed away and did not finish the story. And I waited about 10 years until...
I waited about 10 years, waiting and waiting for some other book to come out,
because Frank Herbert's son Brian was also a science fiction writer
and when nothing was fourth coming I finally got up the nerve one day
and I just sent him a letter out of the blue
I had had a bunch of novels published on my own, and I said
"Is anyone going to finish the story, and if
you're not can I do it, or can we work together?"
and we talked on the phone, and we agreed within a few minutes
of after we first spoke on the phone... My wife Rebecca was in the room and she said
"You guys just started speaking a different language all of a sudden"
because we were talking about the Bene Gesserit, and the Padishah Emperors
and Spice Melange and all this stuff from Dune.
We agreed to start doing a trilogy to Dune because we figured that after talking a lot
whether we should start with a book that was set thousands and thousands of years
before a story called the Butlerian Jihad, which Dune fans will probably recognise,
or we could do the final sequel to Frank Herbert's books,
which was thousands and thousands years later,
or we could do a book that was set as an immediate prequel
telling of the story of how the main characters in Dune came together
We chose to do that one, and we started writing the outline,
started coming up with our story after we had already decide what we were going to do,
then the lawyer for the Frank Herbert Estate said
"I've just found two keys to safe deposit boxes we didn't know about them,
let's go check them out" and inside the safe deposit boxes were Frank Herbert's
full and complete outline for the last Dune book he wanted to write.
And when Brian Herbert was cleaning out his garage, or his attic,
to try and make room to make a bigger writing studio
he found a very large Xerox box full of 2,000 pages of Frank Herbert's original Dune notes.
So none of these had been found for years and
years until we started working on the project
and then they magically appeared, and Brian thinks that's his father's blessing pointing
on it.
House Atreides came out in October of 1999 and it hit virtually every best seller list
and we also hit a great many of the best of the year list,
best fiction of the year, from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com
Ivory Journal even picked it as one of the best books of the year,
and the second book "House Harkonnen" comes out in this October 2000,
we just finished the first draft of "House Corrino" which is the third book
and moments before I came over to the convention this afternoon
I edited my first chapter in "House Corrino"
so every minute of the day we have to do something related to writing.
SciFi.com the webpage for the SciFi channel has also just picked up a nice excerpt from
"House Harkonnen" the second of my Dune novels with Brian
and they'll be running that shortly,
I mean it is already delivered and finished been written, and its been accepted,
so a nice little piece about how Fremen, the native people in the desert world,
how the Fremen mete out their own particular brand of justice.
And that will be up, it will be a nice little teaser for the second Dune book.
The paperback of House Atreides", the first one will been in stores in August (2000)
and the second hardcover will be out in October
we hope every October from that point on we can
have some new Dune fiction out for the readers.
SciFi Channel is in production doing a, I believe it is a 6 hour,
3 part miniseries of Frank Herbert's original novel "Dune"
Brian Herbert is a creative consultant on it,
we've both read over the full scripts,
and made comments and input.
Willian Hurt has signed to play Duke Leto, one of the main characters,
I don't remember a lot of the other names offhand,
full casting hadn't been announced the last press release I saw.
They were slated for October (2000) release for broadcast I think,
it might be bumped up to December but it should be that before the
end of the year we'll have another 6 hour version of Dune.
And that'll be interesting because the David Lynch 1984 Universal movie
of Dune is still... its very popular, and a lot of viewers really love it,
the SciFi channel has broadcast quite a few versions of it,
the short, the director's cut and the shorter version and the longer version,
it'll be interesting to see how the fans react to this new version
because it really polarised the Dune community, David Lynch's movie,
some people hate it, some people love it.
So we'll see how this new version does, according to the script that I've read
it is very very close to Frank Herbert's original novel.