Frank Herbert - Dune Genesis

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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.

Dune Genesis by Frank Herbert

Dune began with a concept whose mostly unfleshed images took shape

across about six years of research and one and a half years of writing. The

story was all in my head until it appeared on paper as I typed it out.

How did it evolve? I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book

about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues,

fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent

bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory

that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero

(whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over

the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.

Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of

politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to

give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap

himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it.

Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it.

My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton. Both fitted

themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming

bigger-than-life appearance. But the most casual observation reveals that

neither was bigger than life. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet.

This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: 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. And

sometimes you run into another problem.

It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want

power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people

are imbalanced-in a word, insane.

That was the beginning. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe.

The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.

It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous Systematic is a deadly

word. Systems originate with human creators, with people who employ

them. Systems take over and grind on and on. They are like a flood tide that

picks up everything in its path. How do they originate?

All of this encapsulates the stuff of high drama, of entertainment-and I'm in

the entertainment business first. It's all right to include a pot of message,

but that's not the key ingredient of wide readership. Yes, there are analogs

in Dune of today's events-corruption and bribery in the highest places,

whole police forces lost to organized crime, regulatory agencies taken over

by the people they are supposed to regulate. The scarce water of Dune is an

exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.

But that was only the beginning.

While this concept was still fresh in my mind, I went to Florence, Oregon, to

write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there.

The USDA was seeking ways to control coastal (and other) sand dunes. I

had already written several pieces about ecological matters, but my

superhero concept filled me with a concern that ecology might be the next

banner for demagogues and would-be-heroes, for the power seekers and

others ready to find an adrenaline high in the launching of a new crusade.

Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure

its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can

be just as addictive as any other kind of high.

Ecology encompasses a real concern, however, and the Florence project fed

my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see

the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other-social

ecology, political ecology, economic ecology. It's an open-ended list.

Even after all of the research and writing, I find fresh nuances in religions,

psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, plant research,

soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones. A new field of study

rises out of this like a spirit rising from a witch's cauldron: the psychology

of planetary societies.

Out of all this came a profound reevaluation of my original concepts. In the

beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the

guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt,

would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism

into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.

Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or

deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an

absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe

attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices

that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are

ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the

ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.

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ThisessaywasoriginallypublishedintheJuly1980issueofOmniMagazine.Ithasneverbeenreprinted,andmostDUNEf...

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Frank Herbert - Dune Genesis

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