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Magazine Worms

“Dune World” and the world’s first glimpse of Arrakis.

They have prepared a way for us in the desert.

—The Lady Jessica Atreides

Frank Herbert’s pre-Dune clunky prose is so uneven that had “Spice Planet” ended up being the book we got, there’s every reason to believe it would have been just as forgotten as his other early work. While Herbert haters would say his prose isn’t much better in Dune, either, there’s a clear before and after, at least in how Herbert saw himself. This shift exists artificially through the lens of history because nobody interviews hacks when they’re hacks. The world only starts to document these kinds of writers after they’ve ceased being hacks, which is why artistic revisionism is so rampant in every single conversation you’ll have about pop culture in your entire life. Unlike someone like, say, Kurt Vonnegut, who sort of owned up to the crappiness of his earliest writing, Herbert tended to repaint himself as a scholar who was just using science fiction as an outlet for his important philosophical musings. Post-1965, after Dune, Herbert liked to claim he was really “a journalist” who “just write[s] a bit of fiction.”

Most biographies of Herbert support this claim for the simple reason that Herbert worked as a journalist from the 1940s well into the 1960s, even after Dune was published. And yet, Herbert was never able to support his family, nor his obligations to the IRS or his first wife, Flora, with his journalism. The proof? Beverly Herbert supported Frank and their two sons, Bruce and Brian. While Beverly and Frank were married, the family moved houses and cities well over twenty times, and in 1956, even fled to Mexico to avoid the IRS, blowing a good deal of book advance money from Herbert’s sale of The Dragon in the Sea. Frank Herbert may have been a journalist by training, but he didn’t straighten out his family life or his responsibilities until he became a successful fiction writer. Obviously, this sounds nuts. Most people don’t become more stable and more responsible by working on fiction, but if we just chart the broad strokes of Herbert’s life, that’s the truth. He wasn’t a journalist who wrote a bit of fiction. He was a fiction writer who needed to get away from journalism to become a stable person.

Herbert had been churning out science fiction stories for a variety of publications since 1952, when Startling Stories published his short story “Looking for Something?” Ten years later, by 1962, Herbert had published a total of twenty more science fiction stories and novellas in every leading SF magazine of the era, from Amazing to If to Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the last of which would undergo a strange metamorphosis to become Analog, the first home for Dune.

Before the first magazine publication of “Dune World” in 1963, Herbert wasn’t exclusively researching religion, wandering the desert looking for inspiration; instead, in addition to flying over sand dunes in Oregon, he’d also been hustling as a professional fiction writer for over a decade. Despite his impressive, prolific output of fiction, and the plethora of imaginative concepts in those published stories, the bulk of that writing is simply not that great. Even stories that foretell the future themes of Dune are too on the nose. In “You Take the High Road” (later “The Godmakers”), Herbert plays with the idea that religion could be manufactured through sci-fi shenanigans, which results in a character named Orne thinking to himself, “Could this psi machine amplify the energy we call religion?” Technology plus telepathy equals robo-religion. Get it? One of the things that makes Dune great is that it doesn’t insult the ability of the reader to discern the meaning.

So the primordial soup from which Dune came was swimming with science fiction writing clichés that looked backward stylistically rather than forward. And yet, all of Herbert’s earlier (and inferior) science fiction writing gave him raw material he could harvest and then make more interesting in Dune.

In various retrospectives and biographies of Herbert, and from Herbert’s own revisionism, the origin of and impetus for the writing of Dune is nearly always chalked up to his golden idea: combining his interest in desert environments and the history of various religions. In 1969, he told Willis McNelly: “For a science fiction writer anyway, it was an easy step from that to think what if I had an entire planet that was a desert? And during my studies of deserts and my previous studies of religions, we all know that many religions began in a desert atmosphere. So, I decided to put the two together, because I don’t think any one story should have any one thread.”

Herbert claimed that his style of writing was about using a “layering technique,” which is certainly not something a creative writing teacher could safely teach budding writers in any kind of class on the craft of writing. But according to Herbert’s telling of the creation of Dune, he worked with ideas and nonfiction research way before he invented any characters. He repeated the story of studying deserts and religion before coming up with Dune many times, right up to 1984, when he told Denis Fischer: “I had to go into the history of desert cultures . . . approximately six years later, I was ready to write the book. You could see it as an adventure story, or a love story, plus there’s political commentary and a metaphor for the things that are happening all around us.”

This last statement vaguely checks out with the novel we got, but, hilariously, could also describe nearly every good novel ever written. No rational person would argue Dune isn’t one of the most groundbreaking books from a metaphorical perspective, but Herbert’s insistence on peddling it as thinly veiled nonfiction bizarrely undersells why the book is so good. Just like other bearded so-called geniuses, Frank Herbert is not the first person to be shortsighted about why their art is great, and as anyone knows, he’s not the last. And yet, within this special group of out-of-touch smart people, he’s the only one who created a science fiction novel that broke through to the mainstream. But—great grieving Freud!—to create realistic characters in fiction, you can’t be thinking only about what eventual political point you’re trying to make. This means Herbert’s process must have been more than what he tended to describe. However, because we can’t prove what Herbert was thinking about when he invented Dune—just listen to the retelling of his own myth—the paper trail of what he was specifically writing between 1957 and 1963 is the only real way to guess at how Dune was logistically formed. And in that era of Herbert writing, there are essentially three elements that mattered:

After 1959, Herbert had these three notions not just rolling around in his head, but also on paper. If we take Herbert at his word, once he realized he could combine a spicy desert planet with a cool sci-fi novel about a religion on said desert planet, then he was all set! The reason Dune is so great is because Herbert mixed ecology and religious critique. Of course! That’s why people loved it and that’s how he sold it . . . right? Let’s imagine it: Herbert has this brain wave, writes a long letter to his agent, Lurton Blassingame, and explains that this new science fiction novel will combine world religions and stuff on a desert planet. Blassingame realizes this premise is pure gold, drinks two gin and tonics in celebration, and buys himself a new car that same day, all because he knows he and Herbert are going to be millionaires. The rest is history. Herbert is hailed as a hero and an ecological visionary and a brilliant religious scholar at the same time. Done and done!

Saying Dune was accepted for publication because one editor saw the brilliant collision of ecological and religious themes would be like saying Brian Epstein decided to manage the Beatles because he liked their politics. The themes of Dune mattered later, of course, but not at the beginning. What mattered was the characters. Damn the spice. Save the men.

Frank Herbert’s personal mythmaking makes it seem like Dune was written as a complete masterpiece and that its length was determined by a tireless novelist pounding out his 188,000-word tome. The reality is, Dune was published piecemeal, written on demand, and workshopped and revised as it was being written. And just in case you’re unclear as to what this means, let’s break it down: Before Dune was a novel you could hold and buy, it was a serialized story, told in parts, published in installments in the pages of what had at one time been considered the New Yorker of science fiction,[*] John W. Campbell’s Analog, which, perhaps more famously, had begun its life as Astounding Stories of Super-Science in 1930. Although basically unheard of in the twenty-first century, the idea that a novel would have been serialized and broken up in magazines before getting released in one volume was not only common, but that process describes the history of several famous novels, from Dickens to Hemingway. In the science fiction field, nearly every so-called classic released before the 1970s was initially published like this, too. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles are both “fix-ups,” novels that were really a combination of various short stories, compiled to make a book. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is another one, which, like “Dune World,” was edited and published by Campbell as disparate, sometimes unrelated stories set in the same continuity, well before anyone (including Asimov) considered it to be one unified story. As pitched to Campbell, Herbert’s vision for Dune wasn’t as incongruous and seat-of-the-pants as Asimov’s was with Foundation, but the process by which these texts were brought out into the world was similarly pseudo-collaborative.

But what made the pitch for “Dune World” stick out? Why did the infamously mercurial Campbell take it on? Scholarly revisionism tends to hop over the first published version of Dune and jump to the point where it was a complete novel in 1965. But that leaves out the most crucial step in the formation of Dune: the moment where somebody bought it. The most pivotal moment for Dune’s birth is the crucial fact that one very specific and very infamous editor had a real thing for characters who could see the future.

When famous (and very controversial) science fiction editor John W. Campbell[*] wrote to Frank Herbert on June 3, 1963, telling him he was accepting the then-in-progress three-part story “Dune World” for serialized publication in Analog, he mentioned desert planets and religious studies exactly zero times. This is not a short letter. It’s four pages long and is entirely focused on what Campbell correctly intuits is the broader allure of Dune: the fact that the story is about a teenager who has the power to see into the future.

“Dear Frank: Congratulations!” Campbell writes. “You are now the father of a 15-year-old superman! But I betcha you aren’t gonna like it. . . .”

Campbell then details what is both the greatest strength and greatest challenge of Dune: If Paul Atreides can accurately see the future, how does the rest of the story work? Isn’t the tension removed if the main character is locked into a destiny he can’t change? Campbell worried that Paul couldn’t have “so much precognition that you can’t build a workable plot for the next yarn. . . . If ‘Dune’ is to be the first of three,[*] and you’re planning on using Paul in the future ones . . . oh, man! You’ve set yourself one hell of a problem!”

Keep in mind, this is an acceptance letter. Campbell calls “Dune World” a “grand yarn” and promises to “buy it,” but his hands-on editing approach meant he wanted to make sure Herbert was focused on what Campbell considered to be the problems of the most important thing in the story—its main character. “Give your hero precognition that works,” Campbell suggested, and in that suggestion the fate of Paul Atreides and all of Dune was pretty much sealed. By saying Paul needed precognition “that works,” what Campbell meant was that there needed to be realistic consequences of Paul’s prescient visions. Later, this conundrum occupies pretty much the entire last half of the first Dune novel and nearly all of its first two sequels, Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976). While it’s unclear how much of Herbert’s overall plan for Dune was altered by Campbell, one thing is for sure: The original Dune is the only one of the series that Campbell worked on. Campbell wasn’t the Gordon Lish to Frank Herbert’s Raymond Carver, but he had served that role with several pivotal science fiction writers before. Meaning, his influence on Dune wasn’t nothing. And the fact that Herbert wanted Campbell to buy, shape, and publish his masterpiece is revealing.

“[Campbell] was a very prescriptive editor,” science fiction historian and Campbell expert Alec Nevala-Lee tells me. “He took a very firm hand with the kinds of things he wanted to see in the magazine in a way that I don’t think editors these days can do.” In Astounding, his nonfiction history book about the “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” Nevala-Lee illuminates the specific ways in which Campbell’s “firm hand” shaped and defined early stories from Isaac Asimov, specifically the idea that some of the big sci-fi ideas that we associate with Asimov—like the famous laws of robotics—actually came from Campbell first. Asimov later said that Campbell viewed all the authors he published as “extensions of himself”: “We were his literary clones; each of us doing, in his or her own way, things Campbell felt needed doing.”

While Nevala-Lee believes that Campbell probably didn’t have the same kind of power over Herbert that he’d once had over his 1940s protégés, like Asimov, the fact remains that Herbert had been corresponding with Campbell since 1953 and had had stories published by Campbell in Astounding since 1954. So prior to the moment where Herbert pitched “Dune World,” he’d had a working relationship with Campbell that had lasted nearly a decade, which indicates that at some point in time, Herbert must have either drunk the Campbell Kool-Aid a bit or pretended to enough to get his stuff published.

Just as the Fremen had been toiling in the desert for ages before Paul and Jessica arrived, the historical context of science fiction is important. Frank Herbert didn’t revolutionize science fiction by inventing it. Instead, like the heroes and villains of Dune, he worked within existing systems and, in many cases, destroyed and pushed back against their rules. But how did it all come about? What kind of universe was Herbert entering when he was working on Dune?

Here’s the brief history lesson: In 1926, Hugo Gernsback launched the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, which is commonly viewed as the first science fiction magazine. At the time, Gernsback preferred the term scientification and published short fiction in which the plausibility of fictional technology was central to the story. This may sound like a bad way to write stories—idea first, character second—but in the 1920s, the notion of demanding that fanciful narratives have more concrete science mixed in was fairly new. While certain very famous authors—like Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells—were known to employ what was later called science fiction, it wasn’t until the late 1920s that it became a codified genre, specifically within magazines. And while the term science fiction emerged from Amazing, it was popularized by one of its competitors: Astounding. That magazine began its life as Astounding Stories of Super-Science in 1930. In 1938, it was retitled Astounding Science Fiction. The editor who made this change was John W. Campbell. In 1960, he changed the name again, to Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction.

Now that we’ve done a history download, we must fast-forward to the future briefly and make it clear that Campbell’s reputation today is beyond problematic. Like many great American institutions, the publication history of American science fiction has a few downright evil progenitors, even if some of their impacts were positive. Campbell may have codified the SF field as a strong-willed editor, but his failings weren’t limited to just being pushy with some rewrites. He was a horrible racist who tried to “prove” nonwhites were inferior humans. He was sexist to the point of publishing very few women and was anti-Semitic enough to try to convince Isaac Asimov to use a pen name to hide the fact that Asimov was Jewish. Campbell was also heavily involved with L. Ron Hubbard, another science fiction writer he championed. Campbell didn’t die a practicing Scientologist, but later in his life, his support of pseudoscience made him so polarizing and unlikable that science fiction authors like Robert A. Heinlein (a right-leaning libertarian!) disavowed any positive influence Campbell had on their careers. From the political right to the political left of science fiction, rational people all agree, Campbell was bad news, even if he did publish and edit a lot of great stories. In 2020, the Hugo Awards, which had previously given out the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, changed the name of the award after author Jeannette Ng said in 2019 (while accepting the award): “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day.”

The tone Ng refers to is essentially the one thing Campbell was obsessed with throughout his editorial stewardship of Astounding (and later Analog) and, briefly, a magazine called Unknown. Campbell believed in a strict adherence to various formulas that always demonstrated that a “super-man” or “super-human” would win the day by virtue of being a super-being. What Campbell either ignored about Dune or outright missed was that Frank Herbert’s “super-being” wasn’t set up as a positive thing. In the pages that Campbell edited and published for “Dune World,” Paul’s prescience about his messianic destiny fills him with a sense of “terrible purpose.” This phrase, “terrible purpose,” is repeated ten times in “Dune World.” While some might say Herbert pulls his punches on being critical of Paul’s role in the first novel, the story in no way suggests that Paul’s ascendancy to false godhood is noble. On top of this, when Paul discovers he’s the product of controlled breeding, he’s disgusted and outraged, saying to himself, “I’m a monster! A freak!”

If Campbell harbored any notions that Frank Herbert would have been in support of systematic racism or eugenics, the feelings and beliefs of Herbert’s protagonists suggest the opposite. While “Dune World” may have been written in the space opera, swashbuckling style that Campbell essentially invented, Herbert’s actual dialogue in “Dune World” (which is what Campbell published) totally runs counter to the kind of diluted Great Man–theory propaganda Campbell was fond of. As Herbert has said many times, his goal with Dune was to say “cult leaders have feet of clay, if not worse. They lead their followers to the Coliseum, where they get to be eaten by lions.” He could have been talking about L. Ron Hubbard or Campbell himself. Although Campbell gleefully published the three-part “Dune World,” from December 1963 to February 1964, and then the five-part sequel “The Prophet of Dune” from January 1965 to May 1965, it’s likely he missed the point.

Interestingly, Nevala-Lee asserts that the moment in which Campbell accepted “Dune World” for publication came at a time where Campbell’s influence and the reputation of Analog weren’t so hot. “The interesting thing here is that by this point, Astounding is kind of in decline,” Nevala-Lee explains. “It’s no longer the leading magazine in the market. It’s been in decline since the Hubbard period in the 1950s.” This viewpoint was backed up by Harlan Ellison in 1967, who wrote: “John Campbell . . . used to edit a magazine that ran science fiction called Astounding and now runs a magazine that runs a lot of schematic drawings called Analog.” Burn!

Ellison was mostly referring to the 1960s revolution within printed science fiction that is now generally called the New Wave. This was a period of writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and many more, folks who (like Herbert) were more interested in saying something relevant than describing spaceships. More politically progressive, and more concerned with style than technical writing, the New Wave SF writers were decidedly anti-Campbellian. Frank Herbert and his “Dune World” weren’t ever really considered part of the New Wave, mostly because the beginning of the saga was published by the old guard. And yet, because Dune’s backstory rejects computers and artificial intelligence while downplaying the specifics of space flight, Herbert was, in many ways, the most important New Wave science fiction writer of them all. He fooled Campbell into believing he was an old-school science fiction writer, when the truth was, he’d evolved into something new. The only thing he had left to do was to finish the story of Paul Atreides, whom “Dune World” left crying in a cave, finally mourning the loss of his father.

By January 1964, several readers of Analog were furious about this “ending.” Although they had been promised a three-part serialized novel called “Dune World,” the third and final installment, billed as the “conclusion,” ended without resolution. After the Atreides are betrayed on Arrakis, and Paul and Lady Jessica escape into the desert, the story promptly stops and leaves the reader as Paul considers all the possible futures he might have. And that’s when the tears come. If you squint, this ending—the first public ending of Dune—is a little like a much harsher version of the cliffhanger of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One, but this time, the movie stops well before Jessica and Paul meet the Fremen, about an hour and a half in. Even for the most loyal Dune fan, reading the third part of “Dune World” and imagining it presented as the end of the story is ridiculous. One particularly annoyed reader, Mark L. Schibel, wrote to editor Campbell that “the conclusion was disappointing, to say the least,” while another, P. M. Strain, complained that “Dune World” was “misrepresented as being a story with a beginning, middle and an end,” and added that they couldn’t “call it a novel; it was butchered too badly, either by you or by the author.” But the common thread in all of the criticism of “Dune World” was clear: It wasn’t that Analog readers thought the quality of the story or the writing was bad. Just the opposite; they loved it. Their anger came from feeling cheated. Is this it? Really?

Campbell forwarded these letters to Frank Herbert, who dutifully informed his newfound fans that, yes, there was more to the story, and a serialized magazine sequel to “Dune World” was in the works. To P. M. Strain, Herbert wrote back: “That ending was put on it to ‘tie it off’ for serialization of the first third. John [Campbell] will publish the rest of the story later . . . and we hope to have a single-volume of the story out shortly afterward.” By “we,” Herbert meant himself and his agent, Lurton Blassingame. By “single-volume of the story,” Herbert referred to what is commonly known as a book.

On September 7, 1964, in Oakland, California, “Dune World” was a big deal at the Hugo Awards. It had been nominated for best novel, even though everybody hated the ending, it had appeared only in magazine form, and it was, admittedly, unfinished. This moment may have been one of the earliest indications of the strange uniqueness of Dune; even before it was done, and even before anyone knew how the story ended, it was still being called a novel and getting nominated for awards. It didn’t win, of course. Which makes sense. The version of Dune readers encountered first was incomplete and with a future only vaguely glimpsed by the prescience of both Paul Atreides and his creator. “Dune World” was a strange, inauspicious, and humble beginning for a novel that would soon conquer the world. The sleeper had yet to awaken fully, and Herbert was yet to publish the iconic scene in which Paul learns to ride a sandworm. And yet, by mastering Analog and controlling John Campbell, Frank Herbert had essentially done the same thing. A monster that had created the context for science fiction hadn’t been tamed. But Herbert had ridden that monster and used it for his own purposes.