(Turn these off using the [CC] next to the ⚙)
A man stands above the Florence dunes, watching the
sand blow. Once, nothing grew here. The dunes moved
and shifted, grew and spread. But now, grass grows
here. It was introduced by humans to anchor the dunes,
to keep them stable, to make them into something else.
This gives the man an idea.
♪ "Hypothetical" by Surasshu ♪
The year was 1957. The man: Frank Herbert. Even if you
were a science fiction fanatic back then, it's unlikely that
you'd have known his name. At this point, he'd only
written one novel: The Dragon in the Sea - a near-future
story about a world running out of resources, where
submarine crews from the West tried to steal
underwater oil reserves from the East to fuel their
ongoing war. While it was first published in Astounding,
you're as likely to find it in the thriller section today as
you are in the sci-fi shelves. But he, out on those dunes,
was looking for a new story. Not a sci-fi story, though.
He'd actually gone to those dunes for a very different
purpose. You see, he'd spent much of his career as a
journalist and he'd gone out to the Oregon coast in
hopes that he could get some magazine to pay him to
do a story about how the dunes were being reclaimed.
Truth was, it was actually even simpler than that. He
really was down there mostly in hopes that he'd find
someone to underwrite him so he could be nearer to his
wife, who was living in Florence, Oregon at the time. But
the image of those dunes, in a picture he took as his
little charter plane rose into the sky above them,
becoming waving golden ripples on a fine ocean of
sand, would stay with him. Dune wouldn't be completed
for years yet. Perpetually broke, he would become a
political speech writer, try his hand and fail at writing for
TV, learn about zen, move to San Francisco, rejoin the
newspaper industry as a night editor for the San
Francisco Examiner, study the I Ching, and dive yet
deeper into Jungian philosophy before the book came
out. But, the whole time, he plugged away at the work.
Something in him knew that this piece, his "desert story"
was the one, the thing that would finally let him break
through. And eight years after he spent that day on the
Oregon coast, looking at how European beach grass
was transforming the sands, he turned out to be right.
But the path to Dune, as we know it, was a long one.
Dune, itself actually began as a haiku. Yeah. The
181,000 word novel began as a poem less than eighteen
words long. There was a method in this madness,
though. Herbert felt that the haiku was the perfect form
for expressing images of nature and setting a tone. If he
could get it right there, he'd know what he had to deliver
on for the whole novel. From there, he researched
ecology, psychology, tribal cultures from arid regions
across the globe, and ESP. He would draw inspiration
from everything and bring it back to his book. Once, on a
trip to Mexico, he was walking through an arroyo, heard
his footsteps echoing off the banks, and immediately
began to pen notes about drum sand. But as
enthusiastic about his novel as he was, others were less
so. Publisher after publisher rejected the novel, telling
him, "It's just too long!" or that "People can't even get
through the first hundred pages." Others found his idea
of a trilogy strange, because what we now have as the
first Dune book was actually originally three separate
books that luckily got put into one. But unlike other
multi-part sci-fi novels of the time, there's no great jump
chronologically or distance-wise between the episodes.
And so the rejections rolled in. One after another, each
of the big sci-fi publishers passed. But one person saw
it and knew its value: John W. Campbell. Perhaps the
last great hurrah of an illustrious career, Campbell
decided to serialize it and publish it in Analog magazine
under the name "Dune World". As the first part was
being published, Campbell and Herbert went back and
forth in long, philosophical letters about things like the
nature of time and the difficulty of writing characters
with superpowers that were just too good. Herbert took
many of Campbell's suggestions like not killing Alia and
worked to refine parts he'd recommended, like better
clarifying the holes in Paul's future sight, even as early
parts of the serialized novel hit the stamps. But as
Herbert prepared the second and third sections for
Analog magazine, more rejections were arriving every
day. It looked like the book was never going to find a life
as anything but a set of magazine pieces. But in the
background, something was slowly starting to happen.
People were taking notice. Analog was still the greatest
of the sci-fi magazines, and Campbell still had many
friends in the science fiction community. People were
reading the story, and other science fiction authors were
talking about the story. Then, it got nominated for a
Hugo. Sure, it lost to Here Gather the Stars, but it didn't
really matter. The story had fans. And one of those fans
was from an unlikely source. His name was Sterling
Lanier, the editor of Chilton Books. Herbert and his
agent hadn't sent a copy to Chilton because they were a
publisher of car repair manuals. But Lanier had read the
story in Analog and liked it so much, he hunted down
Herbert's agent and made them an offer. He wanted to
print all three books as one hard-bound novel named
Dune. Herbert ecstatically accepted. They went all out
with radio ads and newspaper clips. As Herbert himself
leaned on his old journalist and bookstore connections
to get it more notice. Prestigious science fiction authors
were already starting to call it, "one of the greatest
science fiction novels of all time."
And within a year, the newly formed Nebula Awards
were planning to name it Best Novel. And Harlan Ellison
was writing Herbert to ask him if he could make it to the
award ceremony dinner. But in the short term, the
publishers were right. It cost too much to print and too
few people bought it, because it was part of a niche
genre at the time. Sterling Lanier lost his job. But, he
was supportive of Herbert and the book to the end. He
sent Frank a note saying that he'd made an important
and powerful book and that he was glad he got to be a
part of it even if, humble to the last, he said that his
contribution to it was largely seeing something great
and finding out how to reach Herbert's agent from John
Campbell. And he ended the note by saying he hoped to
meet Frank Herbert in person one day. I don't know if
they ever did. The next year, though, Dune sales began
to pick up. And although Analog rejected a sequel,
Galaxy picked it up. Hip colleges started to teach the
book in literature classes and it got buzz as an
underground masterpiece. Dune not only survived, it
soon became the center of the science fiction universe.
So continue your training and keep trusting Yueh
implicitly, because we begin our pilgrimage to
Arrakis Proper next time. What could go wrong?
Oh, yeah. Uh, that.
♪ "Hypothetical" by Surasshu ♪