Dreamer of Dune (31 page)

He gazed toward the mountains, and I saw tears welling in his blue eyes, rimming the lower lids. I took a deep breath, and after a long moment I hugged him.

He was shaking, and when he hugged me back he was like a clumsy bear, powerful but gentle. As we pulled apart he wiped his eyes quickly and wouldn't meet my gaze.

I felt like a parent who had scolded a naughty child, and said to him gently, “Dad, I love you. I'm sorry I had to say those things. But…” My voice trailed off.

Now he met my gaze, and his eyes flashed intensely. “I love you, Number One Son,” he said. He smiled reassuringly, then started toward the path. “We'd better get back, Brian. Your mother is fixing pot roast and wild blackberry pie.”

As we returned along a narrow path, pushing brush aside to get through, I knew he had apologized in his own way, and that I had forgiven him. I knew as well, but did not say to him, that my siblings and I had competed with other children for his attention—the stories that were the offspring of his creative mind. When we lived with him, the story-children had been easier to control than their human counterparts, and received more love than we did.

As weeks passed, my father and I went on fishing, oyster-digging, and crabbing trips together and enjoyed many fine feasts afterward. We began kidding one another and laughing a lot…the way people do when they like one another and the relationship is new and fresh. If I said, “How you Dune?” or something of equivalent silliness he would point off in the distance and say in a mock-gruff tone, “Go to your room!”

These were not welcome words to me when I was a child, not in the least, and he knew that. Now, in using them with a different tone and a wide smile on his bearded face and little laugh crinkles under his eyes, he was softening my harsh memories.

This is not to say that Frank Herbert became perfect. He remained an incessant nit-picker about the smallest and most insignificant of details, disagreeable and impatient too often with children, and a grouchy bear before dinner. He drove his car too fast, frightening the passengers, pedestrians, and other drivers. He didn't like to admit weakness or fault.

But I was crossing things off my list, replacing old bitterness with new, fond memories. For the first time in my life, I could say with pride that I had a loving, attentive father.

D
URING ONE
of our walks at Xanadu, my father told me that none of us own real estate. “We are only stewards,” he said, “charged with taking care of the planet for our grandchildren.” This philosophy became, in
Chapterhouse: Dune
, a tenet of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. Similarly, he wrote in his short story “Death of a City” (1973): “Only the species owned land, owned cities.”

On his six-acre Port Townsend farm, Frank Herbert finally established his “Ecological Demonstration Project” (EDP) to explore the application of alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar and methane gas. From
Dune
to
New World or No World
to the
Green Brain
, he wrote frequently about the environment, presenting frightening images of world ecological systems in trouble. His famous EDP was a Frank Herbert story in and of itself, one in which he “learned by doing,” as he liked to say—the best way of learning anything.

He started it largely because he wanted to practice what he had been preaching. For years he had been crisscrossing the United States talking about environmental issues, and for a long time he had wanted to get his hands dirty, performing experiments that would bring the discussion out of the realm of theory and into the realm of application.

When he began the EDP shortly before the Arab oil crisis of 1973–1974, he spoke of a five-year plan. In that time frame he hoped to prove it was possible to live in comfort while only drawing small amounts of resources from the public energy system. However, my mother's illness and other factors prevented him from meeting this deadline, one of the few times in the life of this journalist that he did not meet a deadline.

Xanadu was one of his visions for mankind's future, in which he was developing methods by which modern man might utilize the resources of the planet efficiently, with minimal harm to the environment. As he spoke, I thought of Leto II in
Children of Dune
, receiving the visions from his father, Paul Atreides, when the elder's time was past.

A great deal of misinformation about Frank Herbert's EDP has circulated in the science fiction and environmental communities—principally that my father intended to become entirely self-sufficient, producing one hundred percent of his food and energy needs. Dad said that was like the myth of the perpetual motion machine, a machine that could operate without external influence.

“We're all part of society,” he said. “We can't stop interacting with it.”

During his entire life, Frank Herbert shopped in food markets, and never disconnected his homes from public utility systems. Through experimentation, he just utilized these facilities less than most people…and espoused that others follow his lead.

Dad coined an interesting word for self-sufficiency, no matter the degree of application. He called it “technopeasantry,” almost an oxy-moron, and spoke of the particular adaptability of Americans to such systems. He always said we were a nation of “screwdriver mechanics,” with a lot of people who didn't mind getting their hands dirty.

My parents' modified A-frame house featured vaulted ceilings and large windows, with large sheets of glass in each gable—all the way to the eaves. The glass was single pane—so it was not the most efficient home to heat. They had an oil furnace with a two-hundred-gallon tank, but were considering the installation of a forced-air wood-burning system.

Before doing that Dad wanted to try solar power, which he believed held great promise for solving his heating problems. With the assistance of an environmental housing expert he designed a passive solar collection system that he hoped would reduce his dependence upon heating oil by around fifty percent. The results were slightly better than that. Even on fifty-degree days when the sun was partially or completely behind clouds, the system produced seventy-two-degree heat. In fact, heat even came out of the system in the middle of the night, despite the absence of a heat storage facility in the design. Dad was amused by this, and found it baffling.

The solar energy system, built on the south roof of the house just above the greenhouse, had simple panels made of plywood, large sheets of thermopane glass, and, remarkably, aluminum beer cans. It had Fiberglas insulation. To keep the cost down, thermopane seconds were used, which had small scratches on them. A control panel with a cedar cover was installed on one wall of the living room.

For solar heat collectors, a few inches behind the thermopane, they set up banks of aluminum beer cans cut in half horizontally with a power saw and attached so that their cupped insides faced the sun. The solar collector system comprised an area of one hundred forty-five square feet, set in six panels. In one of the panels, the cans were painted entirely flat black, with high-temperature paint. In another panel, the cans were left unpainted, in a plain aluminum color. And in the remaining four panels, the cans were only painted black on their interior bottoms, leaving the rest in their natural aluminum reflective state.

Through experimentation Dad found that the completely black cans absorbed slightly more infrared heat, making them more desirable for this application. It was a convection heat redistribution system, in which he used the furnace fan to circulate the air into the solar collectors and back into the house.

He used approximately one thousand, seven hundred and fifty aluminum beer cans, most of which were purchased from a recycling center. Still, he liked to imply other sources, quipping, “I received a lot of help from my friends putting the system together.”

While Dad got this passive-solar system going, he still believed solar technology was too expensive for the average household. He wanted to develop a low-cost alternative energy system for homeowners, something that could be sold in Sears or Wards catalogs for five hundred dollars or less. Until the prices for solar collection technology came down, he thought wind power might be the best answer to produce electricity, which would in turn be converted to heat.

Dad found that buildings used more energy for heating when the wind blew because of the wind-chill factor, and came up with an ingenious solution. If a building had a windmill for generating electricity, it could offset the cooling effect of the wind, flattening out the heat-loss curve by turning a generator and warming a house electrically whenever the wind blew. The harder the wind blew, the more it would heat.

He built a sturdy concrete-walled shop on the hill above his house, intending to construct a second-level conference center with guest bunks sometime in the future. In this scenario he had dreams of teaching writing classes and of conducting courses on environmental issues for corporate and political leaders. All electrical and heating needs for the conference center would be provided by on-site systems. Above the conference center there would be, someday, a thirty-foot concrete tower with a windmill on top. In studying wind technology, he found there had been very few advances since the invention of the horizontal-axis Dutch windmill in the sixteenth century. He envisioned developing something that focused wind power and employed modern aerodynamic principles.

Working with an architect he designed and patented a cylindrical, vertical-axis windmill with a horn on top that focused and concentrated the wind. Air passing through the horn spun a vertical shaft by pushing vanes on it, and this in turn activated an automobile alternator, producing AC electricity. The device had no gears or belts, and was very simple, with relatively few parts.

Dad had a four-foot-high, four-foot-diameter prototype built, which was mounted on a truck chassis and connected to a calibrated speedometer for testing. The unit, self-propelled and drivable on public roadways, enabled them to estimate that a ten-inch-tall unit having a three-foot diameter could produce one horsepower in a fifty-mile-per-hour wind.

Frank Herbert also developed a rather unusual methane gas generating system by slitting a large truck-tire inner tube, filling it with chicken and duck manure and straw, and then patching the tube. A piece of flexible rubber tubing was attached to the tube at the unsealed valve stem, with a spigot on the other end of the tubing. As the manure and straw decomposed, it produced pressurized methane gas, which Dad used to singe the feathers off chickens and ducks he had slaughtered. He also connected the apparatus to a gas heater, and heated the poultry house.
^*

He believed that methane had potential large-scale applications for cities, which could convert sewage into methane gas for the operation of city vehicles, including buses. The byproduct would be fertilizer, useful in gardens and farms. On his own farm, my father shoveled poultry manure into buckets and spread it on the vegetable gardens.

Frank Herbert always had plans to improve his solar, wind and methane systems, but the development, maintenance and promotion of his ecological experiments were taking too much of his valuable time. He decided to reorder his priorities, and as the 1970s drew to a close his Ecological Demonstration Project took a back burner. There were novels to write, book tours, and above all my mother's health, which required constant monitoring.

I
N
1977, my father's novel
The Dosadi Experiment
was published in hardcover by Putnam, after its serialization in
Galaxy
(May through August issues). Like the earlier novel
Whipping Star
and a number of earlier short stories,
Dosadi
featured Jorj X. McKie and the Bureau of Sabotage.
Dosadi
sold well, and when Berkley released the paperback the following year it became a national bestseller, one of their top-selling science fiction titles of all time.

That year, Babe passed away of a stroke while visiting her favorite sister Peggy Rowntree in Tacoma. She was seventy-six. Her services were held at a Catholic church in Tacoma, an old building downtown. As the priest spoke, I sat behind Mom and Dad, and I recall seeing his head shaking back and forth constantly, an involuntary condition whenever he was very tired or feeling too much stress.

Though my father was not a formally religious man, he could, like my mother, be spiritual at times. In the limousine as we rode to the cemetery, he said, “There is a place for ceremony.” He also said drivers kept their vehicle lights on in a funeral procession to light the darkness for the one who had passed on.

George Lucas's hit movie
Star Wars
came out the same year. The film was shocking to me, for all the similarities between it and my father's book,
Dune
. Both featured an evil galactic empire, a desolate desert planet, hooded natives, strong religious elements, and a messianic hero with an aged mentor.
Star Wars
' Princess Leia had a name with a haunting similarity to
Dune
's Lady Alia of the noble house Atreides. The movie also had spice mines and a Dune Sea.

I phoned my father and said, “You'd better see it. The similarities are unbelievable.”

When Dad saw the movie, he picked out sixteen points of what he called “absolute identity” between his book and the movie, enough to make him livid. He thought he saw the ideas of other science fiction writers on the screen as well, including those of Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Ted Sturgeon, Barry Malzberg, and Jerry Pournelle.

Still, Frank Herbert tried to be upbeat. He and the other science fiction writers who thought they saw their work in Lucas's movie formed a loose organization that my father called, with his tongue firmly placed in his cheek, the We're Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society. Through humor, Dad tried to mask the pain.

One of his biggest concerns:
Star Wars
made the filming of
Dune
an even bigger challenge than before, even more insurmountable, because of the important concepts that had now been pre-empted on the screen. Not the least of these was the young hero of
Star Wars,
Luke Skywalker, who, like Paul Atreides of
Dune
had messianic qualities, with a link to a mystical religious force.

That year my sister Penny and brother Bruce were visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday, staying in Port Townsend. During his visit, Bruce confided to me for the first time that he was gay, and said one of the reasons he felt he had taken this course was because of the terrible example his own father had been for him. “After seeing how Dad treated children,” Bruce said, “I didn't want to have any.” He asked me not to discuss it with Mom or Dad yet, since he wasn't sure how he wanted to break it to them.

I thought of, but did not comment on, Mom's desire for a boy grandchild to carry on the Herbert family name. I didn't know anything about the gay community, didn't know what to say to him. I told him I loved him anyway, that his sexual preference would never change how I felt for him. But I felt awkward discussing the subject. Words did not come easily.

Bruce was a studious young eccentric, a genius in electronics who built and maintained sound systems and other equipment for San Francisco rock-and-roll groups and for celebrities, such as the actor Stuart Whitman. My brother always carried little pen-shaped television adjustment tools in his shirt pocket, which he used to keep all sets in the Herbert family operating at their optimum. He made a steady stream of unlucky business decisions and investments, however, and seemed unable to keep his financial house in order.
^*

In June 1978, Dad interrupted his writing schedule to travel to Metz, France, with Mom, where he was guest of honor at an immense science fiction convention. My mother kept one of her rare journals on this trip.

That year the
Dune
movie project had fallen apart for the third time. Producer Dino De Laurentiis decided Dad's screenplay was unworkable, and based upon further research thought the book might be too complicated to ever be reproduced on film. He did this despite feeling drawn to
Dune
, and thinking that it might be a big hit.

Upon hearing that my father would be in Europe, Dino De Laurentiis asked Dad if he could lend a hand with the screenplay for a science fiction movie that was being filmed in England and was in trouble, his thirty-five-million-dollar production of
Flash Gordon.
Dad agreed to help, and spent a month in London working on the project. To do the patch-up job, Dad purchased an ultra-lightweight manual typewriter, much lighter and more compact than his old Olympia portable. In the hotel suite he shared with Mom at the Grosvenor House on Park Lane, he set the typewriter keys in motion. Dad and De Laurentiis enjoyed working with one another, and the popular movie that resulted was given high marks by a number of critics.

My parents took a side trip by air shuttle to Edinburgh, Scotland, the country of my mother's paternal ancestry. They took a drive along the coast, and like characters in
Wuthering Heights
, one of my mother's favorite novels, they had a romantic walk across the heather-covered moors and climbed a hill for a magnificent view of a white sand beach.

One day in Edinburgh they opted to ride a double-decker city bus. They sat on the upper deck at the rear, on a wide seat with other people. A man next to my father pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and as he was lighting up inquired of those around him, “Does anyone mind if I smoke?”

He had the cigarette lit before the question was completed.

In a tense voice, Dad told him to put it out. Nervously, the man dropped the lighted cigarette on the floor and crushed it out under his shoe. Ever since Mom's brush with death, Dad had become fanatical against anyone smoking in his or my mother's presence.

Returning from Europe, Dad found himself under pressure to complete a number of projects at once. One day he showed up at the door of his friend Bill Ransom and inquired, “Can you write like me?” He needed help with a short story for a project inspired by Harlan Ellison called
Medea: Harlan's World
. My father's story was slated for publication in
Analog
prior to the Ellison collection. Bill, a Pulitzer Prize nominee for poetry three years before, said he would try to help. He proceeded to write the first draft of the story, which they entitled “Songs of a Sentient Flute.” Dad edited the manuscript and typed the final draft, making additional changes as he did so.

Dad was also being pressed by Putnam to come up with a new science fiction novel, so he and Bill brainstormed and came up with a way of using the same concept for the short story and for the novel. They laid out “Songs of a Sentient Flute” with the idea of expanding it into a novel entitled
The Jesus Incident
, which would be a sequel to
Destination: Void
.

So, on the same day that they mailed “Songs of a Sentient Flute” to
Analog,
they also sent it to their agent Lurton Blassingame, in the form of a book proposal for
The Jesus Incident
. Putnam offered a substantial contract to publish the novel in hardcover, and Dad and Bill set to work on it.

Bill, who had many shared interests with my father, was only a couple of years older than I was. He had an intelligent, oval face and long black hair combed straight back. In the novel, he and my father alternated chapters, using a “leapfrogging” technique, after which they edited one another's work. Their styles meshed so closely that even my mother, who knew her husband's style better than anyone, could not identify the writer of particular sections. Despite strong egos the men did not clash, because of the high regard they held for one another. Mom often heard them laughing uproariously in the loft study as one or the other came up with a
bon mot
for the developing tale.

To a great extent the collaboration was a
quid pro quo
. Frank Herbert received assistance with a short story and a novel from an energetic, talented young writer, and in return Bill Ransom was given a rare opportunity to learn at the elbow of a master. Bill told me, “The key thing that I wanted to learn from Frank was how to maintain a story for a novel length, because working in poetry I'd always been focused on making things smaller.” Bill also felt he needed to learn a lot more about literary description, which was one of Dad's strengths. One day upon looking at a passage written by his young collaborator, my father told him to rewrite it with more sensory detail. “Look, Bill,” he said, “we need to smell this guy, right in the armpits.”

Bill worked hard and learned quickly, but when
The Jesus Incident
was nearly complete a major crisis occurred. Ellison learned they were using the same planet and characters as in “Songs of a Sentient Flute,” and he got his book publisher (Phantasia Press) and the publisher of
Analog
involved. They told Dad and Bill to cease and desist, that they were using material they didn't own. Dad made an emergency trip to New York City, where he met with his agent and the publishers involved. When he returned to Port Townsend, he was extremely upset and nervous. “We can't use the planet, the characters or any of that,” he told Bill. “Harlan Ellison owns the rights to them.”

Thereafter they rewrote
The Jesus Incident
, changing the names of characters, locales, and other details. The racial background of one character was altered, but aside from that the basic characterizations were not changed. They rewrote problematical passages and tried to make the plot that they had already written fit. It took two weeks of nonstop rewriting, and they kept a professional typist working into the wee hours. The collaboration had ceased to be fun, and instead of heady, joking sessions, long periods went by without laughter. When at last they finished, little gaps were apparent in the story, and they weren't particularly happy with it, especially with the way they had to end it. Nonetheless the book was accepted for publication, and sales were brisk.

While working with my father, Bill Ransom had an opportunity to watch the interaction between my parents over an extended period of time. They were physically passionate toward one another, he said, and often took breaks alone during the day. To Bill's amusement they were open about the reason for this, and laughed about it. He enjoyed teasing them on the subject.

Bill also observed my parents as a writing team, in which Beverly, for a long time Frank's reader, became the reader for the product of the Herbert-Ransom collaboration. “That was where she really shined,” Bill said, adding that her comments contained detailed reasons and suggestions, not just general statements. He saw the mountains of other work she did as well, including the financial management that she performed and the handling of voluminous correspondence that came in from fans, agents, publishers, and other writers. He noticed, too, how she screened calls and inquiries and kept people away from Dad, so that he could create, and how she coordinated all interviews and public appearances.

In a very real sense I was struggling to know my father, just as he was struggling to know me. We were trying to make up for lost time. We went on long walks together and I helped him around the farm, feeding poultry, tending to plantings, working in the shop. It had been a long and difficult road to this point in my father's life—a road from tattered rental houses and unpaid bills to worldwide fame.

In the Old Testament it was said that the skin of Moses “shone” when he came down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. This phenomenon has been noticed as well about successful people at the heights of their careers. They glow. And so it was with my father at the pinnacle of his success.

Through it all, I still had dimensions of this man to discover. There were nooks and crannies in his marvelous mind and in his emotional makeup that I didn't know existed. He was not as strong as I had always imagined. Dad was more vulnerable to comments from me than I thought he would be.

I told him I had been reading his books, and that I thought
Dune
was more smoothly written, more polished, than
The Dragon in the Sea
, a book written a decade before
Dune
. I was talking about style, having noticed a certain choppiness in the earlier work when it was laid down beside the later one, with its beautiful, poetic prose. He was obviously hurt at my remark, for he said, simply, “
Dragon
is one of my favorite stories.” Of course he would feel this way, for it had been his first book sale. And it was a fine book, a well-told story.

Another time we were outside on the patio, preparing the fire pit for a pig we were going to roast. It was a cool day, and he wore a sheepskin vest to cut the chill. As I looked at my bearded father in his vest I was struck with the similarities between him and Ernest Hemingway. Beyond beards and sheepskin vests, both were great writers and outdoorsmen. Both had more than a little machismo. I kidded Dad about his vest, asking him if he was “playing Hemingway.” He seemed displeased by the observation, and didn't laugh.

Rather awkwardly, rather late, I was learning how not to hurt my father's feelings. I also received advice from my mother, who was pleased with the improving relationship. “It's not too late for you to be close,” she told me.