Frank Herbert

Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr., known as Frank Herbert, was an American science fiction writer born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1920 and who died in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1986. He is remembered above all for Dune, published in 1965, and for the sequels he built around it. Dune is among the best-selling science fiction novels ever published, and the series is generally counted among the genre's classics.

He grew up in an unsettled family home. At eighteen he went to live with an aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon, finished high school and started working for newspapers as a reporter and photographer. He served briefly in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and afterwards studied at the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Stuart, whom he married in 1946. He never completed a degree. For years he combined journalism with writing pulp fiction, and in 1949 he moved to California to work on the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. There he befriended the psychologist Ralph Slattery and his wife, who introduced him to thinkers such as Freud, Jung and Heidegger, and to Zen Buddhism, reading that would shape his thinking.

His first published science fiction appeared in 1952, and his career as a novelist began in 1955 with a story about a submarine that examined sanity and madness. It was well received by critics but was not a major commercial success. The turning point came with Dune. Herbert began researching it in 1959. The novel grew out of a magazine assignment about the sand dunes of Oregon and took six years to finish. Several publishers turned it down before Chilton brought it out as a book. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the Hugo Award in 1966. Its ecological concerns, its many viewpoint characters and its interest in politics, religion and human evolution set it apart from most science fiction of the period.

In the 1970s and 1980s Herbert was able to write full time. He continued the saga with Dune Messiah, Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune, and wrote standalone novels such as The Dosadi Experiment and The White Plague. He also collaborated with Bill Ransom on a sequence of follow-ups to Destination: Void. His concern for ecology took concrete form in projects such as his Port Townsend home, conceived as a demonstration of sustainable living. He also helped launch the career of Terry Brooks with a warm review of The Sword of Shannara.

His legacy is twofold. Dune became one of the best-selling science fiction books in history and a touchstone for ecological storytelling. Its story has also been adapted for cinema and television several times, from David Lynch's 1984 film to the versions directed by Denis Villeneuve. Many later writers have acknowledged their debt to a kind of science fiction that combines speculative science, political reflection and a very large timescale.