 |
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
| ||||||||
Frank Patrick Herbert (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was an American science fiction author.
As an author Herbert was both critically acclaimed and a worldwide commercial success. He is best known for the novel Dune, the five other novels in the series that followed it, and the fictional universe these novels created. The Dune saga dealt with themes such as human survival and evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics and power. It is considered by many fans of the genre to be the best science fiction epic ever written, and is certainly one of the most popular. Dune was awarded the Nebula award in 1965 and shared the Hugo award in 1966. The film of the novel Dune, made by David Lynch, while flawed, remains a classic of the genre. Dune was made into a TV mini-series by the Sci Fi Channel (United States) in 2001. This was commercially successful and the Sci-Fi channel continued the Dune saga with a further mini-series in 2003 entitled Children of Dune. Other notable novels were The Dosadi Experiment, The White Plague and The Godmakers.
| Contents |
Frank Herbert was born in 1920 in Tacoma, Washington. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer, and in 1939 he lied about his age in order to get his first newspaper job on the Glendale Star.
There was a temporary hiatus to his writing career as he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He married Flora Parkinson in 1941, but later divorced her in 1945 after fathering a daughter.
After the war he attended the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Ann Stuart at a creative writing class in 1946. They were the only students in the class who had sold any work for publication—Herbert had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, and Stuart had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. They married in Seattle on June 20, 1946. Their first son, Brian Herbert, was born in 1947. Frank Herbert did not graduate from college, according to Brian, because he only wanted to study what interested him and so didn't complete the required courses.
After college he returned to journalism and worked at the Seattle Star and the Oregon Statesman; he was also a writer and editor for the San Francisco Examiner's California Living magazine for a decade.
Herbert began reading science fiction in the forties and in the 1950s began to write it, with short stories appearing in Startling Stories and other magazines. During the next decade he published nearly 20 short stories.
His career as a novelist began with the publication of The Dragon in the Sea in 1955, where he used the environment of a 21st-century submarine as a way to explore sanity and madness. The book predicted worldwide conflicts over oil consumption and production. It was a critical success but not a major commercial one.
Herbert began researching Dune in 1959 and was able to devote himself more wholeheartedly to his writing career because his wife returned to work full time as an advertising writer for department stores, becoming the main breadwinner during the sixties. Herbert later related in an interview with Willis E. McNeilly that the novel originated when he was supposed to do a magazine article on sand dunes in Florence, Oregon, but he got too involved in it and ended up with far more raw material than needed for a single article. The article was never written, but it did serve as the seed for the ideas that led to Dune.
After six years of research and writing, Dune was completed by 1965. Far longer than commercial science fiction of the time was supposed to be, it was serialized in the science-fiction magazine Analog in two separate parts, in 1963 and 1965. It was then rejected by nearly twenty book publishers before finally being accepted. One editor prophetically wrote back "I might be making the mistake of the decade, but...," before rejecting the manuscript. But Chilton, a minor publishing house in Philadelphia, gave Herbert a $7500 advance, and Dune was soon a critical success. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the Hugo Award in 1966. Dune was the first ecological science fiction novel, containing a multitude of big, inter-relating themes and multiple character viewpoints, a method that ran through all Herbert's mature work.
The book was not an instant best seller. By 1968 Herbert had made $20,000 from it, far more than most science-fiction novels of the time were generating, but this was not enough to let him take up full-time writing. However, the publication of Dune did open doors for him. He was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's education writer from 1969 to 1972 and lecturer in general and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington (1970–2). He worked in Vietnam and Pakistan as social and ecological consultant in 1972. In 1973 he was director-photographer of the television show The Tillers.
| Quotation |
| A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing. for example. or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two. |
| Frank Herbert |
By 1972 he was able to become a full-time writer and during the 1970s and 1980s he enjoyed considerable commercial success as an author. He lived between Hawaii and Washington State. During this time he wrote numerous books and pushed ecological and philosophical ideas. He continued his Dune saga, following it with Dune Messiah, Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune. Other highlights were The Dosadi Experiment, The Godmakers, The White Plague and the books he wrote in partnership with Bill Ransom: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect and The Ascension Factor.
But his change in fortune was shaded by tragedy. In 1974, Beverly underwent an operation for cancer that gave her ten more years of life, but adversely affected her health. She died on February 7, 1984. In his afterword to Chapterhouse Dune, Herbert writes a moving elegy for his wife.
1984 was a tumultuous year in Herbert's life. In the same year that his wife died, his career took off with the release of David Lynch's film version of Dune. Despite high expectations, a big-budget production design and an A-list cast, the movie drew mostly poor reviews in the United States. However, despite a disappointing response in the USA, the film was a critical and commercial success in Europe and Japan. The same year Herbert published the fifth book in the Dune saga, Heretics of Dune, which many readers believe to be as good as Dune itself. Finally, following the death of Beverly, Herbert married Theresa Shackelford later in the year.
In 1986 Herbert published Chapterhouse: Dune, which tied up many of the saga's story threads. This was to be Herbert's final single work — he died of pancreatic cancer on February 11, 1986, in Madison, Wisconsin, at the age of 65.
Frank Herbert left a rich posthumous legacy for his readers. He left behind notes for both the history of the Dune universe before the events of Dune and the novel he had planned to follow Chapterhouse: Dune. In recent years, Brian Herbert (Frank's son) and Kevin J. Anderson, have used those notes to write a very successful series of novels based on the pre-Dune materials and are preparing to write the post-Chapterhouse novel which fans refer to as Dune 7.
The film version of Dune is now a cult classic, doing very well on video and DVD and his Dune saga is as of 2003 being serialized by the Sci-Fi Channel. Dune the mini-series has been released to considerable acclaim and commercial success, and the channel have recently released a new mini-series called Children of Dune which merges the plots of the novels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.
Herbert's books have grown more popular as time passed thanks to a growing fanbase inspired by the release of the Dune 1984 film, the television mini-series and the aforementioned "Prelude to Dune" series. Dune remains his most successful and popular novel — it has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies. Herbert's other books have also sold well, particularly the subsequent novels in the Dune saga, which have been reprinted year after year.
| Quotation |
|
I think science fiction does help, and it points in very interesting directions. It points in relativistic directions. It says that we have the imagination for these other opportunities, these other choices. We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, "Well, the only answer is...." or, "If you would just. . . ." Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don't see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don't think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction. |
| Frank Herbert. |
Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology, which have inspired many of his readers to become interested in these areas. The underlying thrust in Frank Herbert's work was his fascination with the question of human survival and evolution. Frank Herbert has attracted a fanatical fanbase, many of whom have tried to read everything Frank Herbert has written, fiction or non-fiction, and see Frank Herbert as something of a guru. Indeed such was the devotion of some of his readers that Frank Herbert was at times accused of trying to create a cult.
There are a number of key themes in Herbert's work:
Frank Herbert carefully refrained from offering his readers firm answers to many of the questions he explored.
Herbert is acknowledged as one of the finest science fiction (SF) writers of all time — his Dune is recognized as a seminal novel of the genre. It is the best-selling science fiction novel, and the Dune saga is the best-selling science fiction series of all time. In addition, Dune has received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Nebula Award in 1965 and sharing the Hugo Award in 1966. According to contemporary Robert A. Heinlein, Herbert's opus was "Powerful, convincing, and most ingenious." Arthur C. Clarke wrote that Dune was "unique among SF novels...I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings."
Dune is also considered a landmark novel for a number of reasons:
Spark Notes conclusion about Dune is that:
Herbert wrote over twenty novels after Dune that some regard being of variable quality. Books like The Green Brain, The Santaroga Barrier and Hellstrom's Hive seemed to hark back to the days before Dune when a good technological idea was all that was needed to drive a sci-fi novel. And some fans of the Dune saga are critical of the follow-up novels — particularly Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune — as being sub-par.
Herbert never equalled the critical acclaim he received from Dune. Neither his sequels to Dune nor any of his other books won a Hugo or Nebula. Some felt that Children of Dune was almost too literary and too dark to get the recognition it may have deserved, and that The Dosadi Experiment lacked an epic quality fans had come to expect. Critics point out problems in Herbert's difficult writing style which they contend was inconsistent, and that Herbert sometimes let his enthusiasm for interesting ideas get in the way of the story.
To conclude, Malcolm Edwards in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction wrote:
Since his death the main controversy within the science fiction community is whether the new Dune books by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson should be considered canonical. Critics argue that these books do not have the quality of the original series, especially with regard to the articulation of complex ideas about human life that was such a concern of Frank Herbert.
Also Herbert's close friend Dr. Willis E. McNelly (1920–2003) compiled a Dune Encyclopedia in 1984. It was written by fans of Dune, including McNelly. There's a considerable debate about how "canonical" the encyclopedia is: Herbert wrote the introduction and read and approved every essay, but in subsequent books of the Dune series he contradicted a few points. Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, offended many diehard fans when they decided against using the Dune Encyclopedia as a reference for their new Dune books, so their series often contradicts material presented in McNelly's work.
Be that as it may, the new books are enormously popular among fans. Aficionados of the original series await the seventh book with anticipation — eager to discover where Herbert intended to take the landmark series, but concerned that the new book would be a major departure from Herbert's original vision.
Non Fiction Books:
Essays and introductions
Significant Newspaper Articles
Poetry
Some Audio Recordings
Dune universe:
Con-sentiency universe:
Destination: Void universe:
|
||||
| View Live Article | This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License | |
||
