Dune Genesis

by Frank Herbert

This essay was originally published in the July 1980 issue of Omni Magazine. It has never been reprinted, and most Dune fans have not had the opportunity to read Frank Herbert's description of creating his masterpiece.

Genres: Nonfiction

4 pages, ebook

First published July 1, 1980

About the author

Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. was an American science fiction author best known for the 1965 novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for his novels, he also wrote short stories and worked as a newspaper journalist, photographer, book reviewer, ecological consultant, and lecturer.
The Dune saga, set in the distant future, and taking place over millennia, explores complex themes, such as the long-term survival of the human species, human evolution, planetary science and ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, economics and power in a future where humanity has long since developed interstellar travel and settled many thousands of worlds. Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, and the entire series is considered to be among the classics of the genre.

Reviews

[bookme4life · Rating 4 out of 5]

The full text of the "Dune Genesis" essay is available here, where it was reprinted with permission.

Published first in the July 1980 edition of Omni Magazine, this essay covers the thought process that led Frank Herbert to write the well known sci-fi classic Dune. The original publication also featured artwork by John Schoenherr.

"Dune Genesis" is the source of a few quotes by Herbert that are floating around the internet:

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. [...] Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.

and

Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.

****

If you're looking for the kind of details that would go in an encyclopedic history of a major sci-fi property, this isn't it. Instead Herbert traces the evolution of the ideas that led to the book we know and love.

Herbert gives the reader a look at his working through ideas of power and systems, and how his time as a journalist writing about ecological issues shaped the worlds he writes about in Dune. Tempted to write "the book that would right the old wrongs," he reevaluates and finds cause for caution, asking how we reach the place that comes from the mistakes of leaders.

Within this process music becomes his inspiration for structure; more specifically, the fugue. (This part called to mind aspects from the Ainulindalë in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.) He plays with repetition and inversion, paradox and koans. And then there's the temptation of oracle and knowing the future. What consequences result?

The essay is a pretty quick read, and I couldn't help but wish for a longer, deeper treatise from the mind of Frank Herbert. Or even the impossible, an in-person discussion, picking his brain. But it's a magazine article, and limited to those constraints. Still, it's a worthwhile read, particularly for those passionate about the world that Herbert created.

If you're a casual fan of Dune this essay may be more than you care to investigate. But it's also a great portal for engaging more deeply in a work sometimes derided as "just another 'chosen one' story"; because if you think that, you've missed what Herbert's doing.