Chapter 11

They Stopped the Moving Sands

WITH THE campaign wars over and the Roth election lost, Dad felt burned out. He’d been beating his head against political walls long enough, and needed to get back to his writing. A number of stories had been churning in his mind, and he wanted to get them on paper.

For a long time he had been intrigued by the effect of heroes upon human history. A student of the flawed, tragic heroes of Greek mythology and Shakespeare, he also studied the gospels of a number of religions. He was especially intrigued with stories of great religious leaders—messiahs. Among his favorite nonfiction works were biographies of great leaders such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Washington.

Employing his increasing understanding of psychology, he wanted to write a novel from the perspective of a hero, venturing deep into the character’s psyche. He sought to become that character as he wrote about him, understanding every motivation. He had faint sketches in mind, and some of the coloration. But no canvas and no plot. So he set the idea aside.

Another story kicking around in his head was a mainstream adventure set in Mexico, with no science fiction content. Two days after the election loss of November 6, 1956, he was hard at work on a novelette entitled A Game of Authors. He finished it in January—37,500 words—and sent it off to his agent.

With this course change, Dad was targeting the mainstream magazine market, thinking he could earn more money with sales to slick East Coast magazines. But he hadn’t done any market research—a critical error. He didn’t understand what needed to be done for success. With severe space limitations, those publications were particularly finicky about length. Dad wrote each story from the seat of his pants, without considering length.

With A Game of Authors he was going full circle, moving away from science fiction and back to the adventures he had written in the 1940s. Dragon was doing relatively well, but Dad didn’t feel entirely comfortable with science fiction. He hadn’t intended to become a science fiction writer; it just happened. Now he was having trouble selling stories in that genre and was reappraising himself, shifting gears. Science fiction was considered a literary ghetto by many anyway, and Frank Herbert felt it might be best to get away from it.

He also had a couple of stories in mind for the men’s magazine market, including Playboy and Rogue, magazines that were doing better than others financially and were paying their writers well. He even considered television script writing for a time, but Lurton discouraged him from that, telling him it was too tough to break into with his background.

A Game of Authors, a title taken from a card game, was about an American writer in Mexico, searching for a famous lost author. This was a familiar plot device in the works of Frank Herbert—a character investigating something, in the manner of a reporter. The story featured international intrigue, a femme fatale and a lake filled with piranhas. Unfortunately it was melodramatic, with poor use of suspense and thin characterizations. The story met the same fate as Dad’s recent science fiction tales. In part this had to do with a length problem—it was too long for the extremely limited magazine markets, and around 12,500 words too short for a novel. Still, Lurton made every effort to sell it without changes. The best hope seemed to be serialization in a magazine.

Around this time, Dad wrote another mainstream story, “Paul’s Friend.” Set on an island in the South Pacific shortly after World War II, it was told in the first person, with an unnamed character listening to a story about a mysterious black man whose bravery in a hurricane was legendary. “Paul’s Friend,” while a salable length at four thousand words, did not find a publisher.

And he wrote a real gem, a wild 10,000-word story told in the first person. Bearing the improbable title “Wilfred,” it described a would-be singer of inferior voice and ludicrous appearance who happened to hit the right combination of acoustics in a recording session, producing beautiful music. Sadly, “Wilfred,” like Dad’s other non–science fiction attempts, did not sell.

In another genre, science fiction book and magazine publishers continued to reject Storyship, which was only a couple of thousand words longer than A Game of Authors.

That spring, Universal Pictures offered four thousand dollars for the screen rights to The Dragon in the Sea. They presented an unfavorable contract, which gave them every conceivable right of recorded and filmed reproduction, a contract his film agent, Ned Brown, did not like at all. He wanted to hold out for a better offer. But Dad went for the bird in the hand, and said he would accept without further delay or negotiation. Reluctantly, Ned proceeded to have the contract drawn up.

While quite a bit of money for 1957, it disappeared quickly, going for old bills that had been accumulating. Dad remained confused about his writing, and was having trouble finding his literary voice. He contacted other writers for advice, to see what he might be doing wrong. Several gave him the cold shoulder—he was just another young writer to them, pestering them, taking them away from their writing.

For a time he had received advice from Lurton’s brother, Wyatt, a successful short story writer—but their last contact had been a year before. One professional in Portland did offer quite a bit of advice, Tommy Thompson. A well-known screenwriter and short story writer, Thompson told Dad never to talk about a story he planned to write or that he was in the process of writing. “Just go ahead and write it,” he said. “Don’t waste your energy trying to explain it.”

Thompson, who lived in Santa Rosa and Portland at various times, built a steam engine into an old Studebaker and ran the car on steam. It ran well, and set my father to thinking about alternative energy sources—a concept he would champion two decades later.

Referring to himself as a Jeffersonian, Frank Herbert was an admirer of the nation’s second president, John Adams. These men—Jefferson, Adams and Herbert—were suspicious of the holders of power. Dad added a twist of his own, asserting that charismatic leaders were extremely dangerous. “It’s one thing to make mistakes for yourself,” he said, “but if you’re a charismatic leader and you blunder, millions of people can follow you over the cliff.”

In The Dragon in the Sea, the crew of the Fenian Ram followed Captain Sparrow slavishly—a perilous situation, in my father’s opinion. This was a precursor to the dangerous power structure that formed around Paul Atreides, as Dad later described in the Dune series.

Dad missed the Puget Sound area of Washington State, where he had been born. It was his Tara and he had done his best writing there, including most of Dragon. It was a wild thought, perhaps, but in 1957 he felt in his gut that another move might provide the inspiration he needed.

Ever cooperative, my mother contacted retail advertising people she knew in the Seattle-Tacoma area. As luck would have it, an advertising copywriter position turned up at a large department store in Tacoma (The Bon Marche), at a slightly higher salary. She was hired, and management accepted her request for a summer employment date, after Bruce and I had completed our current school semesters.

Penny remained with her mother in Florence, Oregon—on the Pacific Coast.

Just before our departure for Washington State, a friend from the Hitchcock campaign told Dad about a U.S. Department of Agriculture research station that was, coincidentally, near Florence. It was in an area of unstable sand dunes that were being driven by wind over buildings and roads, inundating them.

By planting poverty grasses the USDA had discovered a successful method of stabilizing dunes, preventing them from traveling. It was a pilot project, and due to its success government officials were coming from all over the world to see it. Israel, Pakistan, Algeria and Chile were among the interested nations.

Dad was intrigued. He knew from his studies of history that the Sahara and other desert regions had not always been desolate. Once they had been green and fertile, sustaining great and powerful civilizations. Many of these civilizations were subsequently buried by slow-moving, relentless sand encroachment, causing more destruction than any human invader could.

Dad thought he might write a magazine article on the project. He chartered a Cessna 150 single-engine plane, with pilot, and flew to Florence. There he compiled notes and took photos. It was as advertised: the Department of Agriculture had stopped the sand.

On the way back, Dad gazed down on sand dunes that were like waves on a great sea, and he felt an emotional pull. He returned to Portland, and focused his attentions upon yet another move.

In the summer of 1957, we rented a house in Brown’s Point, Washington, just north of Tacoma. One bedroom was on the main floor, on the street side, and Dad converted it to a study.

He had always wanted an antique roll-top desk, and shortly after the move he purchased a large one from a private owner who had advertised it. The desk was dark oak, with little drawers and cubbyholes, and writing boards that pulled out on the right and left sides.

In his new study, Dad placed a row of reference books along the top shelf of the desk. His Olympia portable typewriter went on a typing table by the desk. A “Singing Cowboy” rug (that Mom had crocheted from a drawing of mine) was laid on the floor, and his Mexican serape with silver clips went over a side chair. On the walls he hung a calendar and old maritime maps, with inaccurate but quaint cartographic impressions of the continents. He organized his musical tapes and set up his reel-to-reel tape deck and speakers so that it could fill the entire house with music. With all his preparations, we were in the house for nearly a week before he wrote a word.

Now he set to work on the magazine article, which he entitled, “They Stopped the Moving Sands.” The rapid, staccato hum of his typewriter became constant background noise, a machine drone that I almost filtered out. His schedule at the time was to begin writing at midnight and work until at least 8:00 A.M. In this way he had quiet, uninterrupted time. The typewriter was my father’s mistress, permitted by my mother. In this unpublished haiku poem he described what it was like at that time of night:

Typewriter clacking

In my night-encircled room-

Metal insect song.

I’ve never seen anyone type as fast as Dad. I hesitate to call it “touch typing,” since his fingers moved so quickly over the keys that they didn’t seem to touch them at all. When I interviewed Howie Hansen, my father’s closest friend, he said to me:

Frank was some kind of a typist. I never saw anybody that could sit there while you’re talking, as I’m talking right now, and whose fingers would be flying, and who at the end of your conversation would rip the page right out of the typewriter and hand you your finished conversation. Frank would do that. I always accused him of showing off, and he would say, “What, who me? Huh. You know me better than that.” And then we’d both laugh roaringly.

Sometimes, remaining ever so quiet, I watched my father at work in his study, through the open door or from outside in the yard. When he wasn’t typing, he edited pages with a pen or pencil, scribbling rapidly. He talked to himself in there, reading dialogue aloud. Not being a writer myself at the time, I had no understanding of the benefit of this technique, which makes dialogue more realistic, more flowing. Having heard that crazy people talked to themselves, I put the proverbial two and two together and decided he must be out of his mind. He was so different from other kids’ fathers anyway, with his beard and Bohemian lifestyle. He didn’t hold down regular jobs, didn’t play catch with me in the backyard or go to baseball games with me the way normal fathers did. He didn’t even allow us to have a television.

Each morning, Dad drove Mom to work at The Bon Marche department store in downtown Tacoma and then picked her up in the afternoon. Our car was a gray 1950 Studebaker that looked like some kind of a weird rolling airplane cockpit. This delivery service took him an hour and a half to two hours a day in all, and was necessary since my mother refused to drive, especially in city traffic.

She was dependent upon him for many things. Almost like a baby, so helpless without him. But he was just as dependent upon her, in other ways. She edited his manuscripts and typed the final drafts. She listened attentively and made suggestions as he read each story to her aloud. She found missing things for him, keeping his delicate emotional state balanced.

Dad was in reality completely helpless without her, but I would not realize it until many years later.

My brother and I shared an insatiable curiosity about the contents of our father’s desk. I often saw Bruce in the dangerous inner sanctum of the study, and at every opportunity I was in there as well. I got into Dad’s things most in the afternoons, when he was picking Mom up at work.

He had the most intriguing objects in his desk, and I spent hours at a time looking at them. He had a black and silver fountain pen, like Jack Vance’s. I liked the pen very much. It felt good and substantial in my hand. In cubbyholes were piled stacks of 5 © 7 notepads with a drawing of a typewriter on top of each sheet, and the words, “FROM THE DESK OF FRANK HERBERT.” In cubbyholes and drawers and on the desktop were old eyeglasses, little prisms wrapped carefully in tissue paper, fortunes from Chinese fortune cookies, pens, pencils, slide rules in a variety of shapes, political campaign buttons, typewriter ribbons wrapped in plastic bags (to keep the ribbons from drying out), little boxes and little bags and things held together with rubber bands. There were boxes of bond typing paper and stacks of inexpensive newsprint, used by my parents for first drafts and carbon copies.

My father always had a cardboard manuscript box on his desk or on the typewriter stand by it. The box, which originally came with bond typing paper in it, was slit open on one end by Dad and used to hold the completed pages. The slitted end enabled him to handle pages easily, while still keeping them organized in a box.

His portable typewriter sat on a typing table on the left side of the desk, and I never touched this machine, for the wrath it might bring down upon me. Any slip in that realm would spell BIG TROUBLE, because Dad always said the keys could be sprung if they weren’t hit just right, with an even rhythm. He was extremely sensitive to the touch of his keyboard.

As letters and other paperwork came into his study, he impaled them on a copy spike on the top shelf of the desk. When in the middle of a story, he only answered the most important, earth-shaking correspondence. Everything else waited, and he developed the habit of piling up huge stacks of unanswered mail. He focused his energies upon the story in his typewriter, to the exclusion of almost everything and everyone else. When the story was finished and in the mail to his agent, he would then spend days in succession answering every letter.

His study was, in a very real sense, a sacred place in our home. I had only a faint understanding of the mysterious incantations and rituals he performed in there with his writing implements, but I knew all of his things were to be given supreme respect. So any time I was in there, I took great pains to disrupt nothing, and always listened for noises as nervously as a cat, sounds that might suggest the approach of the Lord of the Domain. I examined small areas at a time, always replacing each item exactly as I had found it.

The door of his study had a humorous sign on the outside that I never laughed about when I lived in his household. A fiendish cartoon character was depicted, with the caption: “I DON’T GET ULCERS; I GIVE THEM!”

From her job at The Bon Marche, Mom often brought home advertising layouts to work on. Many featured fashion drawings of women. On her Olympia portable typewriter, she pecked out advertising copy on newsprint, which she cut out and moved around on large sheets of paper, positioning copy and illustrations. When satisfied, she secured everything in place with rubber cement. She did well at the department store, receiving a promotion to advertising manager and then to sales promotion manager.

After a few days of working on “They Stopped the Moving Sands,” Dad realized he had something bigger in front of him than a magazine article. He sat back at his desk and remembered flying over the Oregon dunes in a Cessna. Sand. A desert world. He envisioned the earth without technology to stop encroaching sand dunes, and extrapolated that idea until an entire planet had become a desert.

What sorts of characters might populate such a world, and what was their history? What religion would they follow? This last was an important question, perhaps one of the key questions he would have to answer.

Three of the world’s major religions…Judaism, Christianity and Islam…came into existence and grew in desert regions. In sand, in desolation. This was the canvas he needed for the complex story he wanted to write about a hero. He selected the most fanatical of the three faiths, Islam. The story would include an Arab-like world view, and the hero would be a messiah. He envisioned a desert messiah like the Mahdi or Mohammed on horseback, with a ragtag army on horse and camelback with him, thundering across the desert. This leader would be charismatic, capable of inspiring intense loyalty among his people. A power structure would develop around him.

My father wanted a novel that would incorporate real elements from history, mixing them and casting them in a new light—always keeping in mind the saying of one of his favorite literary figures, Ezra Pound: “Make it new.”

Frank Herbert knew comparatively little about the complex ecosystems of deserts but set about a thorough course of personal study. He wanted to do something futuristic in his setting, involving desert technology and advanced methods of desert warfare. Despite his mainstream leanings, he found himself changing course again and realized this had to be a science fiction novel. He needed the elbow room afforded by the genre.

This story would have a big canvas.

Dad scoured every library and book store for books about deserts, desert peoples and languages and desert religions. He learned about the behavior of sand, desert storms, water control, and dry land life forms. And he learned how people survived in the hostile, desolate environments. He read T. E. Lawrence’s 1926 masterpiece about war in the desert, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

His Library of Congress research skills served him well in this endeavor, for he was able to skim books and articles for the information he needed, avoiding long, time-consuming passages.

But sometimes his innate, boyish curiosity got in the way and slowed him down. While looking for one thing he would become interested in another, and would spend hours learning about a topic that had little or nothing to do with the story he wanted to write.

His notes began filling file folders. The unfinished magazine article went into one of those folders: background information about the ecology of the desert planet.

The story would not occur on Earth, but the characters would be human. Readers would identify best with humans, he believed. And borrowing from the American Indian’s opinion of white culture, he would describe how man inflicts himself upon his environment, usurping it and failing to live in harmony with it.

He had the science fiction bug once more, but for a respite from the rigors of novel research, he began writing short stories in that genre again and mailing them off to Lurton in New York City. This was not a total commitment to science fiction, as from time to time he would continue to make attempts at mainstream stories….

Sometimes Dad kidded Mom about having a black spot on her lower back, a mark that came and went. He said it was a “Mongolian spot,” indicating that she was either part Indian or part Asian. This conflicted with what Mom had been told by her family, who claimed that they had only pure “East Coast” blood in their veins.^*

My parents were totally faithful to one another, and rarely argued about anything, at least not in front of the children. They were remarkably compatible. There were a few exceptions. From the first days of their marriage, Dad depended upon Mom to find things for him. She was the “white witch” of our family, he said, with mysterious methods even she could not fathom. As a natural consequence, Dad had a tendency toward carelessness about where he left personal articles—his keys, wallet, eyeglasses, books, and the like.

Sometimes his habits irritated her, because he would interrupt her in the midst of her work, or some other activity, demanding that she find something for him. If she didn’t leap to his aid, he became quite upset.

“I’m married to a large child,” she sometimes said, in a tone of bemused resignation.

Once, to apologize for behaving poorly, Dad typed her this note:

Forgive me, darling, if I’m rash,

If prudence doesn’t prevail—

For I needs must be a man at times;

I needs must be a male.

To this she typed a reply, on the same sheet of paper:

You say you needs must be a man,

You needs must be a male…

Our romance, if you weren’t a man,

Might go a little stale.

In some respects, such as Dad’s dependence upon Mom to find things, it was a symbiotic relationship, with unlike organisms living together. Another aspect of symbiosis lay in her dependence upon him to drive her everywhere she wanted to go. In 1956 she did obtain an Oregon State driver’s license, passing all the tests. Then she didn’t use it, and let it lapse. I hesitate to classify their relationship entirely as symbiotic, or entirely anything else, because no aspect of my parents fits neatly into descriptive niches.

They were each dependent upon the other. Where one had a shortcoming, such as an inability to find things or to drive, the other filled in, and they became a complete organism. Where one needed time to write, the other worked to support the family. Frank and Beverly Herbert were inseparable.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1957, Dad and a photographer friend, Johnny Bickel, went to a wild animal sanctuary near the Green River in Washington State, called Hidden Valley Ranch. The place was run by Georges H. Westbeau and his wife, Margaret. Dad wanted to write a story on the Westbeaus for one of the slick national magazines, and he and Johnny were taking photos. The Westbeaus had a huge lioness called Little Tyke, who was internationally famous since it was a vegetarian and had never eaten meat. It had been featured in a film documentary and bestselling book, Little Tyke. The grounds of the compound were lovely, with a pond, rich foliage and exotic birds, including peacocks and swans.

At dinner, Georges Westbeau spoke of his famous lioness, who had died a short time before. He told of advertising for a caretaker one time, and a young couple called. Westbeau forgot to tell them about the lioness. As the couple came up the walkway, the man carrying a baby, Little Tyke appeared suddenly and bounded toward them. The woman ran away, screaming. The man followed close behind, but not before dropping the baby on the ground in the path of the lioness. Little Tyke only licked the child’s face, but the couple did not get the job.

I visited Hidden Valley Ranch once with my parents, and heard another story. One of Georges Westbeau’s favorite tricks was to have an uninformed visitor sit on Little Tyke’s couch in the sun room of the house, a room that looked out upon the pond. At first the animal took the balance of the couch, right next to the visitor. But gradually she nudged the person more and more, until she had the whole couch and the visitor was on the floor.

Dad’s feature about Hidden Valley Ranch didn’t sell, but late in 1957 and early in 1958, his science fiction short stories began taking hold again. Three would be published in 1958: “Old Rambling House” (Galaxy, April), “You Take the High Road” (Astounding Science Fiction, May), and “A Matter of Traces” (Fantastic Universe, November).

“Old Rambling House” reflected our itinerant lifestyle and Dad’s hatred of the IRS. A young couple, not unlike my mother and father, had grown tired of constantly moving. They decided to purchase a large house. Unfortunately, the house was not what they expected it to be. It transported them to another planet, where they were told that the people who sold them the house were tax collectors. The new owners were expected to fill the vacated positions.

Whenever Grandma and Grandpa Herbert came to visit and stay with us, Babe insisted on cleaning our house. She caught up on all the chores my mother didn’t get around to with her busy schedule. The beds were made with fresh sheets and clean, sweet-smelling blankets. Babe even ironed the sheets.

If Grandma was a neatnik, my father was a beatnik, before the term came into vogue. He was a person leading an alternate lifestyle, without steady employment. Whenever Grandma was around, she always exuded a slight air of disapproval about her son’s lack of gainful enterprise and the way he didn’t live in one place for very long. She and other McCarthys, who classified people in black and white terms, saw him as something of a black sheep who didn’t provide adequately for his family.

One morning Dad was surf casting on the beach near our house at Brown’s Point. He heard a bang, and looked around. A strange man was lurching along the beach, coming toward him. The man had a fedora pulled down over his eyebrows, and wore a ragged tweed trench coat with the collar up so that it covered the lower part of his face, revealing only his eyes. He walked with “a terrible crazy slouch,” in my father’s words, and gripped a .38 caliber pistol in his right hand.

Bang! A bullet hit the sand at water’s edge, well away from Dad. Then another shot rang out, and the man was getting closer.

Calmly, Frank Herbert turned away and cast his line into the surf.

Bang! Bang! Each shot rang out louder than the one before.

When the demented creature was only three feet away, Dad said, without turning, “Hi, Howie. How you been?”

They exchanged profane insults and then had a good laugh.

Dad hadn’t seen Howie in a while, but he explained it this way, “I don’t know why, but the first glance was enough. I knew it was Howie. I knew it was Howie.”

Howie put it this way: “I was trying to give him no place to go but Puget Sound. I wanted him to make a motion for the ocean.”

The men then “yammered and stammered,” as Howie described their playful bantering, and went back in the house.

A little shorter than my father, Howie often wore a dark blue nautical cap. He had a ruddy, square face and intelligent eyes. Of my father’s many male friends, none touched his heart like this one. No matter where we moved or how far away Howie was on a maritime assignment, the men always kept in touch. One time after a separation of a few months Dad sent Howie a telegram that said, “Write, damn it, write, or we’re through, by God, through!”

From a week before the Fourth of July to a week afterward, a man who lived next door to us set off firecrackers and rockets until 10:00 or 11:00 each night. Dad and Howie decided to get even. At 2:00 one morning, they set off thunderous cherry bombs in his front yard, by his bedroom window. Lights went on in the house, and the man ran outside in his underwear. He couldn’t see who was creating the disturbance.

When Dad and Howie saw him outside, they split up. Dad hid behind bushes in the front yard, while Howie went in the backyard and did the same thing. Then Howie shouted, “I got him! Here he is!”

The man ran to the back, whereupon Dad set off cherry bombs in the front yard! Variations on this followed, and they kept the fellow running back and forth in confusion.

By this time I was outside in my pajamas. Seeing Howie sneaking back into our yard, I said, “Hey, that’s you and Dad shooting off firecrackers, huh?”

Howie laughed.

In describing his friend, Howie said, “Frank had an infectious sense of fun.” Unfortunately, my father rarely showed this side to us, his children. If we saw it at all it was as observers, not as participants.

In 1957, Avon paid $1,500 for the paperback rights to The Dragon in the Sea. They would publish it under yet another title, which Dad hated: 21st Century Sub. So, in a short period of time, the same story was serialized as Under Pressure, printed in hardcover as The Dragon in the Sea and in paperback as 21st Century Sub.

When the check for 21st Century Sub arrived, Dad was so pleased that he wanted to take Mom out for a gourmet meal. We didn’t own a vehicle that ran, so Howie loaned Dad his big gray 1949 Chrysler Windsor, a nice two-door car with white sidewalls. Dad and Howie washed and polished the car. At the restaurant, the finest in Tacoma, the valet congratulated my father on owning such a fine automobile. Dad just smiled and handed him a generous tip for the time, five dollars.

Howie and Dad spent a lot of time discussing religion, particularly the mysticism of many faiths and peoples. They drew parallels between Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, the Kabbala of Judaism, the Sufis of Islam, and American Indian beliefs. Howie, half Quileute Indian himself, was at once an intellectual giant and a spiritual man. He spoke for his ancestors and for uncounted future generations, and my father was startled by the message of the people speaking through Howie: “The Earth is dying, it is being misused by non-Indian civilizations that take and do not give.”

In 1958, after being in the U.S. Merchant Marine for years, Howie returned to his Indian reservation at Lapush, Washington, in order to gather legends and songs from the remaining old folks. He had last been there in 1939, and was shocked now to see the damage to the environment. Previously the area had been a verdant primeval forest, thousands of years old, with young and middle-aged trees and old grandfather trees shading the younger ones. There had been so many trees on the reservation that to the young man they had seemed to form a tunnel, with light coming in at the ends. Now, after indiscriminate logging by big timber companies, the area was much different. Howie was saddened, and incensed.

When he visited us at Brown’s Point, he had with him a book entitled Ecology, which had been loaned to him by an Indian friend. The book spoke of the ecological decimation of the planet Earth, and Howie combined this knowledge with what he had seen at Lapush. In a conversation with Dad, Howie told me he said angrily, “They’re gonna turn this whole planet into a wasteland, just like North Africa.”

“Yeah,” Frank Herbert responded. “Like a big dune.”

By the time Dad said this, the elements of his story were coming together. He had in mind a messianic leader in a world covered entirely with sand. Ecology would be a central theme of the story, emphasizing the delicate balances of nature.

Dad was a daily witness to conditions in Tacoma, which in the 1950s was known as one of the nation’s most polluted cities, largely due to a huge smelter whose stack was visible from all over the city, a stack that belched filth into the sky. The air was “so thick you could chew it,” my father liked to quip. The increasing pollution he saw all around him, in the city of his birth, contributed to his resolve that something had to be done to save the Earth. This became, perhaps, the most important message of Dune.

My father would write two great books tracing themselves in varying degrees to conversations with his closest friend, Howie Hansen: Dune (1965) and the poetically written story of Indian rage, Soul Catcher (1972), my father’s only non–science fiction novel.