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Frank Herbert wrote much of the first draft of Heretics of Dune in Hawaii, a few miles outside the village of Hana on the eastern shore of Maui. He had not expected to be writing there, because the Pacific Northwest was his Tara, the place of his heart. But difficult circumstances led him to a distant, tropical isle.
When my father signed the contract for the novel in 1981, it was the largest science fiction book deal in history. World famous, he was at the top of his profession, having risen from poverty to success in a fashion that was reminiscent of the works of Horatio Alger, Jr. But Dad’s remarkable achievement was bittersweet. The actual process of writing the fifth book in his classic Dune series would prove to be exceedingly arduous and much slower for him than usual, because of all the time he had to spend out of his study tending to the medical crises of my mother, Beverly Herbert.
She was seriously ill at the time, and for years had been battling valiantly for her life. The original diagnosis in 1974 had been terminal lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes, sometimes as many as two packs a day. At the time of the discovery of the dread disease, the most optimistic prognosis had given her only a 5 percent chance of surviving beyond six months. Our family was devastated.
Under a rigorous program of chemotherapy and cobalt radiation treatments, my mother beat the cancer, but radiation seriously damaged her heart, which was inadequately shielded because of the limitations of medical technology in the 1970s. After these treatments, she suffered several life-threatening episodes, but Beverly Herbert was a fighter, and my father did everything possible to save her. He was her champion, and in true heroic fashion he sacrificed himself for her, just as she had done for him more than two decades earlier—when she gave up her own creative writing career in order to become the breadwinner for our family, thus enabling him to write. When she became gravely ill, he took time away from his writing to find the latest treatments for her and tended to her every need. He became her personal nurse, maid, and cook, preparing the low-salt meals required for her. Under his loving attention, she kept beating the odds, kept rising like Lazarus from ICU hospital beds and going on with her life. As soon as she was able, she continued to help Dad with his business operations, handling his accounting, scheduling, and management. But over the years, she had weakened physically and was slipping away from us, and from him.
Stretching their financial resources to the limit, in 1980 my parents purchased an incredible piece of property in a remote area of Maui and proceeded to have a wonderful home built there. Frank Herbert did this for my mother because she could breathe much easier in the warm air of Hawaii, far from the cold, damp Pacific Northwest, where she had been born and had lived more than thirty-five years of her life.
By late 1982, the home was still under construction but could be occupied. They arrived in October of that year. A swimming pool was being built for Mom on the property so that she could get some much-needed exercise, but work was progressing slowly, frustrating her and my father. Even so, she loved the eastern side of Maui, with its warmth, stunning beauty, and relaxed pace of life. It was a very spiritual, old-Hawaiian region, inhabited by a people reminiscent of a bygone, less-hectic time, and it was the perfect spot for her to recuperate.
Having researched old records, my mother had already found a map showing their property. It was five miles from Hana, in an area that used to be called “Kawaloa,” which means “a nice long time” in the Hawaiian language. She said she hoped to spend a long time there herself and that it was a magical place, unlike anything she had ever seen. A five-acre piece of paradise, the land fronted an aquamarine sea with dancing whitecaps and a surf that pounded against the black lava shoreline. The property had palms, papayas, mangoes, bananas, breadfruit trees, and a graceful kamani tree overlooking the water. The flowers on the gentle slopes around the home were spectacular, with bougainvillaea, blue lilies, orchids, torch gingers, heliconias, bird-of-paradises, poinsettias, and huge hibiscus blossoms.
“It’s warm here,” my mother said to me over the telephone, “and there are flowers everywhere.”
In Hawaii, Frank Herbert set to work on Heretics of Dune . I spoke with him by phone in early January 1983, and he told me he was putting in long hours on the new novel, pressing to complete it as soon as possible. Each morning he rose before dawn and worked out on a rowing machine and an Exercycle. Then he took a quick shower and made a light breakfast of toast and guava juice, which he carried to his loft study on the second floor of the house.
After writing for three hours, he would help Mom get ready for the day. He made her Cream of Wheat with sliced bananas on top, found books and knitting materials and art supplies and whatever else she needed, and sometimes adjusted the louvers in the walls to allow just the right amount of trade winds to enter, naturally ventilating the interior of the house. By nine thirty he was back at his desk upstairs, but he was always going to the interior railing and looking down into the living room to make sure she was comfortable. Under the circumstances, it was difficult for him to find the time or the energy to write, but he did the best that he possibly could. The novel, as important as it was, had to be secondary to Beverly Herbert, his loving wife and companion since 1946.
For the new book project, he was using a Compaq word processor since it was much faster than his customary electric typewriter. Each night he put the new machine away in a sealed “dry room” by the kitchen to prevent it from being damaged so quickly in the caustic, salty air that blew in from the ocean. By the middle of February, he told me he’d been having plot problems with the novel, but he was a little over halfway through the first draft. Only a few days later, he was interrupted by yet another of my mother’s medical emergencies, one that forced them to return to a home they still owned in Port Townsend, Washington. Choosing to stay there instead, a short distance from Seattle, they could more easily obtain the best medical treatment for her. It was the practical thing to do, though they would return to Hawaii later in the year.
By early June, they were still in Port Townsend, and Dad had the first draft completed—around 200,000 words, which would eventually be cut to 165,000. I remember visiting them at their home on the Olympic Peninsula and seeing my mother reading the manuscript. A slender brunette woman, she was seated on a dark yellow recliner in the sitting area adjacent to the kitchen, with manuscript pages spread out on the table beside her. She said the story was great, that she couldn’t put it down. Mom felt that each book in the series was superior to the one before, with plots and characterizations that were even better than Dune .
The strong characterizations of women in the series—and particularly in Heretics and Chapterhouse —appealed greatly to my mother. In fact, Dad based the Lady Jessica on her, creating a memorable literary character who had my mother’s beauty and grace. Remarkably, even though Beverly Herbert passed away years ago, she continues to live through the ages . . . a significant testimonial to the love that Frank Herbert felt for her.
It is interesting to note the progression of women in my father’s Dune novels. Female characters get stronger and stronger as the series develops, and in Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune , women are running most of the important planets in the Dune universe. By that time, the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood is the most important political power, although it is a more austere age, without the grandeur and pomposity of the Imperium back in the days of Shaddam Corrino IV, the Emperor Paul Muad’Dib, or the tyrannical God Emperor, Leto Atreides II. The glories of the desert planet Arrakis are long gone as well, and the sandworm species has been moved off world, where it may not survive.
Thousands of years before the events described in Heretics of Dune , the God Emperor set mankind on his “Golden Path” and scattered civilization across countless star systems, as if sprinkling human seeds in the wind. But now, in Heretics of Dune , evil, supremely powerful women have emerged from the Scattering and threaten the Sisterhood. They call themselves “Honored Matres,” which is ironic because there is nothing honorable about them. Individually and collectively, they can outfight the Sisters, so that the Sisterhood—like the sandworms—seems in danger of being wiped out. The brutal Honored Matres appear to be unstoppable, and there are rumors about their origins. Could they possibly be descended from failed Reverend Mothers, making them the dark side of the Sisterhood? Or could something else be at play, something even more sinister that has been generated in the secret breeding laboratories of the fanatical Tleilaxu?
Heretics of Dune is a remarkable, cerebral excursion through the most fantastic universe in science fiction. In this novel, as in God Emperor of Dune before it and Chapterhouse: Dune afterward, the author explored layers that he originally interwove into the action of the first novel in the series, Dune —layers containing important messages about politics, religion, ecology, and a host of other interesting, timeless subjects. The last three novels he wrote in the series are intellectually stimulating, and sometimes the action almost seems secondary. Huge battles, and even one that is environmentally catastrophic, occur behind the scenes.
As I wrote in Dreamer of Dune , the biography of my father, Heretics of Dune was actually intended to be the first book of a new trilogy that would complete the epic story chronologically. It is set thousands of years in mankind’s future, long after the events in Dune . Before his untimely death in 1986, Frank Herbert wrote the first two books of the trilogy ( Heretics and Chapterhouse ), but he left the third unwritten. Using my father’s outline and notes, I eventually co-wrote the grand climax with Kevin J. Anderson, but it required two novels for us to do so— Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007).
Heretics of Dune is the beginning of that extraordinary, climactic adventure, a giant leap in time and space beyond the novels preceding it. In this novel, you will meet a diverse and complex cast of characters, inhabiting worlds that stretch the imagination. It is a journey into what my father liked to call one of humankind’s “possible futures,” showing where we might very well be headed, into a tableau that is at once terrifying and exhilarating. Even with its complexities, Heretics is a page-turner, a novel that will not disappoint the most critical of Dune fans. After reading the last page of the book, you will want to go back and read it again, revisiting old friends in a fantastic realm that never quite leaves your thoughts.
Brian Herbert
Seattle, Washington
June 24, 2008