Introduction
Frank Herbert:
A Man of Many Worlds
Brian Herbert
I am writing this on what would have been my father’s 95th birthday, had he lived. Long ago, on his 8th birthday, he stood on top of a dining room table and announced to his family, in a very determined tone, “I wanna be an author.” From a very young age, Frank Herbert knew what he wanted to do with his life, and he became a great and beloved author, as I detailed in my biography of him, Dreamer of Dune.
The Herbert family was in crisis during the entire time that my father and I worked on Man of Two Worlds. It began in December 1983, when I had a new story idea that I set to work on, hoping Dad would like it, and that we could collaborate on it. At the time, my mother, Beverly Herbert, was terminally ill with complications from radiation treatment that had been administered to her for lung cancer, a treatment regimen that had damaged her heart.
In late January 1984, my mother was not doing well, and she was living with my father just outside of Hana, an incredibly beautiful, remote region of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. At the time she knew that I was going to submit the outline to Dad for his consideration, and that I had a working title for the book, “A Man of Two Worlds.” She was very excited about the potential project, because she very much wanted us to write together, feeling we might become like Irving Wallace and his son, David Wallechinsky. Dad liked the concept of the novel, and early in February, he decided to collaborate with me on the book.
Yet sadly, my mother died only a few days later in Hawaii, never seeing the completion of the novel. But she knew about it, and knew in general what the book was going to be about.
In the story, I envisioned a universe that was entirely dependent for its existence upon the imaginations of an alien race, the Dreens. They lived on the distant planet Dreenor and created magnificent objects with the power of their imagination. Out of their imaginings, entire worlds and star systems came into existence. Earth was one of those worlds. A situation would come to pass where the people of Earth would perceive a threat from aliens living on Dreenor, and a military task force would be sent to destroy the planet. Of course, such an act would destroy Earth, too, if all the Dreens were killed, since Earth only existed by virtue of the imaginations of these beings. But the military authorities on Earth would have no knowledge of such an impending catastrophe.
The key character in the story would be Lutt Hanson Jr., a young business tycoon who runs a high-technology, multi-planet communications empire, a character who would bear some resemblance to William Randolph Hearst. (One of the real newspapers owned by Hearst, the San Francisco Examiner, had employed both my father and me in the 1960s—he as the picture editor and me as a teenage copyboy.)
After my mother died, Dad returned to his original Port Townsend, Washington home, an A-frame house in the woods that he had kept after purchasing property in Hawaii. In Port Townsend, Dad and I sat by the antique roll-top desk in his writing loft, where I described my “A Man of Two Worlds” plot ideas for him. He liked them. It had taken me two months to work the ideas up, and I was heartened by his reception.
However, Dad was busy with technical advising and promotional work on a big Dune movie directed by David Lynch, scheduled for release in December 1984, and on writing screenplays for two of his other novels, The Santaroga Barrier and Soul Catcher. Because of this, I was left with the task of doing most of the writing on our book during 1984. Dad thought he might be able to begin work on the project without distractions in the spring of 1985, with completion expected by the end of that summer.
During 1984, we had a number of conferences about the new novel. After making an outline we agreed upon a division of labor in which Dad would write some chapters and I would write others. In the end, however, he could not find the time to do the writing that year, so eventually I went back and wrote the first draft of his chapters as well. Shortly after the premiere of the Universal movie Dune in December 1984, I gave Dad a complete copy of the manuscript, as much as I had written thus far. He said he would get busy on it after completing a screenplay for The Santaroga Barrier. At his suggestion, we had modified the title of our novel to Man of Two Worlds.
Early in 1985, Dad remarried and moved to Manhattan Beach, California. He worked on our book there, while my wife Jan and I lived for six months in Hawaii, with our three children. He telephoned me regularly with questions and comments to tell me how it was going, but I wasn’t left with enough writing to do, so I worked on a new solo novel of my own, Prisoners of Arionn. In one of my conversations with Dad about Man of Two Worlds, he reported, “It’s going well. I’ve got Prosik [one of the main characters] in deep fecal matter.” He said he was having an immensely good time writing the book, and that he was adding humor to it.
By late June 1985, Dad was living with his new wife, Theresa, on Mercer Island, a suburb of Seattle. My wife Jan and I met him for lunch at a small sandwich shop in Seattle, and we discussed our story. For the first time I learned that he was fighting an apparent case of stomach flu, and had visited the doctor that morning. Whatever he had was hanging on tenaciously, though he said he was feeling better than the week before.
During 1985, most of our Man of Two Worlds sessions were at my father’s Mercer Island house, in a study he set up in a small room at the rear. He had a rustic black desk on one wall, with a single bookshelf holding books about Nepal and mountain climbing, along with a clapboard from the first scene of the Dune movie. Along the opposite wall were his word processor and printer, and to the left of that was a closet with an immense fire safe inside. A brass lamp stood on a shelf over the word processor. On the floor by the window sat a framed list of national bestsellers from earlier in the year, showing that the Dune paperback had reached #1 on the New York Times list, two decades after its first publication, thanks to the publicity from the Dune film.
In our writing sessions, Dad would sit in front of his Compaq computer, with its black lettering on a light green screen, and I, not knowing how to use a computer at the time, sat in a chair to his left with notes on my lap. The printer was set up in front of me, with a large box of old-style computer paper beneath it on the floor. He couldn’t seem to beat the stomach problem and said it was giving him considerable discomfort.
By the third week of July, we were on a roll with Man of Two Worlds. Dad agreed to delete a number of his passages that I didn’t like, and he went along with my suggested substitutions. He concurred with almost all of my recommendations, but said I was too expository on occasion, that I should leave more to the imagination of the reader. We went over characterizations carefully, fine-tooth-combing each scene to make certain our people acted within their characters, with proper motives, and that the actions advanced the plot. Much of the material involved his own first draft insertions, and I was impressed by the quality—especially considering the rapid pace at which he wrote and the fact that he wasn’t feeling well.
Incorporating all of our new scenes, I typed up an updated outline, which I kept handy. Dad was impressed at the way I used it to access scenes we needed to find. Very often my comparatively primitive method was faster than the search function on his computer. Sometimes Dad and I performed role-playing games to draw out characters, seeing how they might react to the situations in which we placed them. We spoke prospective dialogue aloud, and went back and forth with it. When we liked the way a scene was going, we wrote it down.
Dad went to a writing conference in Utah in early August. By the 6th of the month he was back in Seattle, and we resumed work on Man of Two Worlds. His stomach continued to bother him as we worked. He said he was in considerable intestinal pain, and was taking pain killer medication, which worried me.
Thursday, August 8, 1985 was our longest day. We tended the printer and made corrections through the end of the book on page 565. During a break, he shared a hard-to-find Echt Paulaner beer with me, his last bottle. He wore a navy blue pullover shirt and blue jeans, but in the evening changed into a regal red velvet robe. His glasses had black rims, and when he looked through their lenses that night at the green-illuminated computer screen his head shook a little from side to side … a constant, apparently involuntary motion that I had noticed previously. It seemed to be one of his signs of fatigue.
Years ago, when I was growing up in Frank Herbert’s household, we did not always get along. In my youth, I did not think I liked him because of his stern ways, but by the time I was in my twenties it all changed when I saw him take heroic measures to extend the life of my terminally ill mother, Beverly. This man, whom I had once disliked, had been generous with me in my adult years, helping immeasurably with my writing and also entrusting me with the management of his financial affairs. Considering the bad start to our relationship, I have never heard of anyone who tried harder to get to know his eldest son, or who changed more than he did. The effort was late, but at least he made it.
Now he was working in pain, and I was growing increasingly worried about him. Others in the family were equally concerned.
When we were still laboring on Man of Two Worlds after midnight on August 9th, I reflected on how wonderful it was to be working beside my father, this great and learned man. I watched him leaning over the computer screen, punching buttons to cut words from a paragraph. Whenever we added material, he tried to find somewhere on the same page where he could cut, so that the page numbering would not be altered, and he only had to reprint one page at a time. I was amazed at the way virtually any paragraph could be cut, without harming the quality of the writing. He felt this process actually improved the writing.
We worked on polishing up the novel during the rest of year. By December, we learned the terrible news that Dad had pancreatic cancer. He was going to undergo a new experimental hyperthermia treatment in Madison, Wisconsin, which involved using radiant heat and water vapor to induce fevers of up to 108 degrees Fahrenheit, heating the blood. He went through a series of treatments there in December 1985 and January 1986, returning periodically to Seattle. After one of his treatment sessions in Wisconsin late in January, he was up and walking around before any other patient. Doctors were shaking their heads in disbelief, saying no one else recovering from that surgery had ever walked before five days. He was up in three. This gave us hope, because we knew he was strong. But we were all shocked when he passed away on February 11th, suffering a pulmonary embolism after surgery.
As fate would have it, the very last story my father wrote was with me, the novel my mother wanted us to do together, Man of Two Worlds. He never saw the completed book, though he did see the cover proof and the typeset galleys.
It was an emotional moment when I received copies of our collaborative novel from the publisher shortly after his death, especially when I saw the photograph of us together on the back, taken on his 65th birthday. That was 30 years ago today.
When we wrote the novel together, we laughed often, because of all of the humorous scenes we were including. Though I had published a number of humorous books before working with Dad, including three satirical science fiction novels, many of the laughs in Man of Two Worlds were added by Frank Herbert. Prior to the publication of this novel, many of his fans didn’t realize that he had a great sense of humor, something I knew from my childhood, when I overheard him telling funny stories to adult guests in our homes—showing them a side of his personality that I didn’t always experience first-hand. As we wrote together, I hoped that the writing process was therapeutic for him, because there were medical studies showing that laughter was beneficial to people who were suffering from serious illnesses.
So, it is with bittersweet feelings that I now write about the time when my father and I worked closely together on this book. We enjoyed writing in collaboration, and talked about doing more projects in the future, but this was the only opportunity we would ever have. I had never expected to write even one novel with him, so Man of Two Worlds was a blessing for me, and for our relationship. I loved sharing the creative process with this most complex of all men, and despite any hardships I experienced earlier in his household, I do not regret a minute that I ever spent in his company. He was a very special, loving person, and it was a great honor to have known him.
Brian Herbert
Seattle, Washington
October 8, 2015