Road to Dune

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WE ARE GRATEFUL to the people who contributed to this book, in particular to Frank Herbert, Beverly Herbert, Jan Herbert, Rebecca Moesta, Penny Merritt, Ron Merritt, Bruce Herbert, Bill Ransom, Howie Hansen, Tom Doherty, Pat LoBrutto, Sharon Perry, Robert Gottlieb, John Silbersack, Kate Scherler, Kimberly Whalen, Harlan Ellison, Anne McCaffrey, Paul Stevens, Eric Raab, Sterling E. Lanier, Lurton Blassingame, Lurton Blassingame, Jr., John W. Campbell, Jr., Catherine Sidor, Diane Jones, Louis Moesta, Carolyn Caughey, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, and Eleanor Wood.

FOREWORD

FRANK HERBERT HAD more fun with life than anyone I’ve known. He laughed more, joked more, and produced more than any writer I’ve ever met. With modest beginnings just across the Puyallup River from my own birthplace, and passionate about outdoor life, he judged people by their creativity, and by whether they met hardship with humor or with bile. Humor helped him to endure hardship and to enjoy his rise above it. Frank believed the suffering-in-the-garret stereotype was foisted onto writers by publishers so that they could get away with small advances. The only true currency that Frank recognized was time to create.

“Here it is, Ransom,” he said. “First class buys you more time to write.”

Never ostentatious, he lived as comfortably as he wanted but not as extravagantly as he could, always with close ties to the outdoors. Enjoyment A.D. (“After
Dune
”) came from trying new writing adventures and from helping others succeed; Frank offered opportunities, not handouts, saying, “I’d rather give a man a hand up than step on his fingers.” This echoes my favorite Dostoevsky line: “Feed men, then ask of them virtue.”

Everything and everyone fell into two rough categories for Frank: It/he/she either contributed to his writing time or interfered with it. I’ve always had pretty much the same attitude. We knew of each other through our publication successes, but we noticed each other’s successes because we both came from the Puyallup Valley, we both had fathers who were in law enforcement in the same district, and we’d had shirttail relatives marry. We moved to Port Townsend in the same week in the early seventies and discovered this when the local paper ran stories on each of us. I wanted to meet him, finally, but I wanted to be respectful of his writing time. Frank wrote a piece under a pseudonym for the
Helix
, my favorite underground newspaper in Seattle, just a few years earlier. I dropped Frank a postcard addressed to the pseudonym (“H. Bert Frank”), saying I wrote until noon but would love to meet for coffee sometime. The next afternoon at 12:10 he called: “Hello, Ransom. Herbert here. Is that coffee on?” It was, and thus began our fifteen-year routine of coffee or lunch nearly every day.

Frank believed poetry to be the finest distillation of the language, whether written in open or closed form. He read voraciously in contemporary poetry through literary and “little” magazines, and he wrote poetry as he worked through issues of life and of fiction. As a very young man, he discovered that he could make somewhat of a living from his nonfiction prose style, which was far more readable than most of the journalism of the time. His prose style, his eye for detail, and his ear for true vernacular coupled with that ever-persistent “What if?” question in his ear made for a natural transition to fiction. Success came to Frank in prose, but inspiration filled his notebooks and his fiction with poetry.

My first poetry collection,
Finding True North & Critter
, was nominated for the National Book Award the same year Frank’s
Soul Catcher
was nominated in fiction. Perhaps if Frank and I had both been fiction writers off the bat, or both poets, our friendship may have developed differently. As it was, we refreshed and reenthused each other with our writing, and encouraged each other to risk something in our work, like crossing over into other genres, such as screenplays. The greatest risk of all, to friendship and to our writing reputations, came when we cowrote
The Jesus Incident
and submitted it under both of our names. Frank pointed out that if the book were published we would each face specific criticisms for working together. People would say that Frank Herbert ran out of ideas, and that Bill Ransom was riding on the coattails of the Master. When these statements did, indeed, come up, we were better prepared psychologically for having predicted them in advance. Circumstances leading up to our collaboration were complex, but our personal agreement was simple: Nothing that either of us wanted would stand in the way of the friendship, and we shook hands. Nothing did, not even the publisher’s preference that we release it just with Frank’s name (the advance offer under this potential agreement was larger by a decimal point than what we received with both names on the cover). The power people also would accept a pseudonym, but they were adamant that a novel acknowledged to be by two authors would not fly with the reading public, and equally adamant about talking only with Frank. In addition, they believed that my reputation in poetry circles would contribute nothing toward marketing the book; therefore, I should get 25% and Frank 75% of whatever we agreed on. Frank literally hung up the phone and bought a ticket to New York. The way he told the story upon his return with contract in hand, he simply repeated a mantra throughout his visit: “Half the work earns half the credit and half the pay.” Frank took a 90% cut in pay and split the cover byline in order to work with me, only one example of the strength of his character and of his friendship.

The gamble paid off. We’d heard that
The New York Times Book Review
would cover it, and I was nervous. “Relax, Ransom,” Frank said. “Even a
scathing
review in
The New York Times
sells ten thousand hardbacks the next day.” John Leonard wrote a wonderful review, and we were launched. Now the publisher wanted two more books in the series,
The Lazarus Effect
and
The Ascension Factor
, with no further discussion about names on the cover. For two rustic, self-taught Puyallup Valley boys who ran traplines as kids, we did well because our focus always was on
The Story
. We had no ego conflicts while writing together, largely because Frank didn’t have much ego as “Author.” I learned from him that authors exist merely for the story’s sake, not the other way around, and a good story had to do two things: inform and entertain. The informing part must be entertaining enough to let readers live the story without feeling like they’re on the receiving end of a sermon. Writing entertainment without information, without some insight into what it is to be human, is a waste of good trees.

Frank believed that poetry was the apex of human language; he also believed that science fiction was the only genre whose subject matter attempted to define what it is to be human. We use contact with aliens or alien environments as impetus or backdrop for human interaction. Science fiction characters solve their own problems—neither magic spells nor gods come to their aid—and sometimes they have to build some intriguing gadgets to save their skins. Humans go to books to see how other humans solve human problems. Frank admired and championed human resolve and ingenuity in his life and in his work. He had a practical side about this, too: “Remember, Ransom,” he said, “aliens don’t buy books. Humans buy books.”