Frank Herbert Fullerton Archival Audio – Transcripts

Audio

Dated 1980:

Files 1-4: Interview by a Minnesota State University, Mankato academic

Files 5-6: Science Fiction Speech

Files 7-14:  Frank Herbert reads excerpts from ‘Worm of Dune’ (God Emperor of Dune) manuscript with minor commentary to Willis E. McNelly

Files 15-19:  Willis E. McNelly discussion about the Dune universe prior to publication of ‘God Emperor of Dune’ (1981) and ‘The Dune Encyclopedia’ (1984)

Files 20-21:  Frank Herbert question and answer (probably at California State University between 1972 and 1976)

Frank Hebert Masterpost

Transcripts

File 1: Interview by a Minnesota State University, Mankato academic Part 1

Frank Herbert: -in all of these matters that I’ve mentioned here ecology, energy and so on is that we tend to address them in absolute terms, the self sustaining farm, the answer. That’s nonsense, it’s utter- 

Interviewer: Yeah.

FH: -that’s jabberwocky. We didn’t try to take ourselves off the existing energy system, we just tried to dramatically reduce.. our drain on it. If, well 60% of the single family use of energy, single household, ah heats water.

Int: Is that right?

FH: Yeah.

Int: I didn’t realise that.

FH: Yeah very well known fact. 

Int: Is that right.

FH: If you can put.. part of that onto another system say the wind power, with a preheating system so that your cold water draw for your existing hot water systems comes off, has been heated by some other method, brought up to higher temperature, then the existing system does not to have that. But we’re told all kinds of outrageous lies about ‘well we can’t do that because we can’t store it’ and.. all this crap you see, instead of using state of the art.. techniques, technology to lower our drain.. on existing systems, which should put a lot of the capital investment programs of present energy suppliers.. into very serious problems, because we would have to play more for what we get, we’d have to get less and pay more for it. 

Int: Yeah.

FH: See in other words they, they’d go out of business. The alternative is to turn ourselves over to a, a management bureaucracy where we, we put people into positions of power in the management bureaucracy, with the absolute worst selective process that you could possibly get for that, because there’s no way to get them out if they’re no good. And, and, and that’s nowhere to go, that’s even worse you see. 

Int: What what is the way to do it then? just the way you’re doing it here?

FH: Yeah, enough people, we’ve got to do it on an individual basis. If enough people are doing this, the demand is going to go down, dramatically. I expect we will be able to be able to put our wind machine on the market maybe in two years, it’ll.. heat water, heat space, pump, it has several advantages over existing systems, because you’re not going to blow it down as easily, and it will run in a broader spectrum of winds than existing systems, in fact.. you could design this one to run in 100 knot wind and would use 100 knot winds power, you’d be getting the energy out of 100 knot wind.

Int: My that’d be good.

FH: Yeah, which is one of the solutions to the problem you see, and we addressed the problem John and I did, with um… by wiping the slate clean, by saying we don’t know a damn thing about wind machines… So what do we know about movement of air? Well this society has learned a hell of a lot about movement of air since the original windmills back in Holland the vindmill you know?[laughs] and the sophisticated knowledge that we have about air movement.. has direct applications to the design of an efficient system for using that energy. So we came at it from the point of view, and really, started making progress immediately, it was a cut and fit process and there’s been more, more than four years, in testing and rebuilding and what not, spent a hell of a lot of money on it, but I think it was money well spent.

Int: Who is the John by the?

FH: John is John Ottenhiemer, O t t e n h i e n m e r,  he’s my architect who’s designing the house in Hawaii. John was Frank Lloyd Wright’s last personal student, he’s very close, very dear personal friend, and we work well together, we spark off each other.

Int: That’s great just like you do with a poet.

FH: Yeah uh huh. These are things that, that this society, I don’t think the world really understands the strengths of the society we live in. We live in a, in a society that still has a great deal of self starting in it. You don’t know what the hell this society may produce… Does Exxon know that I’m sitting here in my little shop up on the corner of the property, developing something that could cost them one hell of a lot of money? [laughs] they haven’t any idea, you see.

Int: Yeah probably not.

FH: No, but, and of course they think they can address this potential.. via… various control efforts backed by money… but this is, this is the society of the maverick.

Int: Yeah I think ah the surprise is really as you say, hah the thing that gives…. Um a garbage truck.

FH: Yeah.

Int: That gives us the impetus to go on and solve our problems more than almost anything else.

FH: Oh sure, but we’re being told all kinds of outrageous lies about, about energy, we’re being told we can’t do anything about it till we store it all.. we can’t apply any of this technology until we do x or y or possibly even z [laughs] and really absolute.. blathering lies and the people who are saying these things most times know they’re lies, and we are being told these lies by people who are being paid to lie that way for a very good reason.

Int: Yeah they’ve got ah, their investments are all being protected, the same thing you were saying earlier.

FH: Yeah.

Int: It’s matter of security.

FH: Look the way we’re going, we’re investing – ‘investing’ that’s not really the word, in atomic energy for generation of electricity. I’m not against the technology of it, I’m against the human potential, mispotential of it. The real problem is we’re manufacturing targets, in a world society which is becoming increasingly unstable… Potentially this Hanford project over here, has the potential.. of.. making.. billions of dollars of downstream property absolutely useless. One man in a small airplane loaded with homemade explosives could do that. Do we have barrage balloons around that outfit over there? Are we protecting it against this sort of thing? No, because the unimaginative quacks that, that operate these things.. don’t think that’s possible… in fact they would be outraged by my saying this because they would think that my saying it might create it.

Int:Yeah some one would going to do it if.

FH: Yeah that’s bullshit too.

Int: Yeah [laughs] right.

FH: These are unstable times. And when, when we can put ourselves hostage to one kamikaze, and the, and the people who are doing that don’t take that into account… then we are being led very badly.

Int: So with the nuclear fa-, you, you are ah opposed generally to the expansion of the..?

FH: Oh, Bad investment, very bad investment in the first place. The, the very best of these plants are good for no more than about 30 years. Think of the money that goes into ‘em and the other energy, the oil, and coal, and wood, that go into building these things. If the total energy investment plus the management of that then useless real estate.. for 500,000 years, if all of that is put into the accounting book.. they’re a hideous investment.

Int: Yeah that the ah that word ought to get out somehow on that.

FH: I’ve said it many times.

Int: Yeah I know that, someone ought to act on it some how.

FH: Yeah. Why [not stop building them]? hm? Why? Our congress is a captive of these industries… special lobbies have much more influence on what decisions are made by our government than individual needs require. So why should they do it? We have not rocked the boat you see? Sufficiently.

Int: Well maybe science fiction can do that?

FH: Science fiction is a boat rocker…

Int: If the right people would read it.

FH: Oh, more and more people are reading it.

Int: Yeah I think you’re right.

FH: Which is, which is potentially extremely dangerous, I say so in this article. To… political economic power structures as they are, it’s extremely dangerous. The real danger is the growth curve in technology, and nothing is being done to address this, in fact all of the major influences in our society are still going on their merry way, um education in which you are deeply involved, education has a long history of having a kind of a secret underground fight with the family, about who controls the moral direction of the individual, and the education, you know this.

Int: Yeah true.

FH: Yeah and there are lots of things that are done by professional educators.. to convince the children in their custody.. that their families are a pack of jerks that don’t know up from down, you know this, this is true,  and um ah undermining the influence of the family is one of the most dangerous things any society has ever done, and we’re paying the piper right now for a lot of that. Education and the family should have been in cooperation for a long, much longer time. Our mistake is taking it away from local control. 

Int: Yeah.

FH: That was the real mistake. This is my basic objection to federal aid to education… even the state aid to education. I think education, the cost of it, everything, ought to be kept as close to home, and I mean that home in the traditional sense, as possible. Sure we’re going to make mistakes this way, but the basic.. thrust of the society.. the moral structure upon which the society.. performs its other acts.. will remain intact. Now we’ve broken it all up… The ah, the alternatives to this, the powerful centralised control in a society, in a world society, where in increasingly.. violent.. energy is available to smaller and smaller groups, now you recognise this as true don’t you? 

Int: Right

FH: Not only is it available to them, they can originate it. They don’t have to buy it… smaller and smaller groups can originate.. the violent energy. This is the.. blatant and utter assininity of attempts to institute gun control in this country. I’m not speaking out against gun control, I just think that it is a deflection process, it is saying, ‘oh if we only do this we will solve our problem,’ you see? And it deflects our attention.. away from things that we ought to be addressing. If we were to put in a Sullivan law.. let’s say as good as the one in New York City which is a joke [laughs], I mean the most powerful Sullivan law or gun control law in the world is the Sullivan law, in New York. There are more guns, more handguns, per capita in New York city than in any other like city in the world. But aside from that.. public law joke, um if we were to institute a real gun control law which actually.. was effective, it would do very little, because anybody who wanted to be violent could stop off at the grocery store, the hardware store, and the drug store and come home and make something with potentially far more potential destructiveness, than, than a handgun and could do it quickly, in an afternoon. I could, I could make a pipe bomb out of things that are readily available, and cannot be controlled, out of.. thirty or forty different substances, which are common on the, on the market.

Int: The answer them to ah get back in the heart of the family as away of controlling.

FH: The family ought to be responsible for the behaviour of its members, it always was, before we started this, down this road. And now we, now we see, we’re turning back when it’s too late and saying to Carter you’re responsible for Billy [laughs].

Int: Well that fits in maybe what you were saying in Dune as well about diversity as being important ah.. the idea, since every family has its own particular moral ah attitude and so you’re going to have a, a mixture of what people might think might be right.

FH: Yes but if-

Int: It’s not going to be a uniformity of moral values.

FH: But, if you have some, a basic structural agreement which says that you don’t destroy your neighbour, let’s bring it down to really nitty gritty, and if the entire society has this basic agreement, and if it acts.. in a screening.. process way… to make sure that this is way, the way things flow, this is the flow pattern of the society, then.. then we’re on a far safer course given the other things that are happening, in our world, than we are now, you see? Now I’m not saying bring back capital punishment, but I recognise the thrust towards capital punishment, for what it is, for the unconscious elements behind it, in fact this a whole new field which we are not addressing as a people. I don’t think I’m alone in it, but I, I see very little being done in this field, it is applying the.. the techniques, the leverage of psycho- of psychology and psychoanalysis, to the behaviour of societies as a whole, you see what I’m saying?

Int: Yeah it’s sort of ah the idea of ah Leto having in himself, a represent- as an individual representing a whole society then you could treat the whole society as an individual in that respect.

FH: Yes that’s right, and societies as a whole are addressed this way. The advertising nibbles at the fringes with this technique, you see? Political advisors do the same thing, very high powered political advisors do this. Major advisors to major industry, people who detect the problems, the psychological problems which may arise because of decisions which industry makes, and advises the individual industry on a stance to take to meet this problem. This is the, these are the limitations of how this is applied right now, we ought to be applying it generally to government and our sense of what it is to be governed and to associate as individuals and as a society with what we call a government… you see?

Int: Yeah.

FH: Am I making myself clear or am I being too general?

Int: No I guess the thing i was wondering about is if if the ah, if we don’t have any kind of central authority or any um ah.. say education doesn’t apply any kind of common ah value system but each family applies it own um..

FH: Well we tend to be doing it with words.. you see? Words are not all that important. It’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say but it’s true. People learn much more by example. I think that Richard Nixon did this country an enormous favour. No really, I’m serious.

Int: I see what you mean.

FH: Yeah, Nixon I think was created.. as much by the people who opposed him as by the people who promoted him. I don’t think there was any moment in history when Nixon got up some morning and twirled his mustachios and said, ‘today I vill do an evil thing’ [laughs].

No this is, that’s that’s not the way it happened. The society created him, and there were certain forces exerted on him by the society, those forces originated in people who opposed him, and with people who supported him. Now those are shaping forces.

Int: What, what are some of those then?

FH: I’ll give you a paramount one. There was no time in Nixon’s life when.. he could stand up and say ‘I was a klutz’.

Int: [Laughs] Yeah.

FH: You know and still maintain the power.

Int: Yeah yeah.

FH: We paint them into a corner. I think I may very well vote for Carter, not because I think he is the greatest thing that ever happened, but because he is the first president, in my lifetime.. who has ever stood up there and said, ‘No excuse I just blew it’.

Int: [laughs yeah] that’s refreshing alright.

FH: Refreshing hell [laughs], it is ah it is an example of honesty which we ought to reward some way. Instead people are leaning towards these, these demagogues, Kennedy my god, an absolutely amoral person, who lies and cheats, I’ll say it, I’ll say it right on tape and you can print it, he’s a liar and cheater…  and has been proven to be, but because he has good advisors who tell him what people want to hear and he can mouth these things that his advisors tell him, he is in a position of power.

Int: …Yeah.

FH: And Anderson’s no better. Anderson is a demagogue cut out of the same kind of cloth, a little bit, in some ways a little bit slicker, but the demagoguery is there you have to just see him on tv and there it is. And good god Raygun [laughs] I mean.. shoot from the hip! [laughs]

Int: I hadn’t heard that Raygun. 

FH: No, no, please no. [laughs]

Int: Ah what is going to happen anyway?

FH: Reagan may very well make it. 

Int: Interesting.

FH: Oh yeah. I, I think that the safest thing that, the best thing that could happen to the country is to have four more years of Carter. We’ve had him in training there for four years now [laughs], and maybe he’s learned a few things, and he has this other saving grace. He’s not afraid to stand up there and say, ‘Well.. yeah, I made a mistake’.

Int: Yeah that seems to be, as you said, the thing that Nixon just couldn’t do, he, he never did do it. 

FH: Hell, Nixon couldn’t do it, Johnson couldn’t do it, Roosevelt couldn’t do it, Kennedy couldn’t do it. I don’t know of a president in my lifetime who could do it… And it is a failure you see, because the the, and the failure comes out of the seeking for a leader, a charismatic leader.

Int: One who, who is absolute and doesn’t make any mistakes.

FH: Oh yeah – where do we find him? The danger is in following, in massive following, of such a leader, cause he’s gonna make human mistakes, but he’s going to make them for millions of us.

Int: And not admit it.

FH: That’s right. This is the danger of the bureaucracy, the primary problem of a bureaucracy such as we have, is that it covers up it’s mistakes… most frequently covers them up until it’s too late to do anything about them… that’s deadly.

Int: Now that seemed to be what ah Nixon was doing and ah well in the Billy Carter case now, ah Carter seems to be.. trying to avoid covering it up. 

FH: Yeah his, his response is very refreshing, the minute a new ah, a new problem comes up he just.. lays it all out on the table and says ‘here’s, here are the, are the cables, red state department cables, what do you make of these?’ [laughs] Isn’t that refreshing?

Int: Who could of predicted the Billy Carter? [laughs]

FH: Oh for god sakes.

Int: That’s a surprise. 

FH: No, I think that the, the psychoanalyst who got on the Today Show the other day and said he was unconsciously trying to shoot down his brother is absolutely right.

Int: [Laughs] Could be

FH: Oh yeah, there’s sibling rivalry here.

Int: Yeah.

FH: And Billy is much more like their father.

Int: I’d never heard anything about the father.

FH: Oh the old man I guess was a real tobacco spitting redneck.

Int: Is that right?

FH: Oh yeah. And Jimmy is a sophisticated gentleman beside him, but Billy’s cut out of the same cloth.

Int: That’ll be interesting.

FH: And and, and still, you know there is a family bond there which you only have to, you can only admire. Jimmy says yeah I, I love my brother… you know in spite of all this crap, coming now. You don’t mind your friends and you don’t go with your friends because of their faults, you go with them becau- in spite of their faults. This is a human, a very strong human characteristic, and a humanising thing.

Int: Yeah I think that um… one of the things about your book series, the characters in them do.. demonstrate faults and weaknesses and so on.

FH: Oh yeah, and they… I set up Paul Muad’dib.. precisely.. to create a charismatic leader that everyone could admire, for good reason, who would make… decisions.. with consequences.. were very painful for many many people. That’s the way it happens. People didn’t like that in Dune Messiah, you see? Which is a pivotal book, that’s all one book of course, but that’s that’s pivotal. It is ah, what happens in a fugue when it turns over that‘s why I, I used that, that angle on it.

Int: Yeah the thing I worry a little bit about the movie, the, the, will be um, for example are there, are the other stories going to come into the movie later or not?

FH: If, if the first one is successful we’ll do ‘em all.

Int: Yeah, I think it’s important that they all be there.

FH: I agree, but ah.. here we go.

Int: How’s the deadline, or timeline, coming on that?

FH: I expect we may very well have something that you could sit down and look at in ‘82 but I’ll believe it when I sit in that theatre and they start rolling the credits.

Int: It’s going to be exciting, people are really looking forward to it.

FH: Oh I know, a big built in audience there. What else is on your platter there?

Int: Okay I.

FH: Moving right along.

Int: In fact you have ah, and my tape is still going there, we’ve we’ve covered a lot of things just naturally flowing in, one into the other.

FH: Yeah.

Int: Politics and ah energy and ecology, ah religion was a question on international relations I guess maybe.. I ah, we can weave some politics into that easily too [muffled].

FH: Well I’ll, I’ll address international relations first and we’ll come back to religion. 

Int: Okay.

FH: Number one this is going to surprise a lot of people but I do not believe in world government. I think world government is extremely dangerous, because it would tend to have a powerful and centralised single force directing everything we do. And.. to my way of looking at things that’s not survival. I think we’ve got to get off this planet, we have all our eggs, literally, in one basket… and I’m, I have been addressing myself all along to our descendants. I feel.. as though I am one of the few champions of our descendants, who- are alive in the world. I don’t hear many people addressing themselves to the ongoing thrust of humankind. We are a, a species which has the potential.. of being immortal, the species has. I think what a marvelous idea that 100,000 years from now there would be descendants of ours who would be alive; enjoying their lives.. because we had solved the survival problems of our time.

Int: Yeah I, I can remember a title from an old book of Norman Cousins ‘Who Speaks for Man?’

FH: Yeah.

Int: Nobody it seems, now maybe you are doing that.

FH: I feel that I am. We have to address ourselves to these v- to the various elements of this problem. One of our strengths is in our differences… No perfect view.. of what is required for human survival exists. I don’t think there’s any individual has it. I certainly do not claim it. What I do claim is that if we can maintain our diversity… and harness the destructiveness in it… to get us off this planet, and scattered… we’ve done what I would hope to achieve… you see?

Int: The melting pot idea you don’t ah like particularly?

FH: Oh I think we have to come back and, like this, but I, I like to see the scattering, because that’s a protective thing. As far as a world government is concerned, the danger in world government is the delay time.. between the directive and the action. It’s as though you were driving an automobile, in which there were a five minute delay, between when you turned the steering wheel and the front wheels responded.

Int: [laughs] It’d be a bit awkward huh?. 

FH: Awkward hell you’d be in the ditch right away, you know you would.

Int: Sure.

FH: And this is the nature of government today, it’s one of the major problems of all governments, even a federal government such as we have. Now the strong, so-called strong central government as a matter of fact we do not have a strong central government in the sense that I’m talking about. Our strength would be.. in having the government much closer to home, the major influence of government much closer to home, so we see.. what the.. consequences are, we know what, who, who created those consequences, and we can deal with those consequences on a very quick, a very responsive, local basis. We’re likely to have-find that but we’re likely to find it in a much different way. We’re likely to go back to a kind of a distorted and amplified Western six-gun world. We’re headed that way right now. If a single individual, or just say two individuals. A biochemist and a pharmacist let’s say, in Brazil, can put um most of the world at hazard… with recombinant DNA, and that’s what’s available now…. Most people are worried about atomic war, that doesn’t worry me.. very much at all. Enough of us would survive an atomic war… that the human race would go on, maybe having learned something. Biochemical warfare however, has the potential of destroying everyone and everything.

Int: So there’s the real danger.

FH: It’s a real danger, indeed it is. And it can be, you see, it is the economy of it.

You can get into recombinant DNA right now for around $25,000… crudely but effectively.

Int: That’s frightening.

FH: Isn’t it though hm? I always keep tabs on how much it costs, what investment, what’s the basic investment you need, to do a certain thing. Good god explosives, which we were discussing a moment ago, they are really so cheap… if you know the chemistry… that ah it’s a wonder… if we really lived in the kind of world that some people say we did, it’s a wonder we haven’t blown ourselves up already.

Int: I suppose that’s right

FH: I mean with ah with things like hydrogen peroxide, or nitrogen fertilizer and ah and diesel oil, with these things, with iodine for example, um ah with these things available to us or ah or in the marketplace, or to go out and get ‘em, steal them even, as explosive, as the basis for an explosive, ah sugar…

File 2: Interview by a Minnesota State University, Mankato academic Part 2

FH: The problem using chemical fertilisers is that these fertilisers come.. from an energy resource which is vanishing. And we are building.. a population onto that pyramid, that inverted pyramid.. that’s a real danger.

Int: Yeah.

FH: There’s a lot of profit in it, quick profit, and the people who are behind it think they can get in and get out safely. Well they may be be able to get in and get out safely, but I doubt it, in the, especially in the kind of world we’re entering. You don’t, in this kind of world, you do not build up.. long term.. senses of injustice, and resentment. You do not um.. imagine ..that you can control those things forever… Nobody is safe in, in that kind of a world. However I think there is more goodwill in this world than people really give us credit for having. We haven’t blown ourselves.

Int: Not yet something is keeping us.

FH: Yeah, um the potential is there but we’re not doing it. There are incidences of violence yes, insane activity. We see whole nations go insane, on occasion. But by and large we tend to keep this in check.

Int: Maybe this would be a chance to comment on the Iranian hostage situation?

FH: A completely mismanaged thing from start to finish, we haven’t seen the finish of it of course. Our state department, and the advisors to the president came into this, without the first understanding of the psychology.. of the Iranians, about the influence of religion and their history upon their attitudes, the screening process.. through which they see reality – hope you hear the quotes on reality. Every society, every individual, screens for a personal reality. There is no universal reality. This is especially true when you get diversity such as..  we see existing between Iran and the U.S.. In the first place, Iranian history.. has conditioned people there, to think of themselves as the core of insiders, who the picture that comes to mind is the old wagon trails where they circle up and face the enemy outside. This is the, the basis for Iranian psychology, I’m oversimplifying, but but this is strong there, so that anything you do to threaten makes the cohesive core stronger. You do not offer violence to that kind of society. Think of their history, they have had a history which has, has strongly imbued them with the attitude, they have a religion which reinforces it. They are the holders of the truth… the pure light, right out of Zarathustra [laughs], Thus spake [laughs]. And the enemy Shaitan is all around… and everything we do that portends violence against them perpetuates that, strengthens it. The only way to really address this.. is to.. offer them no violence in any way shape or form and go around the world beating your breast, loudly, saying they have enslaved our people, over there. Really. And slavery cannot survive.

Int: That would go against their religious beliefs too.

FH: Oh yes. You cannot create right by doing wrong.

Int: And ah public pressure then maybe would be.

FH: Oh the, we could turn most of the world against them if we, if we orchestrated it correctly. And this again comes to this psychology of large societies that I’ve been.. addressing earlier, you see? You understand.. the stance.. required.. by the way they view reality.

Int: Did ah in doing the Dune books for example ah what about Arab ah the arab psychology that seems to be reflected through ah as you read?

FH: Oh I I based, I, I spent years studying Arab history, and Arab culture, and Arab language… Islam was one of the major research projects in my study of comparative relgions to find the.. the the the thrust of the religions, the the flow of them, where are they coming from and where are they going? What detritus have they picked up? What strengths have they picked up from other sources?

Int: When did, this study of comparative religions was this ah a project you picked up on your own as you did with psychology?

FH: Yes.

Int: And ah studied it ah, did you have any particular?

FH: I knocked on doors. Yeah, I went to theologians I got reading lists, I read, um… and I looked into everything that I could find from Zen to ah, to witch cults.

Int: The um.. the Arabian um, I’m trying to think of the name of the book that Fred Manferd ah read a lot ah Doughty Doughty it was by it was by Doughty. 

FH: Oh ‘Travels in Arabian Deserta’.

Int: Yeah. 

FH: Yes oh yes.

Int: Have you read that?

FH: Oh indeed I have.

Int: I wondered if you had, it’s one of his favourite books.

FH: Yeah of course. Oh indeed, a marvellous book, um because it was so naïvely.. candid, and-

Int: I haven’t read I going to have to get it.

FH: Oh you must get a copy of it and read it.

Int: Yeah, I will.

FH: …Yeah but I ah I, I did such things as going to book auctions where libraries were sold out. I went to a ah a seminary one time where they were selling out their library and bought more than 400 books… some of them I got for 10 cents, a quarter, a dollar, and I just went in and we hauled away in the car, you know [laughs] loaded the springs were grinding. I didn’t read them all, I would cull through them for what I wanted and then I got rid of the ones I ah, I didn’t use, but I, I read ah, in that particular instance that I’m talking about, I read 3/4ths of them anyway. And some of them are stuff that’s been out of print for years…. marvellous things such as an early study of the ah, the ah the lifestyle of muslim women by a woman.

Int: My goodness.

FH: Done in the 1870s… resource material you just.. couldn’t imagine you see.

Int: This was all ahead of Dune?

FH: Oh yeah, ahead, ahead of Dune itself. You know you say Dune, I think of those books, as you well know, as one book.

Int: Yeah.

FH: And ah… 

Int: I’ll, maybe I should treat them as one in my, in my.. presentation. I, I’m still bothered about, they did want a summary of some kind on these and um… I, the summary.

FH: Go to Cliffsnotes [laughs]

Int: I’ve, I’ve been making one myself sort of as I go along. The summary.. ah gets in the way sometimes ah, you have to get through that before you can say anything about it.

FH: Yeah the summary doesn’t also, does not supply ah, the colour.

Int: Yeah right, that’s true and that’s one of the problems i’ve been trying to avoid somewhat. But also the ah Twain people say a lot of people are going to read this book that haven’t read all of the Dune, all of the ah Herbert books anyway. 

FH: That, that’s certainly true.

Int: And it ought to be useful to them too, and it ought to maybe entice them to read them. Anyway I’ve got to do that one way or another, and the, the trick will be to blend them in nicely so it isn’t just a block of summary.

FH: Yeah.

Int: and ah you can.. ah I haven’t quite figured out how to do that though. Anyway I’m working on it.

FH: Maybe it can be done by the subject matter headings?

Int: Yeah ah.

FH: I don’t know how but ah.. that, that’s popped in my head.

Int: A thing I’ll work out asI go through. Well religion ah where do you come from in your own background any particular?

FH: Roman Catholic.

Int: Maybe I said this before I don’t know but I. 

FH: We backslid early. I rebelled.. against.. um the.. the exclusivity.. of faith.. um any kind of faith, I don’t like the exclusivity of scientific faith, of religious faith.. any of this. I think it tends to lead to fanaticisms and all of the.. evils attendant there to.

Int: That sounds a little bit like Whitman too; you know he says I belong to them all.

FH: Yeah all or none.

Int: Yeah.

FH: Any.. any set of assumptions that we follow, whether we call them scientific assumptions.. or religious assumptions, if you trace them back to their roots, and start weeding off everything you see now what is below that and what is below that, eventually you get to something.. which you have to say.. you have to address that, that something this way you have to say ‘I believe that because I believe it’. That’s faith.

Int: Leap of faith yeah

FH: That’s faith. And science is no different from religion in this respect. There are things that we believe about science that we cannot prove… and what is this belief other than faith?

Int: That’s right, yeah.

FH: Part of this comes from a dependency on absolutes. Most of science, or much of science, I don’t know, I hesitate to say most, but much of science, observedly.. has not recognised the revolution implicit in Heisenberg and Einstein… that we live in a relativistic universe… where any absolute is a local phenomenon… has to be.

Int: ‘Eyes of Hesieinberg’.

FH: Yeah uh huh… Yeah I, I come at this from many angles, the core of, of the scientific dependency on the single law which will.. prove everything…. I think that’s horse pucky.

Int: Well ah.

FH: I think that’s a blinder that hides many things from us. You were about to say I interrupted.

Int: Well I, I was going to go off on a, I was reminded ah of another thing I wanted to do ah before we quit here and that’s ah and just ah, I thought I might on two books of yours next ah before I see you again I’m sure, ah just ah.. Santaroga Barrier for one.

FH: Oh yeah.

Int: And ah one of the things I mentioned in the letter that I need to do is somehow tie the book to your own personal experience and life at that time, ah and the ideas involved in it – how did that come in. Ah for example the um.. relationship between Dune and Santaroga Barrier and the spice and the ah [muffled]. Is there any tie in somehow that I should..?

FH: Well… 

Int: I mean- 

FH: There, there, of course there are tie ins out of my beliefs about these things. I’m, I am not a drug user in that sense you see, I don’t believe in these things. I think they are crippling, they either are crutches.. or cripplers. But our society has not addressed itself to the real nature of drug dependency… Which is.. how much are you willing to pay for it? Now we’ve, we’ve had an association with an extremely potent drug for a long time – whiskey, or alcohol…. such that we are really almost acclimated to it I think as a, as a species. We tend to weed out the ones who can’t deal with it. I would love to see a, in fact I may even do this some, sometime for a short story, a long term study of the um the screening effect of drinking and fast driving, what it weeds out of the s- out of the soci- out of the genetic base of the society you see [laughs], increasing reaction time you see. [laughs again]

Int: Pretty good.

FH: But ‘Santaroga Barrier’ began.. as a study of utopia, or and, and/or dystopia, and the design of the book was such that I was building a ah a copper dam in the stream, which  would divide the stream equally, about half the people reading it would think,  according to my plan, they’d think that I’d talk about a utopia and about would think that I, that it was a dystopia. And according to my fan mail I was extremely successful in this at least.

Int: Yeah I found that to be true too, I’ve taught it in a couple classes.

FH: But that was the design of the book, it was Lady or the Tiger, and I was with malice of forethought, I wanted to put people into that flow of, of utopia/dystopia in such a way that they came out with a different view of what we mean when we say utopia/dystopia… which is.. my utopia can be your dystopia. Yeah, I see all kinds of very very famous people, including a very famous psychologist.. Skinner.. who have missed the boat on this. They don’t spot this. Skinner is standing there beating his breast and saying ‘I want this kind of a universe or this kind of a world because this is the kind of the world in which I feel safe.’

Int: Yeah, yeah that’s his problem all the way through.

FH: That indeed that is his problem all the way through, even from the Skinner box, from the Skinner box on.. that is Skinner’s problem. But of course he is in a sense an unconscious demagogue because he is, he is… saying things that people say ‘oh yeah I like that, that sounds good’ but he doesn’t.. skid off into the exterior darkness of what he portrays.

Int: It’s a little bit what happens in Dune when you’re reading that too, that’s why I worry a little bit about having of the first book because  you you go along with it so well, that 

FH: By design I want you to.

Int: And you think geez haha this is wonderful ah I.. and then you get that turnaround as you’re going through the books, and that’s important.

FH: They get the power. The good guys get the power.

Int: Yeah and it’s ah it’s it’s really a interesting experience for the reader I think to, to find himself ah forced to back out and look again.

FH: Routing for the wrong side [laughs].

Int: Right, exactly so. Hah What’s the matter with her [muffled] 

FH: Yeah.

Int: -but I hope the ah, there, I notice in going through this again, you did ah give a lot of ah lead in to hints as to um how this was gonna maybe.

FH: Oh I well telegraphed the punch all the way along.

Int: Yeah and the movie may do that too so the.

FH: Yeah.. um.. well anyway does that answer your, your question about Santaroga?

Int: Yeah, sort of I ah, where, where were you living at the time that you wrote that? I, these are very mundane questions.

FH: San Francisco.

Int: In San Francisco and ah.

FH: Yeah, San Francisco.

Int: It came out of ah any particular experience in your own life ah?

FH: I’m thinking, I’m trying to think about that – was it San Francisco…? Yeah, in part, part of it. Ah experience out of my own life? No, I’ve ah..

Int: Oh yeah, I’m just thinking where did the idea come from?

FH: Well necessarily in my reading I’ve had, done a lot of reading about utopias right back to Thomas More.

Int: Oh you did, you did say, okay right.

FH: Yeah, where we got the word…. and.. my approach.. has always been to go beyond the paradox. To my way of thinking a paradox is merely a finger pointing at something beyond it. Any time you encounter a paradox, you should look beyond it, you should say ah you should say to yourself that paradoxes don’t really exist… so this is a, this is a screen hiding something else – so what’s beyond this? And I’ve applied all of these… leverages, these tools I’ve acquired along the way, some of them.. poor but my own, country things you might say [laughs], to try to get an insight into these things and what’s really going on there – where does this originate? What is the myth of the Holy Grail? And what happens when you get the hot thing in your hands you see?

Int: Well the jaspers and the spice ah are related though, so I understand, you were working those two ideas in both books.

FH: Well the jaspers.. was a um a unifying.. substance.. introduced.. for, for that unification, and the unification of course as you probably have observed occurs in the collective unconscious.

Int: Right.

FH: Yeah but it, but it, it was glue you might say.

Int: I thought I would work on ah ‘Soul Catcher’ too ah, this summer yet, um I was wondering um why you you decided to do that book or how the idea-

FH: Well you realise don’t you that I grew up with Coast Salish Indians, they were my playmates in childhood some of them.

Int: Yeah you mentioned that to me last time.

FH: Well I had this thing simmering in me for a long time… the wish to do the definitive Indian book, I kind of looked at myself as a, as the white expert on these particular Indians you see… which was horseshit really, [laughs] there is no such thing. So I set out.. to write the book and I wrote it, and in the process I was teaching at the Udub[W – University of Washington] at the time, and I was also helping with in a thing called the ‘Plunge’ over there which was educating in a very fast educational process, over a weekend, freshman to what.. college is really about what, university is, what is a university? and what do you do to survive in this thing? And in the process we were leapfrogging; one time I would be part of the staff, next time I had to go in and whatever was done to the freshman was done to me. Good educational communications process by the way I recommend it highly.

Int: Yeah I was thinking we could use that back where I’m haha teaching.

FH: Yeah, and… one of times when I was having it done to me, we had a Aleut Indian woman came in, her name was Max Franklin, and Max ah.. I won’t go into details cause it’d take too long, but Max  designed and had perpetrated upon us.. ah a dirty shuck which made us mad as hell… and then she quietly said, ‘Why are you angry? You just had this happen to you.. once. Indians had it happen to them every day of their lives’. And I realised that for just a few minutes I had felt.. toward Max and the rest of the staff, the way a lot of Indians must feel towards the dominant white culture, and I went back and, to this completed novel and read it, and it was horseshit from beginning to end.

Int: Hah is that right?

FH: Oh yeah, I burned it. 

Int: Oh.. my goodness. 

FH: I would didn’t, I didn’t want to take a chance on any of the crap getting out. And I sat down and wrote the book again, and that’s what you have in ‘Soul Catcher’. I had all of the necessaries, one of my close friends, closest friends in fact, the man who was, um best man when Bev and I were married, was one of the last people trained as a shaman by one of the Coast tribes… and I grew up with what you might call the anthropology, I think it’s a shucky word but I’ll use it, of the Coastal Indians as a natural thing rather than being a voyeur, the white observer, um it just happened, it was there and you absorbed it you see? and so I had a lot of accurate things.. come acr- across my purview, because they just happened in my presence. And that’s what I tapped, finally, after I got that terrible screen off my.. glasses, of, of the white expert on Indians and had to, got rid of that. That’s what I tapped, and um the, and ‘Soul Catcher’, then became.. a collision.. between two mythologies, two… ultimately incompatible mythologies – the Greco-Roman Western mythology and the mythology which was.. indigenous to this continent… not identical by the way across the continent but having similar aspects all across the continent.

Int: Well I noticed that ah when you were out in Missouri you said that was one, your favourite book, somebody asked you what was your favourite book.

FH: Yeah that ah, that book.. really.. tapped.. rather…. root information that was in me, and, and expressed it the way I wanted to express it, and accomplished what I wanted to accomplish.

Int: Well it’s a powerful book, I’ve used it in classes, students like it, they really respond to it.

FH: I had, we’ve, we’ve tried to deal on a movie with this, there’s some bidding on right now, two, two groups trying to get it. One Indian group, that I’m, I’m afraid might use it as agitprop and that would be a mistake. And another group that I don’t know, I have to find out yet, whether they would treat it with the sensitivity that I would want. But.. I’ve had, we went into some movie.. negotiations on it earlier and the big thing then was how you change the ending. It can have no other ending.

Int: Yeah it’s gotta be that way.

FH: Course it does. The boy has to steal.. the ah, Katsuk’s mana, and then the mana has to be, has to emerge free floating for anybody to grab, and that has to be the destructive thing.. that occurs at the end.

Int: [muffled]. When we’re ah speaking of Missouri I, I heard afterwards that you and Robert Bly had ah some words or something, what was that about?

FH: Oh.. Bly is my idea.. of the ultimate blindness.. that comes from believing all of your own assumptions without questioning them.

Int: Yeah I think you’re right about that.

FH: Um..

Int: But what was he objecting to?

FH: Oh he was objecting to my talking about the craft of writing, in rather pragmatic terms, as though it didn’t come off cloud nine. And you can approach it from any direction, but that’s one valid approach.

Int: Sure 

FH: … and…. He also objected, rather strenuously, when I started taking on liberalism, because I have a standard approach to the extremes, I say that scratch a liberal and you’ll find a closet aristocrat, and you scratch a conservative and you’re going to find somebody who prefers any yesterday over any tomorrow. This is very imbalanced you see, and we, somewhere along the line, he said ah, I-I re- I popped out with a cliche answer to.. something he had said, he says, ‘That’s a cliche’, and I said, ‘Well when I get this kind of repetitive horseshit… thrown at me – a cliche is all it deserves’ [laughs], and he got a little upset by that… [continues laughing] and he started raising his voice and interrupting me when he would say things and wouldn’t give me a chance to answer, and finally I told him, I, I turned on him I said, ‘Shut up’… he looked at me like this and I said, ‘Well…’ I said, ‘I have been very patient. I’ve sat here and listened to you and didn’t interrupt.. when you were speaking. Now, I want you to return.. that favour to me, that’s called courtesy in case you never discovered this [laughs].

Int: Were you speaking at the time?

FH: Oh yeah, no, we were, we were, in a, in a, in a, a private group..

Int: Oh I see.

FH: -in a, in a home, a lot of people round staring at the thing [laughs]. So ah I’m afraid that ah, that Bly got extremely upset with me and ah um, I, I just the older I get the less of this nonsense I, I tolerate. He is locked in, and won’t question any assumption. I’m willing to question any of my assump- my assumptions, trot it out and we’ll, we’ll have a look at it, I’ll present you the arguments that go behind my assuming this, but they are assumptions you see? And assumptions are really a kind of malleable things, you move em around if you recognise what they are.

Int: Yeah they’re, they’re dangerous if you don’t do that.

FH: Oh you bet they are, and ah Bly has this.. quality of being locked in, and really not assuming that he has assumptions if you like [laughs].

Int: Yeah. Of course.

FH: Otherwise I rather like the guy, he’s he’s ah a very fine poet, and ah and is no more, in some respects, no more reasonably nutty than the rest of us, but ah, but he does.. spout.. this particular.. cloud nine.. academy oriented-

Int: Yeah you’re, you’re right, I think you’re right.

FH: -point of view, um and academies are dangerous, you’ll find out what I say about them in there. I really take ‘em on in that article.

Int: Good I’m anxious to read that.

FH: Yeah.

Int: Ah one other point I just noticed there that I didn’t get to ah had to do generally with your, ah your introduction to the science fiction genre did you read it as a kid.. a lot or when did you really ah?

FH: I started reading it in I would say… oh ‘47, ‘48 somewhere in there, I wasn’t ver- early on as a kid, oh I read.. a few comic books, you know I saw Buck Rogers ah that sort of thing. But um, but I wasn’t really caught by it until somewhere along in the latter part of the 40’s,  when I really started to get hot to want to write myself in a different category, and I saw something about it that I don’t think a lot of people had observed at that time, and that is that it was absolutely open ended. There are no restrictions on it at all. You can play god, you can, you can create a universe, a world… populate it with anything you choose, to tell.. any kind of a story you want. My god what an open end for a, for a fertile imagination [laughs].

Int: Ah, the ah.. I don’t know what you would call the group ah, from New York, like Asimov and Poul and all of those, do you ever-

FH: Oh I know them.

Int: Do you know them very well or..?

FH: Oh I, I wouldn’t say I know Asimov very well, I know  Fred Poul pretty well…. I think.. that Poul, Fred Poul and I have argued this before and you’ll see me addressing that argument in there, I don’t address him by name but, um I think that a lot of the.. literary establishment, in New York, has caught the.. literary establishment disease.

File 3: Interview by a Minnesota State University, Mankato academic Part 3

Int: Well that will help me a little bit to.. remember everything.

FH: Okay well what’s on your mind?

Int: Well ah… Do you have any ah, kind of materials I mentioned in the letter I think ah, like I used with that book, ah when you write book do, is your manuscript kept? and do you have notes that ah one could look at or not? That’d be, if you want ah anyone to do that kind of.

FH: Well all of that stuff is sent down to University of California.. to the library at um um.. 

Bev Hervert: Fullerton

FH: Fullerton, Fullerton.

BH: At California State University.

FH: Yes California State.

Int: Do you, is it in a archives there around some [unclear]

FH: Yeah, completely accessible.

Int: It’s accessible alright. Ok that’s the thing I need to know, ah I can find.

FH: That’s where it is. Um when I get through, when I’m through with a project or the sequels to it…  I sent the material down. I do not talk about work in progress because you use the same energies – to talk about that, which you use to put on the paper, and I’m very jealous of these energies.. um and right now I’m doing a sequel to Dune.

Int: Oh hahaha that’s exciting.

FH: But ah, it’s coming back.. more than 3000 years after.. the events of the trilogy.

Int: Oh well, too bad you can’t talk about it [laughs].

FH: I’m sorry.

Int: It’s fine.

FH: When it’s done. Sometime this next year.

Int: Well ah the material that you have down at ah Fullerton is ah, manuscript material you have reviews or anything like that in there – what kind of materials there?

BH: I have reviews.

FH & Int: [Talking over each other] You have reviews. Yeah

BH: What sort of reviews would you want?

Int: Well, I’m not familiar with ah, what kind of reviews, um might have come out with your books ah when they were published in paperback first um.

BH: I [muffled] review styles by books.

Int: Do you? 

BH: Yes.

Int: Is that available somehow so I could get xerox copies or something like that?

BH: I can, I can show it to you, the ah. I, I could copy some.

FH: We have a copy machine.

Int: Oh you do, well fine yes that would be very helpful I think ah. One of the things they wanted in that book anyway, was some kind of.. indication of the reception of the book when it came out, and I did a very brief summary for it, the books that [unclear]

FH: Well you know, don’t you, that Dune… was pretty well panned.. by the critics.

BH: and/or reviewer

FH: and, and/or reviewer, and the reviews… by the critics when it first emerged, yeah. Not only that but some quite important editors… turned it down.

Int: Is that right?

FH: Oh yes. We have some, we have a marvellous collection of letters.

Int: Oh well, that would be exciting to see, I think, if I can look at some of them.

BH: You won’t have much time, you’ll have to look at them, cause I’ve gotta get them out, get ready and get ‘em.

Int: Well I don’t need to do it, I’m, I’m really trying to find out what is available and-

FH: He’s exploring..

Int: -I’ll be out again, ah my daughter works ah lives at the University of Washington, lives there actually I guess but, she in her phd program, and is taking her ah general exam to get in [muffled] in April, and we get out most every summer.. too, so ah, ah I’ve gotta about a two year.. span here, ah deadline, before I get the manuscript done, so I have, have some time.

FH: Okay, that’s fine. Bev and I right now.. are in one of the busiest times of our lives, I’ve never been this busy.

Int: Hah that’s amazing I didn’t believe you’d be writing a book again already because ah..

FH: Well I have a June deadline, I think I’ll make it, but umum.. they, I think I’ll make it, but they know that um, the movie could call me back again because that’s the, that’s priority contractually…So I might have to walk away from this for a while.

Int: Abruptly..

FH: Pardon?

Int: I was going to say how far down the line would the movie be now?

FH: Well.. I have heard them say.. fall 81 my guess is some times, some time in ‘82.

But I always tend to believe a movie when I see it. If I sit down in the theatre and they start rolling the credits, then I know we have.. [laughs] 

Int: I’m supposed to have my manuscript done, I was going to see if I was going to come out anywhere near the time the movie would, ah it’s supposed to be done – fall of ‘81.

FH: You’ll probably beat it.

Int: That’s when I get it in, but you it takes a long time for them to process it.

FH: Yeah I know. Well.. I am making an educated guess.. that the movie will not be on the.. screens.. until ‘82. I could be wrong. They have a very good young.. director with a good staff and production staff. It’s Ridley Scott, fella who did Alien. And.. he wants to.. just go varoom right through it. But you realise that there’s a lot of pre-production, and this one is I think is monumental in pre-production, and then after you’ve finished shooting a film.. you have.. what? You’d be lucky to have 6 months of post-production.

Int: I understand you did the script, is that right?

FH: I did a script, ah which I delivered to London in October. They are now getting their mitts into it. They like some of my scenes, that was obvious, I don’t know how they’ll put ‘em together. We seem to have a pretty good agreement on how the film should begin. I have some scenes that ah kinda set the mood, are you interested?

Int: Yes I am.

FH: Okay…. as of n- as of the last conversations I had with Ridley; we’re going to open on.. a monsoon rain, and a castellated battlement.. with dows(?) in the background… ah probably a.. spring.. shot internally, but it’d be a monsoon rain, and it’ll be lush and tropical. And.. there, you’ll be seeing a young man with his back to you…on the battlement, the rain is just, he’s hatless and the… light clothing, and the rain’s just drenching him, and a door opens, and Gurney Halleck comes into view…. and.. he addresses the young man as Paul – he says ‘You’re getting all wet, it’s stupid come on inside’ [laughs] you know, [unclear]. Paul turns around, camera close in, this lush scene in the background, and Paul says… ‘But this is the last rain… we’ll ever see… On the planet Dune it never rains’, and then we cut varoom, right, just shot cut [snap] right like that, to a sandstorm, you know, a small white object in the distance being blown.. by the sand.. in the wind. Camera tracks it and moves in and gets close enough to see it’s a skull… and.. it follows, the camera follows that skull as the sand blasting.. erodes it to nothing.

Int: [laughs] that sounds exciting I’m, I’m ready to-

BH: You sound ready to watch the movie.

Int: Yes I am, that’s good.

FH: Storm lifts, dunes as far as the eye can see. Sand erupts… and.. Liet Kynes comes out, and.. he’s stripped, that scene of Liet Kynes’ death. You see, we’ll, we, we give a forward flash, to that, to set the stage.

Int: Yeah I’ve been wondering how in the world [laughs] this is going to happen, in the world?

FH: But that does it very fast you see-

Int: Yeah.

FH: -and it gives us stuff that we can run the credits over.

Int: Oh that sounds great. Ah one of the things that you mentioned I think ah, geez it’s been more than year ago now that I talked to you in.. Santa..ah..

FH: Santa Rosa.

Int: Rosa.

FH: It was in October a year-

BH: October a year ago.

FH: -October a year ago yeah.

Int: See I don’t it’d been a long time.. deciding what to do and whether to go ahead or not.. but they finally came through. And I read all your books last ah.. Christmas [laughs] I almost forgotten it, almost seems like I’m starting over again, and ah I made the proposal then of course and ah I think um I had indication from the editor that it was all set to go in May, he said I’m going..  [unclear], I’m going into Boston ah next week and I’ll.. make a recommendation. And you should hear in a week, maybe three or four weeks, we’d better say. I didn’t hear for three or four months [laughs] [unclear]. I was busy and I didn’t ah, and I wasn’t worried ah I wanted to get to work anyway, but I finally thought well this is ridiculous I-

FH: Well, that’s not unusual in the editorial business.

Int: I guess it it isn’t, I, I keep um hearing horror stories about..

FH: In fact the whole idea of the horror story has a different spectrum [laughs] in, in publishing, than it does elsewhere. I tell friends of mine who’ve had manuscripts back for.. for six months, that it isn’t a horror story.. until it’s a year [laughs].

Int: Well I told, I told my tale to ah another ah writer for one of the Twain books I met in a conference.. and he said, ‘Well that’s nothing’ he said, ‘With mine I didn’t hear for five years’ [Laughs]

FH: See, there’s a horror story [laughs]

Int: Yeah there’s always, there’s always a worse one.

BH: A horror story is when you write in and they’ve never heard you and don’t know where it is – that makes it a horror story.

Int: Yeah right. Well one of the things that you had mentioned there and I wanted to.. hear a little bit more about was the ah way you had sort of arranged your life around ah certain studies, certain disciplines that you.. have interested in and ah worked on, and then.. I thought books developed out of that study somehow, and ah wondered if I can..

FH: That has happened sometimes yeah, or I have, I have followed my curiosity… down certain.. avenues.

Int: Did you say something about a ten year span on each one? Something like that?

FH: Well there was a ten… There was a ten year span.. from um.. included in.. the Dune trilogy but um… but it wasn’t a linear span. There’s approximate, and you have to understand that it, that it wasn’t an isolated span, that isn’t, that wasn’t all I was doing… there’s about six years of research that went into it… and that includes a lot of fields. 

Int: Yeah I, one of the things that’s fascinating is the.. interdisciplinary nature of that.. book it’s just great to teach, because it.. gets into everything.

FH: Well, you see the different fields I went into, then approximately a year and half in the writing of each book, so you see.. that’s where I get the ten years.

Int: What, what would you say those ah fields would be? I’ve been.. would.. does the word ecology fit? Is that one or is that..?

FH: Well it’s geology.

Int: Geology and ecology.

FH: Political geography and um climatology.. all of the.. um.. focused interests that we subtend under ecology I would say. Ecology is a late cover really as far as a discipline is concerned and I worry about specialised disciplines anyway.. because I think that our world is kinda overrun with specialists, and that what we’re desperately in need of is.. generalists.

Int: Yeah well I agree with that I completely agree.

FH: There’s economics, comparative religions… ah.. 

Int: Well do you see the..

FH: Politics.

Int: Yeah ah. I I, guess what I’m getting is that you don’t have these… neatly pigeonholed in your life necessarily but they all sort of happen at the same time, or, or did you take- ?

FH: Well there were periods where I was doing just one.

Int: Yeah like psychology say?

FH: Yes that’s right, or.. comparative religions. I studied ah.. politics.. as a ah.. speech writer and researcher for a United States senator, who actually lived in Washington.. D.C, and ah..

Int: Do you want to mention who it is or you want?

FH: Yeah it’s Guy Cordon of Oregon. I had a great time going into universities and.. I, a couple of times I’ve been invited by political science departments, so um.. I, I really enjoy standing there on that platform and saying ah.. ‘How many people in here.. are.. studying.. political science? Put your hands up’ and you say, ‘How many of you believe politics is a science?’ [laughs] Not a hand [continues laughing]. The word science I think has been…

Int: Yeah

FH: -kind of stretched out of shape, or pinched into the wrong shape or something, I don’t know.

Int: That is really odd. Do you ah, I was going to ask you too as ah another thing I wanted to find out is ah, I know you’re awfully business now, but in, in the next two years say, is there a time when you might want to come out Mankato State ah University and give a talk like that to ah – We have a, what we call a residency series, in which writers or dancers or musicians come out, spend a day or two on campus.

FH: We might be able to work it in, I promise ‘nathsing’–

Int: Yeah.

FH: -right away because the movie people have first order on my time, um and.. right, right now I’m being very careful.. what I agree to do to, and I’m being very careful to explain to people that I agree that even.. now that I’m going to be somewhere, that I may even have to call you at the last minute and tell you I can’t be there. 

Int: Yeah.

FH: But ah it’s rather usual for us because usually we do, we are able to plan out a ah six or seven months in advance anyway, what we are going to do.. And pretty well hold to it.

Int: Well this usually involves ah one public lecture ah and ah two or three visits to classes, maybe a political science class or a media class or something like that.

FH: I’m reasonably sure we can work it out.

Int: How much do you charge as your ah?

FH: I have a contract with a booking agency.

Int: I think I’ve seen your name on that somewhere.

FH: Yeah and…

Int: Well they could work through that um.

FH: I tried to price myself out of the business because it was interfering with my writing time. But ah I will agree under certain circumstances to do it for 25 hundred and the expenses for getting there. And ah…

Int: Well.. that sounds reasonably I think,  I am not on that committee, I, I don’t, all I can do is feed a name into them and hope that something would happen. 

FH: Sure. I, I just… tried to price myself out of two of them this year and, and told them the price was five thousand [laughs] and got hoist by my own petard [laughs again]. But even so they, they know that I, there’s one of them, was it Missouri?

Int: That’s the one i know about yeah. 

FH: Yeah, they’re gonna have to, they know that I might get yanked away.

Int: Well I plan to be there and ah see if I can visit with you there, I’m going to try as as said in my letter; I hope to follow you around a little bit if I could just to be available for a, a few minutes any time I could get at you. 

FH: Oh yeah.

Int: I’ll know a little bit more ah by that time too, of where I’m going with it.

FH: You’ll have ah kind of a format.

Int: Right.

FH: Yeah.

Int: I had thought and I wanted to visit with you about this a little bit ah my original idea was um… and I can’t really see how to do this yet, but ah, and I don’t know if, if you would agree that it’d be a good thing to do and ah. But it seemed to me that Dune.. has almost everything in it, ah.. the, the themes you work with and the ah.. ah the other books are elaborations of scenes that are at least presented in Dune.

FH: Specifically well um I would say Soul Catcher is outside that.

Int: Well yeah I, I realise that too.

FH: But ah I’d say you’re, in general you’re right yeah.

Int: And I was thinking of maybe ah trying to um… do some kind of a unity.

FH: If you said the Dune trilogy. 

Int: Yeah I mean the trilogy’

FH: I would say you were right.

Int: Yeah I mean the Dune trilogy. At least that’s the way I put the proposal to them and I drew a little chart in which I showed how all these connections um work through Dune and out of it and ah, I still haven’t figured out at least how, that they have ah in this book you’ll see there’s a rather rigid format.. where you sort of run down each book, a little summary, and discussion, and analysis.

FH: Why is that?

Int: It’s just ah the way the thing developed. Now with ah your book however they’ve-

FH: They must have had some reason for that though?

Int: Yeah it’s a library reference book ah to some extent, and they want them all to look the same.

FH: I see.

Int: You can go and, you know that you’re going to find ah each book is discussed and. 

FH: They’re counting on the basic library sale at least.

Int: Yeah, well that’s all they count on really.

FH: Is it? Uh huh. 

Int: I ah, in fact I’ve tried to get some in our book store [laughs] and they said well bookstores ah want too much ah markup, so they won’t distribute to bookstores. So it’s a basic library and school sale. It’s strange. 

FH: Yes very strange… well they know their thing [laughs].

Int: Yeah it’s ah, yeah I thought well, well maybe I should, I’ve got guaranteed sale here. I don’t know what, what they’ll really amount to.

FH: Do they sell them as textbooks to schools?

Int: Yeah.

FH: I see.

Int: and but I think almost, many many school libraries have these, they just buy every one in the series. And ah these are United States author series they have maybe um two hundred.. Copies, or two hundred books in the series. They also have an English author series and they have a continental author series.

FH: I’m always curious to.. to get at the – when you get that kind of a format, that rigid format behind something such as that, always curious to know the.. reasoning, the ah, what has brought it about.

Int: I think it maybe came about, there was a woman named Elizabeth Bowman who is ah a professor at ah Indiana University.. and she was the editor I first wrote to, and um, or maybe that it was her scheme, she invented the series I think, and was with it for a long time, and…

FH: We’re dealing with laws here you see, and before every law there was a reason [laughs].

Int: Well the chrono, chronology for example is one thing I mentioned, that I need a chronology, I have to have ah, in the front of the book there is this list of dates that are important in your life – just when were your children born, when ag did each book come out, and when were you married, and not a lot of elaboration but if you won any prizes when they were granted and so on.

FH: I see, okay.

Int: And that’s all I need and you can, if you can make something up for me um.

FH: Yeah Bev will put something together for you.

Int: You can see from that book just what they want, I think, that’s why.. it’ll be useful for you to see it. 

FH: Okay Yeah.

Int: Ah but however the editor ah Warren Francis, the editor for this ah Herbert book and ah… it turns out he’s an old classmate from the University of Texas back in 1946.

FH: Really?

Int: I didn’t, I don’t remember ever knowing him [laughs] [muffled] I don’t believe ah… ah I can ever remember meeting them there, I‘ve heard of him since, and he’s heard of me I think  too. We talked to each other, through the letters, as if we knew each other, had the same professors and all that but ah I can’t see him in my mind’s eye at all. Anyway he’s, he’s quite supportive of doing this book in particular and.. so and he said ah, the ah the company since Elizabeth Bowman has changed hands, this is, I got caught up in that because there was a two year delay while they got, I don’t know I wouldn’t say got rid of her but she backed out of it all, and then they established a system of twelve editors, with various aspects of literature and um modern.. chronological probably. And I, ah Lauren French turns out to be the editor for contemporary writers.

FH: I see.

Int: So he said we’re going to do some, some different things, I’d like to do some different things, and I think I mentioned.. one he wanted ah have a little bit input from you if possible, maybe by way of um interviews, public interviews that kind of thing.

FH: Okay.

Int: Like question and answers or something.

FH: We have lots of those… and ah what we can do is just duplicate them..

Int: Yeah. 

FH: -fire ‘em off to you and let you play with them however you want. Some of them have inaccuracies in them. I’ve done a lot of interviews, several thousand…. from the other side of the tape recorder.

Int: [Laughs] Yes.

FH: And.. I.. was one of the first to begin using a recorder on these because.. my short hand while it’s good.. it’s not professional shorthand but I have my own newspaper shorthand, is sometimes not fast enough to get precisely what I want, and I was always very careful… to.. try, you can never completely do this, but to try to keep my own..  pre-view out of an interview, to get what came.

Int: Yeah. 

FH: Because those are the best kind.

Int: Well I, I think ah Lauren French at least sees you as ah an important figure other than simply as a writer of science fiction or of novels or books and is interested in your opinions on ah ecology and.. politics and so on as well.

FH: Well as you probably know I’m not a hot gospel ecologist. I think we got into these problems together.. and we’re going to have to get out of them together, and it’s counterproductive to try and produce scapegoats.

Int: I remember your speech at the Santa Rosa.

FH: Yeah.

Int: [Muffled]

FH: A very dangerous.. policy, in a society though that.. has been raised on guilt [laughs]. I don’t know what you’re background is but mine was.. partly Catholic [chuckles] and and ah I think that Catholics and Jews.. tend to have the heaviest.. ah injection of guilt training [laughs]

Int: [laughs] Could be. Well I, I had ah.. a Protestant upbringing in a Methodist church.

FH: Well there’s some Protestants that come very close [laughs].

Int: That’s fair we, we probably are running a pretty close circuit.

FH: Yeah the um ah.. the nature of our ecological problems just dismays me, partly because the ah of the ah… the, the problems of specialisation, people trying to separate one element of it from another element of it. I have tried to create categories such as political ecology or social ecology.. the danger in that though is that you.. start shooting off at a tangent, you see, which all specialisations do. What’s that darling?

BH: Well that a um bible list with a few years written in-

Int: Oh sure.

BH: -to help, and this is a, a current book list.

Int: Oh fine.

BH: Some of those dates, I went through all books in there [coughs] I suddenly realised that the books lists were varied at the moment by the date of the book. And finally not too long ago, just a few weeks ago, I went through every book I could find in there and got the copyright date, off the copyright. 

Int: I see. ‘Priest of Psi’ I’d never heard of that, that is [muffled]

FH: It’s a new one coming out.

BH: That’s pretty- maybe I should, maybe I should mark that too.

Int: It is marked oh.

BH: Okay.

Int: My you’ve written a lot. Manfred I thought had written [laughs] I, I was really bogged down in his books, he has about 24 now, and you must have about that.

FH: Approximately yeah. Well anyway there’s the ah.. our problem is that our society tends to produce.. what I call little sea mountains, that are in the.. big ocean of everything that’s going on. We’ll have this little power structure here, and that little power structure over there, and that little power structure over there. Each one of them desperately jealous.. of prerogatives.. and their own destiny. To try to combat that we build um.. more powerful monolithic central governments, and that gets us away from the original intent.. of.. at least the original political intent of the government that was set up on this, in this nation, which was to..  by maintaining a certain kind of balance.. to hold down the individual powers of any element of government, ah.. and then, when you get a monolithic form government the influence of.. special pleadings.. becomes.. even more important to what happens. When you got a king, especially a tyrannical one.. the people who are permitted to advise the king by whatever means, become very powerful, and as we get a more monolithic form of government here, and we’ve been going a long way down that road, then the people who are permitted to advise the government, and lots of times that permission comes from having the wealth to do it… or having the ear of powerful people through… childhood friendships and that sort of thing. This becomes very very important. Right now we’re in an energy crunch and we’re being told that there is an energy shortage, an outright lie, there’s no such thing as an energy shortage.. in this world, there is a shortage however of the kinds of energy that can be distributed by existing systems.. and existing power structures. But the United States could convert to ah, if we put up a crash program in this country the way we did for.. the atomic bomb study, this country could convert.. to, ah all of its public transportation, all of it’s emergency vehicles.. to hydrogen in one year.

Int: Hmm. That’s amazing.

FH: We could do it. And we could convert the rest of our personal vehicles to hydrogen.. in two additional years, so in a three year period we could take ourselves right off an oil economy. Well what’s the problem with that? The problem with that is that anybody with a backyard windmill to make electricity and a water source can make hydrogen [laughs] so…. so you wind up with… every man his own personal oil well you might say [chuckles], or a lot of them you see. And an old fashioned capitalist competitive economy coming into the energy field. Now in the long run I think that’s a very healthy thing to have happen, but it would not.. happen without certain social trauma.. 

Int: Yeah I can see it would be disruptive.

FH: Yeah. Very disruptive, we would have to find employment for a lot of people who are depending now on other sources of employment, and that’s why I go back to this statement that we can’t solve these problems without solving them all together. We have to be responsible for the people we displace. And god help us if we go.. the socialist route in that, because I have become less and less socialist the older I get, um.. and the more of them I see. Each, every damn one of them develops a bureaucracy… to maintain its projects… and.. when those bureaucracies make mistakes-

File 4: Interview by a Minnesota State University, Mankato academic Part 4

FH: And it gives us the assumption that we have discovered intelligence, when we haven’t, um that every gifted child, and every gifted adult who was a gifted child that I’ve ever met, one of the major problems of that person.. was to develop a protective colouration… And that within any educational system, we would be a lot better off if we spent more money on the educators so that they would not feel threatened by a truly gifted person coming into their system, and they wouldn’t try to suppress that, that person or divert them, that they would stand aside and let them go. No way were they going to listen to that, and so I said that I would write a minority report, I said, ‘I suspect you won’t print it… but I’ll do it’, and um ‘oh we’ll print it’, so I wrote a minority report more or le- minority report more or less along with what I was saying here, saying that the way you determine a gifted student is they fall outside of your yardstick, which they would call the IQ test, your IQ test doesn’t measure them… and that’s how you know you have a gifted student, somebody who gives you answers that take off at a tangent from the question, with something you hadn’t even thought of, as the questioner. And I wrote a, oh I think it was a 10 page minority report on a, about a 150 page document that they finally got out, and didn’t come out, my minority report wasn’t printed, so I called down to the, Olympia three or four times and never could get the author of this report on the phone – they were always out, never returned my calls. I said well… [laughs] 

Int: You were right.

FH: I was right.

FH: The ah, but essentially that is a real problem in in ah, in these hierarchies, these power structures. I’m awfully distrustful of power structures. People ask me if I was ever trying to start a cult and I say ‘For the love of god, read the books again’. [laughs]

Int: Yeah I wonder, I wonder what ah Khomeini and all of that ah you know your books certainly speaks to that situation.

FH: Oh indeed. Islam, in common with a number of other religions, depends… on a kind of hypnosis induced hysteria. I use the word hypnosis advisedly here because it is a form of hypnosis, when you get, when you fixate attention in any way, you can begin to manipulate.. the awareness of the fixated. And.. while it’s an oversimplification, there’s a great deal in truth in saying that all religions.. circle around a sun which gives them energy, and the sun that gives them energy is the mystery of death, you see and they can’t touch it. So they circle around that, that energy source.. feeding off of it.

Int: I’ve, I’ve been reading ah Thoreau ah this vacation I got to teach Thoreau next quarter, ah he made the, some of the same comment about ah did you ever see a church without a graveyard?

BH: How about Swinburne?

FH: Oh yes.

BH: Feasted, feasted on things unseen and fed on the shoals of death.

Int: Yeah.

FH: Yeah, I have aroused a great ire.. in the mortuary industry in the United States by saying on national television on a couple of occasions, that I think our mortuary practices are insane. That we put death into the service of death, rather than death into the service of life. If I had my way, we would get rid of all these cemeteries the way they are now, as, stone orchards as I call them [laughs], and we would set up a quite efficient system of returning the dead to the service of life, and I even have specific recommendations on this. One is to build our cemeteries with a rectangular form.. put a quite good looking pylon at each corner, with brass plates to be added to it, and you would grid it, you would have letters one way, the alphabet one way, numbers the other way, so that you could intersect any position, then you would have a large post hole digger.. and you’d very quickly be able to go to any grid position, and vrvrrvroom[noises] you’d dig a vertical hole, and in biodegradable shroud, you’d drop the dear departed into that hole, and I even kid people I say you’ve even got a choice – you’ve got head up or head down [laughs], you can say in your will, and then you would plant an orchard tree there. One tree, one good orchard tree, will restore about as much oxygen as an acre of lawn.

Int: [Laughs] That’s a good idea.

FH:  Plus producing fruit.

INT: Yeah.

FH: And then you put a little.. brass plaque in your pylon at the corner, that… at intersection of ah ‘double A 91’, is dear uncle Alfred.

BH: 100% renewable

FH: Fertilising a persimmon tree as he requested you see [laughs]. And this makes a lot more, this druidical type approach to it you see.

Int: Yeah.

FH: Makes a lot more sense than what we do. It’s a lot less expensive, a lot easier to maintain, and it’s ah it has a lot more happiness built into it, long term happiness. But oh have I received some nasty phone calls and letters for suggesting this. 

Int: Well It’s just-

FH: But, you see part of this is tied up in this idea of infinity, peopl, this is the other element that religions feed on – ideas of infinity. Infinity’s a very difficult thing to focus on, I’ve, whenever I’ve been studying, whenever I’ve been in the process of studying various kinds of religions and various.. denominations, first thing I approach is death and infinity. I want to find out how that religion treats of these. Infinity, infinity to a, a society that.. is mechanistic in all of its beliefs, that believes that everything has a linear cause and effect relationship, strictly linear, that there’s a mechanical explanation for everything… you just have to find it. Every such society has problems with infinity… not to mention problems with [unintelligible] [laughs]

Int: Yeah

FH: Yeah But they have real problems with infinity. Some of the best and least problem oriented approaches to the concept of infinity, of infinity have been pagan or, or well the Northwest coast Indians for example, had a seabird, a particular sea bird, they had a real concept of infinity the way we have with our lazy eight. The seabird represented infinity, which was a particular white sea bird which could be seen easily against these grey skies, and tended to fly.. low to the waves out on the horizon on the ocean, and was always in movement.. against the horizon, see? 

Int: Yeah.

FH: And that’s infinity, always in movement against the horizon. The Vedantic writings had a, a similar approach of.. infinity was the chaotic backdrop against which everything moved, you can’t, you don’t know that anything moves until it moves against something. You see? You can’t detect a motion, until there is something here and the motion happens against it.

Int: [Laughs] That’s a good one too. Yeah.

FH: Really. And ah, very insightful.

Int: You mentioned the Northwest coast Indians I wondered ah ‘Soul Catcher’ seems to be out of the general pattern of the rest of the books. Ah someone, in fact Judith Guest, I don’t know if you’ve heard of her? She wrote ‘Ordinary People’, ah Minnesota-

FH: Oh yes.

Int: -novelist I had an interview with her just a couple weeks ago. Mentioned I might be seeing you and she said, ‘Oh, tell him I love Soul Catcher’ [chuckles] said, ‘ask him if he’s ever going to write another one about the Indians’ I wondered if you will?

FH: Yes, I have some plot work already done, I probably will. I grew up with the Coast  Salish Indians, they were my playmates.

Int: Is that right?

FH: For several periods in my life. They and the Nisei. I considered myself to be… the expert.. on.. the anthropology of Northwest Indians and to a degree, if you allow for the open endedness of such claims, it’s true. I’m able to detect certain behavioral pitfalls into which anthropologists have fallen [laughs], because they were, they approached it as the voyeur to the primitive. And in common with children and a lot of other societies that didn’t have the quote unquote benefits of.. Western civilisations, the Northwest coasts Indians were very sensitive to what you wanted to know, and that’s what they told you [laughs]. 

Int: That could be tricky alright.

FH: Yeah well it’s very tricky. A lot of anthropologists, very famous anthropologists, have fallen into this trap, um and there’s some very funny mistakes that have been made. I have some insights for example.. on Polynesian culture, from Polynesians, and one of the, in some respects, one of the funniest books ever written to the Polynesians.. is growing up in ah, ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ [laughs]. Because they can say well that’s what grandpa Pa’aluhi said to her [laughs], and she just took it down. But you see this is the error of academe, when it gets its nose to the ground, and just starts boring along without speciality.

Int: Yeah

FH: As you well know I’m sure.

Int: My daughter has found some of that I think, she’s ah her speciality is ah Northwest coast argillite pipes.

FH: Oh yeah.

Int: And ah there’s a mystery.. as to why.. the ah people, before her times anyway, have always thought that argillite and pipestone both as it came out, ah at first as it came out of the ground as soft and then it hardened, ah and had to be wet and so on and that isn’t true at all, and maybe that’s how it came out that ah Indians told them that ah…

FH: It sounds just like the sort of thing that happened. 

Int: Yeah.

FH: I know several.. very well thought of books, anthropological books about Northwest Indians, which show that the anthropologist swallowed hook-line-and-sinker, just exactly what the locals told them. But, you know from teaching, that the first thing.. that you have to fight is.. the awareness that the person playing student down there… wants nothing more than to find out what you want. 

Int: Yeah oh that’s true, [laughs] I think that is true.

FH: It’s the first thing you learn in school, your first day in school. Even earlier than that you learn to be very sensitive to what those big people want, it can be painful if you don’t find out, so you have this capability very finely tuned.

Int: Yeah I think that’s true. If you put it on a, on a, on a scale of peoples and ah and you can see how the thing would happen, completely natural.

FH: Oh sure yeah yeah. You can see how people fell into these traps, they fell into them out of the belief that the ah, of this mechanical absolutism, that there has to be some single thing back there that causes all this.

Int: Did you grow up on the ah Olympic Peninsula then or where?

FH: The Kitsap Peninsula.

Int: The Kitsap Peninsula. 

FH: And partly in the Olympic Peninsula, we were all over it as, when I was a kid. We lived pretty close to the ground and… my grandparents were among the early settlers down in Burley.

Int: Oh Burley… where is Burley is that ah?

FH: That’s above Gig Harbour, between Gig Harbour and Port Orchard.

Int: I see.

FH: The head of Henderson Bay. The um… the kind of life that a you led at that period – here, depended on the wilderness quite a bit, and by wilderness I mean ah the open beaches where you could get clams and oysters just from going out picking them up. There’s a saying here that when the tide’s out the table’s set. A lot of the people around ah the United States look back on the ah Depression as a very traumatic, very nasty time. I look back on it as one of the most marvellous periods of my life. My father… didn’t have a job, there’s one year when I think he made 10 or 12 dollars in the whole year, but we lived like kings. We had ah, we worked like hell, we had a farm, we grew all of our own meat, we went out and got salmon and smoked them. I took homegrown apples and smoked salmon to school as my lunch. 

Int: Sounds good

FH: The um ah, at the, in the fall, right after hunting season, because no local would go out in the woods during hunting season you’d get yourself killed out there [laughs]. We would go out at night, with a powerful flashlight and a rifle, and jack light a barren doe, which was our winter meat, game wardens never bothered us, and as a matter of fact we’ve discovered, from the ecology program, we’ve discovered subsequently that getting the barren does out of the herds is healthy for the herds, we did it, we didn’t do it for that reason of course we did it because that was the best meat [laughs]. They were big female steers, you see? And nice and fat and good eating, and we’d have a staked out abandoned orchard, apple orchard some place, and we’d go sit in the proper position on the prevailing wind and wait, in the dark, until we could see out in the moonlight out there that a deer had come up. My first job when, I can remember when I was.. oh 8 years old, I can remember that my job was to take the light, hold the light, point it at the, at the deer, And um… our light was a six-volt car battery with a car light headlight on it with a switch you see, and I, I’d have to aim that thing [laughs] and one of my uncles standing over my shoulder would tap me on the shoulder, my dad would ‘hit that light’ [whoosh] like that right out and the deer would turn and look and kapow over my head, one shot, cause bullets cost 10 cents back then you know, quite a bit of money.

Int: Your family’s been in this area then for quite a while?

FH: Oh yes my dad was a whistle punk in the early logging ah within about oh ten miles of here. An uncle of mine was the commander at Fort Worden over here, back when it was protecting us from the yellow peril.. [laughs]

Int: What nationality would you be then ah?

FH: Me? 

Int: Yeah.

FH: I’m a, I’m a Mongrel, um there’s a lot of Irish… Spanish, a lot of mixed semitic back there, um… Holland Dutch. 

BH: You have some French.

FH: What?

BH: I’m sure you have a lot of French

FH: Oh I’m sure, that that’s the Holland Dutch area

Int: Yeah well Amantha is Frisian, pretty pure.. Frisian, and Northwestern part of Iowa is a strong Holland Dutch area.

FH: Yeah um..

BH: [muffled] came from there

FH: My ah, my dad’s people came from hill country between Tennessee and Kentucky. 

Int: Oh.

FH: My Grandmother spoke-

Int: That’s where mine came from [laughs] 

FH: Really?

Int: Yeah way back there.

FH: Oh yeah well this is pre civil war, ah so it was um, there was English, Irish and Scotch, there as you well know that.

Int: That’s, that’s mine.

FH: And my grandmother, my dad’s mother, was raised on a trace.. up there, along those buffalo trails, because when the.. europeans first came here the buffalo were on the Atlantic coast, ah we just pushed them back.

Int: You never think of that do you? You never, I never think of buffalo ever being out there.

FH: One of the woods buffalo and ah, they vanished in a hurry because that was a lot of free meat. The ah, my grandmother, my dad’s mother could neither read nor write, had the most remarkable memory of any person I’ve ever met. And well you’d have to if you couldn’t read or write, think about it, you’d have to know all these things in your head. She remembered dates, birthdays, names, if there was any doubt about when somebody came to visit… my you’d go to my grandmother, she would not only the date, and the year even exactly, she’d know the time, ‘they caught the 4pm ferry’ [laughs]. 

Int: Which side of the family was she on? 

FH: She’s my dad’s mother. She was raised on this trace where there was no school, the nearest settlement was three days away by.. ox train. There ah, they had a cyprus grotto and their cash crop was barrels, her father was a cooper, and they raised everything else they needed. 

Int: When did they come out this way then?

FH: My grandmother.. and my grandfather, my grandfather was a civil engineer on ah, a federal crew coming through the area putting in the ah the intervert roads, and.. the crew contracted.. my grandmother’s.. parents to get their green groceries, and my grandmother and my grandfather met that way and eloped, [laughs]. My grandmother was sixteen just before her seventeenth birthday, when we were saying, they had their, she had her seventeenth birthday a couple days after they were married. She used to speak a pure Elizabethan English when she got excited, and she had the most remarkable.. memory for old.. songs, she knew all the lyrics. I can remember when I was young enough to walk under the kitchen table, walk under it, hearing her in the kitchen working, singing…ah some of the songs that Burl Ives made famous, and some that I had never heard, the fox lies under the hill I can remember that one. But my grandfather ran a crossroads country store.. for years.

Int: In this area here?

FH: In Burley yeah. My mother’s people were right out of one of the troubles in ireland. They got out of Ireland, my grandfather’s people got out of Ireland to jump ahead of the British. I think it was probably true that he was the McCarthy, that his father was the McCarthy, yeah the one who built McCarthy, Castle McCarthy and several of the others, I mean the family did that, um and when the British ah, when the Normans came in, why ah, all of the Irish chieftains of course tried to save as much as they could, and this particular group. The McCarthy ancestors, ah at one point buried family silver, and sometime, I’m not sure when, ah cause I don’t, I didn’t have the same kind of stories out of them, the  dug up this silver and bought rifles with it, and there was a saying in the family that, because they had to run for it under assumed names, they went to Halifax under an assumed name, um ‘all this for seven hundred rifles’ [laughs] and of course they lost and they ran for it, and the story was that they did not take back their actual name until they went back into the U.S. from Canada. I don’t know where my grandfather was born, um my mother’s father. I think he was born either in Canada or shortly after they got to the States. They were at a place, a long time, called Three Tree Island, in Minnesota. 

Int: Really in Minnesota Three Tree Island?

FH: I, I could be wrong. In, it was up in the..

But they came West to get land. My grandfather was a, educated as a mining engineer, and he was always getting to some kind of a mining project.

Int: Well um I was going to ask you ah, in order to get started myself in doing some reading that I might need to do – I don’t know if ah if you would ah know know certain ah maybe I could ask you What books have been important to you in ah in your writing. Um I could talk about science fiction, maybe you want to say, um if there is anything particular in science fiction that’s been influence or helpful, or other, other ah books that might be helpful to me if I should read them to ah maybe get a better handle on?

FH: I had pretty much of a classical education, um, partly public school, partly jesuitical…. there was a.. bit of pull and back and forth in my family because my father was not Catholic and my mother was, and she was a, a I should say later issue loosely Catholic, and ah, everytime the pressure would come on from her family there’d be a little shift [laughs] in direction. But um… I would say that as far as writing is concerned, that ah.. I was a ah, a Shakespearean I really.. bored into Shakespeare. And as far style is concerned.. the person who.. really shot me off like a rocket was Ezra Pound.

Int: Really?

FH: Because he said you have to make your own style, you see… And he said you have to make it new. And I’m sure that those are very profound truths. Of course you build on the, on the background of all that went before. Human endeavour is always a pyramidal thing. 

Int: Yeah.

FH: Yeah you, you stand on the shoulders of whoever went before but you try to make something new out of it. To the degree that you make something new out of it I think you then create ah, a bett- an important part of the pyramid. It pleases me for example to find young writers using ah, terms that I invented – plasteel [laughs] hi, be my guest [laughs]. But I hope they hear Ezra Pound as well, because it’s alright, in fact it’s a good thing for a young writer to sit down and try to write.. in the manner of some other writer to see what he, why he did it. I’ve, I’ve played the old Henry game and the Guy de Maupassant and all of these you see, to see what they were doing. But once you see what they’re doing, then you realise then you live in another age, and different things are happening, you have an accumulated dividend you might say, that you can spend, as a writer, because they wrote you see?

Int: How did you happen to decide to be a writer other than through journalism or to write science fiction

FH: This is the truth, I came down on the morning of my eighth birthday. We had a kind of a thing in my family where ah, I was born on my mother’s birthday and so we alternated,  one year she set the pattern and the next year was mine, this was mine. I announced as I said what I wanted for dinner.. and lunch it was my day [laughs] I announced that I decided that I was going to be a author [laughs]. I was always a bookworm and had a couple of serious illnesses when iI was a child, pneumonia when I was quite young, and I read, and was read to, so I was inoculated.. at a very early age. And really did not deviate, I was a journalist and ah, we helped raise our family that way, Bev worked and I worked. Part of our lives Bev brought in the major income, she bought our beans, while I stayed home took care of kids, did the cooking and the laundry and the house cleaning and wrote, because that’s where the typewriter was.

Int: What do you do Bev then?

BH: I was an advertising writer…

FH: She was very good at it too.

But anyway we were, we were pretty much of a team.. in this respect back from that wasn’t ah..

Int: I was going to say that was really ahead of the game.

FH: That wasn’t a thing that was being done then.

BH: I never felt a strong need for [muffled] 

File 5: Science Fiction Speech part 1

[Muffled introduction] 

Woman: -and this year we are particularly fortunate to happen to have with us Mr. Frank Herbert, but Frank Herbert is no stranger to people who read science fiction, um if you say the word Dune.. to anyone who reads science fiction, immediately brings a picture of the Dune trilogy, and all that marvelous world.. of a desert planet. But Mr. Herbert has written many other things and.. his favourite is not.. Dune but his favourite piece writing is the Soul Catcher. I mean he has good taste right? Ah he is um maybe [muffled] fortunate to say he um, he lives up in Port Townsend, he’s a West Coaster [muffled] he has a very interesting and very varied background, he’s done things like been around the world he’s been in documentary tv, and  he’s dived I understand for oysters and today we relive our farm childhoods when we [muffled] And so.. it is my very great pleasure now to turn you over to Mr. Herbert and his speech [muffled] lecture.

FH: Good evening I see a lot of masochists out there who were here for the.. afternoon session. Welcome back. I promised the.. organisation that I would talk about everyday sorts of science fiction. Now… this is a sneaky way of telling you that ah with that kind of an agenda titled we may well talk about anything, but I’ll hold, I’ll hold pretty well to the theme. One thing I did notice in coming  here that I think.. it would have best for my purposes if.. you hadn’t had roads and rivers you had..  other roads and other rivers… because that’s always the thematic approach of science fiction. We don’t use ordinary rivers, we use rivers that flow forever… in infinity, from a source that’s never found, to a sea that you never reach. And our roads.. may make a mobius twist.. and dunk you into a dimension you did not expect… How ‘other’ can you get? You might not expect that ah such.. far out shenanigans… could have everyday applications in our lives. But I tell you truthfully that this does. I think there are a lot of things wrong with our and our society, but one of the major problems is we don’t plan far enough ahead. I once had ah an afternoon.. session as a reporter with the vice president of ITT… and one of the questions I asked him was um does ITT go in for long range planning? He said, ‘Oh certainly’… and I said, ‘Well.. how long is your long range planning?’ ‘One year’… and I said, ‘Well.. what happens when your plan, your one year plan, inevitably goes wrong?’, because one year’s really short sighted, a little myopic. He said, ‘Oh yes we have problems, but we have a large contingency factor built into the budget… and we jury rig something, we knock something together that will solve ah a problem when it comes along’. I said, ‘Isn’t that costly?’ He said, ‘Well we pass it along to the customers of course’. And I for one am having.. second thoughts about things that are passed along to me, because we haven’t planned ahead. I started talking about ah a science fiction everyday matter, in the 1950s… the fact that we were going to run out of oil… well that’s 30 years ago. And alot of us could see it because we tend to think in long range terms in science fiction. I don’t mean just 30 years, 30 years is a short stuff for us… 20,000 years, 50,000 years. A young minister today asked me.. if I were optimistic about human future? I said, ‘Certainly, I write stories about them being around.. 20 million years from now, how optimistic can you get?’ 

You know the funny thing, I’ll just take a, an aside here for you, the funny thing about the science fiction writing and the fandom community. I see some people I’ve met here today who I, I know you’re fans, that you read science fiction, a lot of it. We tend to think in much longer range terms.. than most of our contemporaries. When you’re sitting down to write a science fiction story.. and you project yourself.. 20 million into a future and you live in that future. For the length of time it takes to write the story or read it… you come out of the story… and you open your eyes and you look around.. and where are you? Back in these primitive times. And these are primitive times. You know very well that your ancestors.. were primitive and that your descendants, 1000 years from now, are going to look on these days and say, they’ll say, ‘You know… they actually got in vehicles with internal combustion engines that drove on.. concrete trails, I guess you could call them.. and they went [chuckles], if you can believe this, they were limited to 50 to 70 miles an hour [laughs]’. Take a look back, take a look back 200 years… take a look back at the primitive medicine.. of 200 years ago. And now project yourself forward, you don’t have to go 1000 years, just go a couple hundred. ‘I tell you Jim I was just reading this history the other day and do you know? Now now believe me that the man who wrote this is a respected historian, and he says people were dying of cancer… and they had some strange lung disease I don’t understand, it’s called emphysema, from breathing their air… and nobody could go into a store and get an artificial kidney’. It stretches your mind a minute, if you stretch your consciousness… across the periods you can conceive of, through the device of science fiction. 

We find ourselves in an election year. How many of you are already tired of the election year rhetoric? Lord preserve us. We’re privileged in the United States that we can write speculative fiction about social and political and economic systems that are different from the one we have here, you can’t do that in the Soviet Union, you can’t do that in China.. they know what’s right… and have an aristocratic bureaucracy.. to make sure.. that you don’t deviate. We can speculate about all kinds of things in this country, we can talk about.. the politics of.. money voting… I’m just thinking in this very science fiction story that I know about. Let’s play a little game… with social systems. If you look at.. societies in the long range.. imaginative way available to you through science fiction… you come on.. ideas.. which.. surprise even you because they came out of your head… you think of, simple things that have been treated regularly in science fiction, such as.. computer voting, but you also confront some of the problems that are not addressed by contemporary society, and one of the problems with a democracy is that it is awfully susceptible to demagogues… very susceptible, because it’s.. quite easy to see that we have various crises, and oh how nice it is.. to have somebody come along with a powerful voice, and a glib tongue, and tell us ‘now here is the solution to our problem’. Yes I can imitate those political jesters too. And oh how nice it is.. to hear them say.. we don’t have to pay for it…. An interesting thing to me about that, looking at it in these long terms, is that.. whenever you hear that or its equivalent in our society.. ‘You don’t have to pay for this’, what they mean is.. that your grandchildren, or your great grandchildren, or your great great grandchildren, or your great to the n power grandchildren, they will pay for it. I read a little history… periodically.. human societies look at the contract signed for them by their ancestors and they say, ‘Hey, my signature’s not on that’. Well a lot of little things around, that you look at with these unrosy science fiction eyes and you say.. ‘might wanna rosy after Saturday night, late Saturday night’. How about ah social security? I used to have a friend that had a sign on his desk.. that said, ‘security is a dirty word’. When I got on social security there were 90 workers for every.. person drawing social security, today there are now 3 workers for every person, in a few short years there’s going to be 1 to 1. How many of you think that the people paying the bill are going to continue paying it? Well this is very political to stand up here and say it, but.. I’m looking at it through these long term science fiction eyes, and I know for a fact, because I read a lot of history, that this sort of thing has happened before… and I firmly expect it to happen again. And you’ll find a great deal of that in science fiction, but we sugar coat it. We tell you an amusing or interesting, or.. a shocking story, and you’re caught up in the story and you read it, and only at the end of it, if you put it down, do you realise – hey… he wasn’t talking about 4000 years from now, he was talking about today. You would be surprised at the number of people who have come to me.. and they’ve said, ‘I gotcha. I know what you were doing in Dune…. water was the equivalent of oil wasn’t it?’ And I say, ‘Yes… and of water… and of clean air… and of arable land… if you misuse it… the problems will be dumped on to the people who have to survive in the midst of that’. Dune was hailed as the first.. ecological.. consciousness novel, and I must confess to you I did that with great.. deliberateness and malice of forethought. I thought it was about time because I realised that.. you can’t preach at people. I can’t stand here and tell you.. all of these things we know, I can’t.. throw these platitudes out about what shortages we’re going- we’re likely to have. But if you’re into a story and if you’re the kind of reader I am, where you live it, you’ve had the experience for a little bit, and that’s the way we really learn, and at the bottom.. I think that is one of the most valuable things available to you in science fiction, to experience.. alternatives to what we experience now, to put on.. another kind of life, to sample.. another time, and another society. I lose myself in a book. I have no.. questions if it’s a good book, I’m in it, I have no questions about… that are you aware of all of the studies that have been made about movies and where people are, you’re sitting out there in the audience and there’s a movie back here, do you know they’ve actually made.. studies about where your awareness is, at any given moment, are you still back in that seat… looking at it… are you halfway up to the, there are some – they call them halfways. Are you halfway up, not really in the seat, but afraid to get in at screen, or are you caught in the screen living vicariously… the action that’s going on there. Listen when I was young.. I put on my two six-guns and I walked down that street, only cost me 10 cents in those days, my mother gave me an extra nickel I had a bag of popcorn, and Hugh Gibson… Oh I was Hugh Gibson. And I am afraid that I did the same thing with fiction.

I alerted to this earlier today… that the experience.. teaches. You can break down education into.. any kind of categories you wish. I’ve seen many many breakdowns of the steps involved in learning something. And maybe I over simplify but I tend to break it into three pieces. One: the discovery, you discover that there’s this nifty thing out there… that you could do or learn… and then you get a verbal association with it, you read the books, the magazines, you listen to the lectures.. the instructors… and then you get hands on.. and that’s when you really learn – when you do it. That’s one of the reasons I said today that you really learn to write – by writing. You need guidance of course, but the learning process has to be in your body, in your mind to do it. And I see science fiction faulted for its escapism, I don’t look at that as escapism, I look at that as magnetic attraction which yanks your consciousness into that .. milieu for the term of the story, and therefore you learn something. I have noticed, I get reader lists, on class reading reader lists frequently from my publishers on where my books are being used… in teaching anthropology, architecture, sociology, political science, how many of you have ever done any association with political science…? How many of you believe politics is a science…? I have a list of 16 different kinds of classes where my books are used, but the one I like best is.. in remedial English, remedial English because what? Because it gets the children reading, they like to read. This was scaring the hell out of me about academic discovery of science fiction, because I think you can analyse the life out of anything, which it isn’t fun anymore. Who’s gonna do it? There’s a saying in science fiction – ‘Let’s leave it in the gutters where it belongs’. But it has other uses. 

I would imagine that most of you have read 1984 or Brave New World… read Farenheit I’m sure, I see a few patterns I was littering back then, it’s firelight from inside.

I once talked to an important politician.. in the United States, you’ve never heard his name but he’s very important because he writes speeches, for an extremely important man, and I asked him.. if he had ever read these books, and I had a long list, there were more.

And he said, ‘Oh yes I’ve read them all’. And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Well… you have to know… what people are thinking.. before you can make them think the things you want them to think.’ 1984 here we come. Mind bending happens every afternoon, and evening, on the television. I watch television while I’m riding an exercycle in the morning. I had a doctor friend who wanted to get me exercising because I’m married to a cordon bleu cook, and… he runs, he ran the Boston marathon last year, I see a few people who look like joggers to me and.. marathon runners, I say, ‘oh you should be out chasing rats… or something else useful’. But the puritan ethic tells me… that if i’m sitting there, riding that exercycle, getting my healthy exercise, while I’m reading the things that scroll up on tv, and I’m listening to the news, and watching the Today Show, that I’m doing something useful, and oh boy if I could put a, a generator on that.. machine and run the tv.. at the same time the protestant ethic would be served beautifully. And if we keep on moving as we are, I’m going to have to.

I hope you’re getting.. the message of what I’m saying to you, that it ought to be fun… it must tell us something useful about the kinds of lives we can live, or the world we’re going to find here tomorrow. How many of you think that our world is going to lope along.. largely unchanged for the next twenty five years? Well.. welcome to the club… you should probably all be writing science fiction. Isn’t it interesting.. that science fiction has become acceptable in polite society? Not as acceptable, perhaps, as some of my friends would like it, but just as acceptable as I would ever want it. I still find plenty of people who greet me with – ‘well I’ve never read any science fiction but what’s your work about?’ People think I should be insulted by that, I’m not, I’m reassured… because slowly but surely I think they will be picked up by science fiction which is taking over the world. I charge you to pick up your newspapers tomorrow, and look at the front page… and ask yourself how much of that front page is really science fiction? We’re living it. And as surely as god made.. the little green apple… and surely he did because I got sick on them plenty of times when I was young… We are going to see science fiction become the mainstream.. both in the movies.. and in fiction, oh there will be, the old traditional stuff will be still around, a few Westerns, horse opera or two for the old addicts and the historical buffs. There will be Doctor-nurse stories… and mystery stories although science fiction has already begun to invade that I swear to you. There will be puzzle-suspense things.. but science fiction is I, I’m promising you is going to take over, it’s going to dominate because… hubris can have its day here, you can make any kind of world you want… any kind of universe you want, any kind of society you want.. any kind of individuals you want, to tell any kind of story that pleases you to tell. 

Now I know very few.. creative artists in letters who can long resist the lure of that kind of open border policy. Look at the names of the mainstream writers.. who are writing science fiction. Now I have a broad definition of it, which includes Jaws. I think Peter Benchely has written science fiction. Anybody who knows the first damn thing about Ichthyology knows… that that is a very, fishy, story… unless you play a science fictiony game saying – alright… we can tell the kind of stories here, because for the purposes of this story, we need this, big, fish. I had a little discussion with Dino De Laurentiis about… King Kong… Hollywood is so derivative, it is so trapped by the, by the problem of insuring to the investors that they will get their investment back. That it always looks at what succeeded yesterday, because they can take that into the boardroom and say, ‘look… that what they made in on this one, we’ll do another one’. And I told Dino the thing that was wrong, with his remake of King Kong, was we did not have a science fiction writer, in at the beginning. How many of you saw the original? The Fay Wray original? Ah good old movie buffs. We’re a special club we are [chuckles]. When King Kong was made – we knew more about the face of the moon, than we knew about the pacific ocean, and as far the people sitting down in that theatre were concerned – ‘so do you mean there could be an island out there that nobody had yet discovered? and there could be this big beast on it, and all that, I’ll believe that because we don’t know’ and that is the-

File 6: Science Fiction Speech part 2

And I tell you this, in this anecdote form, to show you another everyday value of science fiction. Alvin Tolffer was right, the future is shocking, in the first place because there’s no such thing as the future. You presbyterians in the audience please suffer along with me for just a moment. Predestination doesn’t bite back. I use the Catholic mystics and the Sufi mystics. And when we start talking about the future we fall into a semantic trap, if it’s the future we are describing, it’s already there, it’s fixed, and we are just moving inexorably towards it, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about that, except sit back and let it happen. However.. since Einstein and Heisenberg.. at least.. there has been a new awareness around, a relativistic awareness, which has not yet made its.. definitive impact on our language. I studied semantics, as I told you at the horse’s mouth.. S. I. Hayakawa is a.. scintillating mind, or he was anyway, I haven’t talked to him in about five years. And he taught me a few things about the traps laid for the unwary.. about, that exist in our language, and it’s one thing to talk about these things it’s another thing to live them, that verb ‘to be’ is deadly even though I use it now I know the damn thing sits there.. in wait for me. There is or it isn’t…. Well in a scientific sense that’s nonsense… and second year fans in science fiction are well aware of this… are no longer falling into that semantic trap as easily… especially since some of us are using that semantic trap to trip them up.. for story purposes. A teaching instrument? Certainly, but a teaching instrument which teaches in the most marvelous fashion, because you learn it painlessly… and don’t even realise you’ve learned it until you learned it. Al is right to.. that future, coming down on us… those futures, those decisions we have to make, and the unknowns, that abound beyond every new decision… they spread their deadly spell of.. impending shock, because we know very well we’re going to be surprised. Alvin.. Toffler is right, Herman Kahn I think is wrong. Kahn wants to set our future in concrete. -I’m sorry [chuckles]… this lighting(?) just tempts you to do that sort of thing every time-. If you know everything there is to know, if you can predict absolutely what’s going to happen in our collective futures… then that’s not future that’s today, because that predicates no change, and there’s a marvellous story I know, a true story, which demonstrates this through… I told it.. to this fellow sitting down in the front row today with the marvellous first name, by the way… he’s actually a fellow… Poe fan. I came across a journal.. in the Library of Congress one time when I was researching.. for the book ‘Under Pressure’/’Dragon in the Sea’. It was a handwritten journal by a contemporary source, and it describes a scene on the streets of New York, and I believe the year was 1847…  and the journalist.. who was obviously awed by Poe… says they were walking.. down the street, and Poe was discoursing… on some prevalent theory.. [of hoodi? – unclear] – they used to write like that, you don’t know what the theory was but it was prevalent. And all of sudden Poe was given to flamboyant gestures, and dramatic… ways of delivery, stopped and grabbed his friend by the arm, threw a hand over his forehead and said, ‘I have just had a vision of the future…’ and if he had good timing, he waited a bit… ‘Within 100 years…’, that’s 1947, ‘Within 100 years… New York is going to have 10 story buildings.’ Well well, what did Mr. Po leave out of his scenario? Mr. Poe didn’t see the elevator of course.. ah steel frame buildings, the pressure of taxes and especially the pressure of population, on real estate, so you couldn’t go out you had to go up. And Mr. Poe was left far behind.. by at least 100 stories. I see a few.. like myself who, came through the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years and.. the Great Depression… and remember a few of the cliches of that time, such as the Brain Trusters… You know what the Brain Trusters were? They were some people that Roosevelt… assigned a job, a very science fictiony job, an ordinary job for a science fiction futurist. He told them – I want you to sit down.. and give me.. a list.. of the important scientific developments we will have to deal with, in the next 25 years, now that’s through 1958. Let me tell you.. the things that the Brain Trusters did not include in their list – jet travel, atomic energy… transistors, antibiotics… surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise. Which brings us right back.. to science fiction.. putting back our big toe out in the water saying, ‘well maybe this is what it’ll feel like… maybe this it how it will be.. if every household has its own.. computer terminal… and you don’t go to the library or the grocery store, or even to the office’. I was talking to a journalist friend of mine not too long ago, and I said, ‘You ever thought about it? If you have a word processing system in your office, which they did, it would be cheaper for your company to lease a telephone line and put that terminal in your home… so that you can write from home. It’d be cheaper in energy, they would pay you less travel time, and they would get more hours of the day out of you, you’d be fresher, no commuting. And he said, ‘My god… what do I do with the wife and kids?’ I said, ‘You build yourself a sound proof den, with a big strong bar on it, that’s what you require.’ I really think we’re, we’re going to have a computer in the home (realm?). I really think the computer is going to make more difference in our lives.. than the wheel has made, and possibly more difference than fire. But most of the time you would encounter computers.. in science fiction.. as scary.. machines which think. Good heavens machines which think.. and that’s very out of the 17th century… when the only thing that could think was a human being. Well rest easily friends, I don’t think computers will ever think even, at least not the way we do. I may use that device for a, for a story, but after doing all the necessary research to write a book, a nonfiction book about computers, which will be published by Simon & Schuster this fall, I had to get the plug in you see. I think the computers are never going to be anywhere near human, they’re a tool.. And you learn it first… you will learn it first.. experiencing.. the tool and its use, in science fiction, and nonfiction. The interesting thing about this tool is that it’s so fast… we lumber along.. at our 55 mile an hour speeds, doing a few things every second. A computer can execute 4 million different things in one second…. 4 million… that’s time crunch. But what.. Max Barnard and I did, I had a companion writing this book with me because.. when you don’t have enough expertise yourself you go out and you knock on a door. Max is a computer.. programmer with 15 years experience and electronics engineer, and a brilliant guy, and between us.. we came up.. with a way that.. you could.. program a computer yourself. I could teach this system to a child, a 5 year old, in about an hour… an adult could learn it in two hours. And two weeks of practice.. you’d be pretty good at it, you’d make the machine do what you want to do, which is the real crux of the thing. The problem we have with computers is we have to depend on computer programmers.. who really can only guess at the bottom line of what you want it to do… they’re not absolutely sure.. ever, especially when you’re get into highly technical fields like medical programs and statistical programming for ah.. for managing large budgets in big department stores and.. things like household budgets.. oh your budget isn’t that hard to run. If you can make it do what you want it to do, it’s your baby, it’s your tool.. and believe me you’re going to see one in every household. And the minute you see one in every household you’re going to see.. entrepreneurs coming along saying ‘hey.. with a printout on those home things we could send them a newspaper over the wires’, this is already being done. We can search libraries for information we need, you need a special recipe that your aunt Harriet gave you.. and you’ve forgotten but you know it was printed.. in the Buchanan county… home development cookbook in 1931, fine, bingo bingo bingo on your computer and ten seconds later there it is. If you don’t think that’s going to make a big difference in our world… that speedy intercommunication, that almost magical.. interlock between.. the things that you want to know, and the things that I need to know, and the things that I want to know, and the things that you know….then.. I recommend that you read.. ‘Future Shock’ again, and of course, I recommend also.. that you read lotFs of science fiction, because we’re dealing with these kinds of problems, and many many more, every week of the year. You’ve been a lovely audience.. and I notice most of you have managed to stay awake after the blood rush to your stomachs, from that meal [laughs]. I can reduce(?) with that – why the speaker must foul the meal and everybodies going hmm [laughs] it reduces to using shock tactics, like good night and thank you good night.

[applause]

Woman: And thank you very much Frank Herbert. And now on behalf of the Department of English and Modern Languages [unclear] I’m again very glad to that you walked in to salvage a great lecture and now I think I heard instruments tuning up outside and so probably entertainment is probably about to begin, thank you very much and enjoy.

Files 7-14:  Frank Herbert reads excerpts from ‘Worm of Dune’ (God Emperor of Dune) manuscript with minor commentary to Willis E. McNelly

File 15:  Willis E. McNelly discussion about the Dune universe prior to publication of ‘God Emperor of Dune’ (1981) and ‘The Dune Encyclopedia’ (1984) part 1

M: The collaboration of it’s interesting, it’s the first ah novel I know of that you’ve done any collaborative work – what happened?

FH: Well.. it was spooky at times, we leapfrogged. I would do one chapter and Bill another and then we would come back.. after doing a number of chapters and we would check each other’s work, we’d compare notes. We’d plotted the story very loosely, we knew the kind of story we were going to do… generally where it was going to take place and.. the conditions.. the.. the values we were going to put in, but very general things. Then ah, we sat down and.. worked out the progression of the first few chapters and we were just trialling it, to see if it would work. And we got together.. at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, but.. at least once a week. And very spooky things happened as I say, we found that we were on the same beam, we were, we were naming characters the same, or one of us would get the idea to, of a piece of business that needed to be in a chapter and we’d insert it, and intending to mention it at the next meeting, and find out that the other had already picked up on this and was incorporating it into the next chapter. It’s as though we were, had tapped the same.. collective unconscious to, to do the story.

WM: What made you want to do a collaboration in the first place?

FH: … Bill had the idea to do the sequel, for me to do a sequel… to ‘Destination Void’.

WM: Oh yes.

FH: He likes it, and I didn’t have time, and so.. I suggested that we try a collaboration to speed it up so we could do it maybe in.. six months while other things were going on, and so.. Bill had never done this before so he said, ‘Sure fine, we’ll, we’ll try it’, neither of us committing…  Just say we’ll try it. And then the spooky things began to happen…. We got sick identically and after finishing the story each of us sprained the same little finger [laughs]. I mean, I, it was, there were some, there were too many very weird confidences even in one instance, without collaboration, putting the same name on the introduced new character which we had not consulted, we had not consulted about this new character we put the same name on her, and put her in the story.

WM: Is that right?

FH: Independently. So ah….

WM: I’ve not read the book yet, ah what’s your general reaction to it? What’s been the critical reaction? How well has it sold and so on?

FH: It’s sold very well… 40,000 plus hardcover.

WM: That’s hard to take.

FH: Yeah… yeah it’s one of those stories that’s.. picking up, in old books it’s picking up, people are.. moving it around saying, ‘Hey do you notice this?’ We used my technique… of enlisting the reader, to the reader’s limits, of exploring those limits of, of cooperative imagination which are available in a reader. I don’t know that this is done elsewhere, it probably is, I probably didn’t event it but ah..

WM: You demand a lot of your reader and you involve the reader and ah that’s, that’s a good technique.

FH: Yeah. I think that the more you can involve the reader in.. creative imagination the old game we played as children of ‘let’s pretend’, the more you can involve the reader in that… so that the reader actually will supply things, one reader will supply things that no other reader would supply, you leave that free to the reader.

WM: Well that’s one of the reasons I’m going to start asking you a number of ah ah one or two letter words to ask you to react to that, ah not only for the purposes of the encyclopedia you are a reader of your own works as well as being the creator of your own works, and um, in order to be able to give as much verisimilitude and authenticity to these things and I want to be able to be able to compare your reaction as a reader-creator to mine as a reader to the potential… writer of, of an essay on various topics.

FH: Well you know this is the way I write too? I come back and rewrite, going deeper into the story, and then rewrite again going deeper into the story.

WM: It’s your technique of leveling.

FH: That’s right.

WM: Creating levels as you’ve talked, talked about.

FH: Yeah.

WM: So I’m going to use one or two letter.. key words and ah you just sort of give me the idea of what-

FH: Like ‘it’, ‘go’, and ‘be’? [laughs]

WM: Did I say two letter words? Yeah I’m sorry. But ah ab. A couple of.. two letter.. two word phrases.

FH: Yeah ok.

WM: So that ah you’ll react to it.

[cuts]

WM: Okay do you want to react to the… [phone rings]

[cuts]

WM: The first topic would be then ah the Dune tarot, let’s start with that.

FH: Alright I envisaged the Dune tarot as a means of clouding the oracle. If you postulate oracular abilities, and I discuss that in greater depth.. in the new book, see you can refer to that, but if you postulate oracular abilities in this society, you’re dealing with ah a lot of unexamined assumptions… about prediction… Most people when they go to the oracle… want a couple of sure things… they can make a lot of money with, tell me what U.S. Steel’s going to do on the big board next week, and oh by the way I’d like a winner at Hialeah, and…

WM: But did you, did you envisage names of, of suits and names of trumps and names of cards?

FH: No, I think I, I think I gave a couple of offhand names but I didn’t go into it in depth, because my.. my base purpose in introducing a Dune tarot was to give a lot of prediction, you have a lot of prediction around, one interfering with the other, I, it was a clouding effect, I wanted that ah that clouding to occur.. to obscure the effect of ah of the primary oracle.

WM: Then the tarot has existed for the.. 20,000 years intervening between now and the time of the, of Dune Messiah ah.

FH: It’s already pretty old.

WM: Yeah I realise that, but it would then… ah be any suit names, card names, and so on.

FH: Well it also has another function you know, ah it is concretionising archetypes… and if you’re going to contretionise the archetypes of a particular time, then you have to have some.. substantive way of doing it, some way to make it visible to say yes this is the archetype.

WM: So that the author the… entry on the dune tarot could make up ah names for.. the major arcana?

FH: Oh yes.

WM: And so on?

FH: Oh yes.

WM: Without any difficulty.

FH: Just as long as he keeps in mind the archetypal forms of Dune, and the fact that this is a, a system of clouding the oracle.

WM: My tentative ah writer for this article is quite familiar with the tarot in general and Jungian archetypes in particular.

FH: Okay good fine that’s, that’s all you need, and if, if that person reads the.. four books and then come out with the archetypes, because I’m quite clear about the archetypes in this, you’re going to have obviously a um ah one Shai-Hulud, you’d have to have  Shai-Hulud in this. This is the ah, if you’re expert is familiar with Jung, this is the monster in the depths who guards the pearl of great price… mindless monster. The, the monster that reacts, that merely does things… for which you have no reasonable, rational, logical explanation.

[cuts]

WM: The second done would be ah the spice itself.

FH: Okay, the spice stands for many things, we have analogs in our society water… heroin… I could envisage a ah conditions under which air… would be this substance, let’s say in a space capsule. It is that.. substance upon which.. a great deal of life, it’s an energy source upon which a great deal of life… sits, it, it makes demands on it for its existence. Now it has geriatric properties, therefore you can that it is ah a specific for aging.

WM: I once made the.. ah metaphor that if one views.. Dune and the spice as a rough metaphor for the Arabian mystique – the spice could become oil.

FH: Oh yes indeed, in fact I had that in mind. It is a substance upon which a great deal of life demands this substance to, to survive. If you took the oil away from the U.S. immediately a lot of people would die, we are on, we are in the conditions of hydraulic despotism right now, with oil as the, the substitute for water in the original.

WM: Do you have any notions about the chemistry of it?

FH: Only vaguely, um ah my… my notions were that it was such, of such extraordinary complexity… so many interrelated.. molecular bonds, that you ran into a problem similar to the computer problem of the billion gate circuit.

WM: Which is?

FH: Well.. it just becomes so monstrously complex that no single system can handle the reproduction of its pattern, you cannot project its pattern on the wall and say, ‘that’s its pattern’. The billion gate system in a computer… well that would just take us up for hours.

WM: Yeah.

FH: But, but the ah, just say that it is an absolutely horrendous.. complexity.. that you cannot derive.. a… a comprehensible, in a single… projection, a comprehensible.. pattern describing it.

WM: Now there is an implication in the first three books… that ah, because Arrakis once was a green planet, once was a water planet, that the… Shai-Hulud had been.. brought to the planet, from off planet, and had ah.. had thus over a period.. of-

FH: If, if that implication is in there, it is the implication is in inadvertently. My, my-

WM: Maybe it’s in my mind then.

FH: My intent was to have an evolutionary process over an extremely long period.. build this complex creature out of which a complex substance emerged. Now the, the vectors are sandtrout – to sandworm. The sandtrout does what many vectors do; it helps create.. the environment in which the metamorphosis will, not only occur, but that next vector will survive… you see?

[cuts]

WM: Well let’s continue this then with a um, you’re… because the spice is so directly collected, connected to Shai-Hulud it is… perhaps spermatic material or something like that of, of Shai-Hulud.

FH: I envisaged it as a substance which permeates the entire.. environment.. and which reflects on the lifeforms.. that are living there, to help support them.

WM: And it, is it a product of Shai-Hulud?

FH: Oh yes, oh yes indeed. It’s a product of the worm. The worm-

WM: Is the only source.

FH: Is the only source.

WM: And thus Arrakis has then for.. presumably tens of centuries, the only source in the known universe for the spice.

FH: That’s right.

[cuts]

FH: You understand?

WM: You have some notion as to the population, the worm population, of ah… Arrakis at the time of Dune.

FH: Yeah I would say that there was one worm for every sixty.. kilometres, roughly, in a, a circle. And I-I set that up.. as an environmental base and also a transport base.

WM: Okay.. and then we could extrapolate to the number of worms then?

FH: Yes.

WM: Fine.

[cuts]

FH: You understand don’t you that when I say that Arrakis is dry… I don’t mean there is no moisture, but I mean that moisture is severally limited by the lifeform that dominates. The sandtrout encapsulate water in the depths, it’s part of their… behavioural pattern, part of their cycle. Then… they, as they evolve, they are replaced.. by their, and they can breed you see, in fact I said that the sandtrout can breed and reproduce themselves until.. the moisture level reaches such a low point, that the next.. developmental element of the metamorphosis can occur then a number of them reaching maturity will not breed, will move out and evolve into sandworms.

WM: And the Little Maker and then the sand worm itself.

FH: Yeah that’s right the Little Maker and then into the sandworm.

WM: Ah alright another topic then – CHOAM.

FH: Yeah ah before you leave this you see what I was doing was building complexity on complexity.

WM: Ok fine.

FH: Ok CHOAM, recombine, CHOAM was every cartel we have ever, ever imagined… But amplified.. to a horrendous.. level of ability to control.. the market.. the product, at every at every stage of its development, to delivery to sale… It’s OPEC, OPEC is the, the perfect analog of it.

WM: What would be the relationship then of CHOAM to the Spacing Guild?

FH: Interdependence. CHOAM controls the spice market. The Spacing Guild requires spice. You have interdependence.

WM: And we can really invent ah how.. the Spacing Guild ah discovered ah spice.. in the first place and, and so on, presumably tens of centuries

FH: Before, before there was a Spacing Guild. 

WM: Yes.

FH: We can that they’re.. my own view of it was that before there was a Spacing Guild there were people whose genetic susceptibilities.. were the precursors of the Atreides and some the same.. genetic lines have involved into the Atreides.. you see? And the precursors were susceptible in a particular way, in a linear prescient way, very limited, they could, they could see the path in the woods before they reached it… and know if there was bear waiting at the corner you see? And I had, I didn’t go to that extreme of primitiveness but I, but I did think of um ah battle commanders.. who know where the enemy is… you see? And then slowly a larger.. picture emerging in the evolutionary process and then a specific, a specialisation, were they see yeah transport; we’re the only ones, we can control it, we can control the market.

WM: With linear lines through  space then?

FH: Yes. They know where they’re going to run into detritus before it gets there and they can navigate.. to avoid.. problems. With a, with a Guild Navigator you get there.

WM: And presumably then they’ve also been around for tens of centuries?

FH: Oh yes, but evolving in space,

WM: Okay. Ah what is the relationship of CHOAM to the Landsraad?

FH: They are interrelated corporate directorships.

WM: What is the Landsraad? I’m not, I’m a little uncertain about that.

FH: The Landsraad is the visual… debating society within which the political.. elements of political economics.. operate. This is, you know that you can’t separate economics from politics or vice versa. I’m sure you realise that?

WM: Yes.

FH: Alright. Then this was my bowing to that fact. You have to have some kind of a political arena.. within which the.. political elements of the political-economic system.. operate. Of course it’s an elitist society as such.. things always are, they always become elitist even if they didn’t originate as elitist, look at the Soviet Union for god’s sakes, look at our own US Senate.

WM: …Or our American oil companies.

FH: Well yes. The influence of economics, of powerful economic blocs, on the voting policies of the U.S. Senate is far greater.. than that of any small voting block around the country, any constituency, The people who elect a United States Senator have much far to less say about what that Senator will do in the halls of congress than do powerful economic blocs.

WM: Now the Landsraad is composed ah basically of the feudal houses?

FH: That’s right the Great Houses.

WM: And what about the, now how many, do you have any idea of the number of Great Houses?

FH: I hadn’t even imagined it, but it was enormous because there, there would be the ins and the outs.

WM: What would distinguish a Great House form a Minor house

FH: Great houses would control one or more planets… with major products… which were very popular and economically very powerful in the- 

WM: Thus the Atreides on Caladan controlling.. the various products of Caladan.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Become a, a Great House, also are a Great House.

FH: Whale fur, Pongi rice. I envisaged Pongi rice as being.. an enormously fertile and productive rice, where you get something like a 98% high protein balanced food… out of the energy input, that is the earth and the sun. Very, a very highly developed, highly evolved form of vegetable product, which would be, in turn be very valuable you see.

WM: And then the Great House controls one or more planets is that it?

FH: That’s right.

WM: And the Minor houses then?

FH: The Minor houses are ones who seek Great House status, and have some thing that they control or do that has economic and, politic, and/or political value. They have leverage in the society, and so it’s easier to use them… but, for the Great Houses to use them, then to fight them.

WM: And this, they compose the Landsraad which in turn is sort of a… almost a galactic um board of governors ah? 

FH: Yeah kind of.

WM: Parliament ah?

FH: Yeah. It is one of the, one of the elements of the tripod you see?

WM: The tripod?

FH: Yeah. The Saudakar – the military force, CHOAM, and Landsraad. You have other influences on this of course, you have that ah, by implication you have that flag with the rattlesnake on it flying over every Great House.

WM: The rattlesnake?

FH: Yeah ‘don’t tread on me’.

WM: [laughs].

FH: Because if you did, say you used atomics against them from space… This is disruptive, this is.. bad for business… in, in the Godfather sense you see? [chuckles] So you don’t do this, you don’t disrupt the marketplace. This is the element of The Great Convention you see?

WM: Okay.

[cuts]

WM: The Great Convention now?

FH: We have, we have The Great Convention which says we… we don’t use atomics on each others from space, because if we do… many others are committed to exterminate the perpetrator of such a disruptive action.

WM: Is this a formal or an informal.. thing?

FH: Formal.

WM: The Great Convention?

FH: Formal.

WN: And thus its history would be thousands of years old?

FH: Oh yes. And very powerful because it is another.. agreement structure.. within.. The space society.

WM: Okay.

[cuts]

FH: You start analysing the economics of let’s say the world today… you don’t find simple linear.. problems. Let’s say we start addressing the problem of the Importation of Japanese automobiles into the United States… there all kinds of influences on that.

WM: Permutations.

FH: Oh yes the.. the market in scrap steel, oil, whale, whaling is involved in this.. the agreement on the North Pacific salmon is involved in this. 

WM: The price of Beef in Japan.

FH: U.S. technology. The, the, our major export right now… is technological knowhow. This is one of our problems, we’re acknowl- we’re, we’re exporting the.. expertise… which others are using, and we‘ve had lots of examples of this, during World War II for example; the Germans.. sent a crack team to Japan, of lens makers, to teach the Japanese how to make better lens, for their binoculars and for cameras and what not, the Japanese learned it beautifully and quickly developed a better quality control system than the Germans had, and improved on the chemistry of the glass so that by the time World War II was over, the Japanese had a real lever on the camera market, they were producing far better cameras than the Germans and very quickly everybody found out about it, life photographers started spreading the word.

WM: And you brought a Pentax instead of a Leica

FH: No you bought a Contax… You bought ah yeah you, you bought a Pentax instead of Leica, if that you, if that was your market level, because Pentax was cheaper, but the lens, the lens themselves.. were far superior and the Japanese nationalised quality control systems, they nationalised quality control. The Japanese spotted that popular image of Japan, of Japanese products, that they lasted quick… and that they were flimsy, the cute little Jap toy, the quotes you see. And they set up a nationalised quality control system to eliminate that image… and they are really tough with it.

[cuts]

WM: Let’s go back to The grand Convention then now.

FH: The Great Convention.

WM: The Great Convention – This was a formal.. meeting of the Great Houses?

FH: It was a, it was an arena wherein they could bring together these complex, this Complex webwork of relationships, at the political level, as part of the political-economic structure.

WM: Okay ah let’s turn now to um… the.. Water of Life.

FH: The essence. Well I postulated that because of the… existing, although low level, moisture, in the air, of Arrakis, that there was a constant… interrelationship between the worm and.. the emission of spice, that it kind of emitted it a little bit in the sand around it and that every now and then it had an accumulation of it it, too much, or hit a bad patch… moisture, and.. then put out a lot of it. But you could amplify that, as the Fremen found, if you kill a worm by immersing it in water. So they would trap a small worm… a Little Maker… Then they would immerse it in water, killing it, but in that process they accelerated.. the spice production.. abilities of the worm, where it produced a spice essence, a… a spice amplified… a very dangerous substance to people not conditioned to it. The uncut heroin you see?

[cuts]

WM: Alright let’s continue with crysknife.

FH: Okay.

WM: History, origin, development.

FH: The crysknife of course-

WM: Mystique.

FH: -is one of the teeth, one of the backset(?) teeth, is sharp… and pointed, and of a convenient size for a knife, from Shai-Hulud… actually though the Little Maker, although occasionally they would get a ah a wild one.. from the desert, these were, I, I didn’t go into detail, I thought of doing it and then this was one of the things I discarded in the, in the process, it was, it was a detail not required,… better devote your attention otherwhere, elsewhere. But I, but my original thought was this is a, a tooth, the major source is one of the teeth of the Little Maker, which is.. fixed by being.. immersed in.. in spice essence and then worn next to the person, actually touching the skin of the person, who is going to have it… and its fixed to that person, then, and as long as its near that person, within the.. aura of that person, it doesn get brittle, it re-, maintain its, its liveness, and is a living knife… you see?

WM: The substance is ivory like?

FH: Yeah ivory like but sharper, harder sharper, more crystalline. And when you prepared one for giving… you immersed it first in spice essence and then gave it to somebody.. then by wearing it next to themselves its fixed to them.

WM: And the unfixed knife?

FH: The unfixed knife, knife will slowly become brittle.. and if you try to use it it will shatter.

WM: It is hollow?

FH: It has hollow.. pipe in it, you can put poison in that if you want… it’s a fang in that sense. 

WM: Okay.

[cuts]

WM: Alright what about the Voice?
FH: Voice is a an extension of something that we see all the time. People who command…  dominant people, develop command voice… you know this as well as I do, and you can see it in caricature.

File 16:  Willis E. McNelly discussion about the Dune universe prior to publication of ‘God Emperor of Dune’ (1981) and ‘The Dune Encyclopedia’ (1984) part 2

WM: Okay.

FH: I would tell the questioner to, I’ll give you a ah a primary exercise in Voice, so you can begin to learn about Voice. I’m going to give you a target, a person.. I’m going to describe that person to you.. I’m going to limit to you to telephone contact, so that the nuances of voice don’t have to be  considered at first, just content, and gross tone. Your individual is an American Legionnaire who fought in World War.. II.. No World War I, whose has lived in the small town all of his life, is married, has a daughter and a son, the daughter being older… has worked at the same the job since getting, leaving World War II, World War I, now I want, I’m going to give you his phone number.. and I want you to make him angry, [laughs] and and of course they’d laugh, and they’d see the point. Now if you start there and then you think.. of other.. nuances. I want to make this person happy, I want to make them doubt… I want to arouse a certain specific behaviour pattern, in this person. Now you begin getting the nuances of voice control, which are, is partly a knowledge of the individual that you’re.. trying to control this way, and your own control of voice, tone, and content.

WM: Now the Voice then within the context of the novel is largely a creation of the Bene Gesserit? 

FH: Yes They have refined it.

WM: And thus.. what about the techniques of implanting reactions to certain sounds?

FH: I’ve just described the person in which ah, to whom you could ascribe implanted reactions by things that had happened to him, in a gross sense. Now we refine that characteristic even.. more delicately, you see? So it’s an amplification in another direction, you’re you’re you’re increasing the susceptibility of a person to this modality.

WM: Well I anticipate this, this article being written by one of our professors at Cal State who is a professor of speech.

FH: Oh lovely excellent, linguistics and speech of course are primary elements of this.

WM: And ah he ah he’s just looking forward to writing this very very much and ah he will be able to create ah certain Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers of the past ah… 

FH: Who..

WM: Or sisters who..

FH: Who brought it to a new height.

WM: And so on.

FH: As they used it they learned.

WM: Fine.

[cuts]

FH: You see the directions?

WM: Oh yes yes.

[cuts]

WM: I saw, I saw a ah… a.. Cabot… George Cabot, use Voice.. on.. his.. underlings at the U.S. embassy in Paris… I mean, yeah.. Henry I mean not George, Henry..

BH: Lodge.

WM: Henry Cabot Lodge.

FH: Yeah Henry Cabot Lodge, excuse me I was, my head was someplace there.

WM: Yeah.

FH: But, but I, I saw Henry Cabot Lodge use this.. in Paris, as I, as it comes back to me the name of the, even the name of the person upon whom he used it was, is available to me but I won’t, I won’t reveal it. But he was using Voice, and there wasn’t any doubt that he was using Voice… that person jumped.

WM: Well this then is related to languages and the linguistic background, let’s take one..

FH: It’s also a, there are nuances within this that you have to recognise, there are nuances of, of behaviour, or things you do, your posture, the way you-

WM: Bodytalk.

FH: Bodytalk yes, the, the, the mouth shape, the way you form, your mouth forms the words, the way you look at the person when you say it.

WM: And the entire concept of the metamessage as well?

FH: Oh indeed, the whole thing is there.

WM: All of that is of course pertinent.

FH: Yeah I I doubt very much that Henry Cabot Lodge knew the first damn thing about what he was doing, it was entirely instinctual with him, he just was ah had been raised in that milieu, and could do it.

WM: Well let’s take up ah the language background and let’s be specific first.. ah Galach.

FH: Galach is like English – a language that has arisen out of collisions, it is a sponge language, which will absorb any necessary.. sound.. for any purpose that it needs. This is the power of English of course, it does, it changes. English is spoken by people who are willing to change the sound structure for new demands. Galach is the same kind of language. It is ah it is Chinook, it would have originated as a trade language, it is um um camp Latin. The popular mythology says that French and Spanish and ah and many other of the Romance languages grew out of Latin, that’s not true, not true at all, these languages grew out of camp Latin; which was a ah a lingua franca spoken on the frontier, it was kind of patois that you, was developed to talk to the captive, the subject nations, the cook that you hired from the local people, the slave… it was a, a pidgin Latin.. like pidgin English, which by the way is still spoken in Hawaii, 

WM: Yes.

FH: But again, you see, it had the medium.. to develop. There’s somebody’s at the door Bev

[cuts]

WM: Back to Galach again, ah it’s a lingua franca

FH: It’s a trade language.

WM: and ah..

FH: It is an evolved, it is a language that I envisioned having evolved from a trade pidgin into a dominant language.. because of the various collisions which have occurred.. with the people who speak it, they run into another society and they find useful things, noises in that society which are useful to them and they absorb them.

WM: Does it have ah in your mind did have any  specific origins on any ah terran language?

FH: I kind of had it in the back of my head that it had English behind it and ah and some of the Romance languages and very likely some … Russian, perhaps some Chinese, but that it was written in a Roman script- 

WM: Okay.

FH: -the way they are doing now in Japan you see.

WM: Romaji.

FH: Yes.

WM: Ah each planet however would maintain its own language?

FH: There would be planets that had their own language, yes, but Galach is the language that everybody speaks, it’s a second lang- everybody’s second language, except for some people who have it as a primary language, and who may have other languages they speak for trade reasons. Remember the effect.. that you’re going to have.. by having a, a transport guild, a Spacing Guild. They’re going to have a strong influence on.. on the market place, they the people who are going to speak all the languages, they’re the translators, the Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit seeing the power in this.. have picked this up themselves, they speak many languages, it’s a natural thing they would do out of the evocation of Voice, you see? The Great Houses.. would teach their children many languages… They’d all use Galach, and lots of them would use Galach as a primary language because of its fluidity, because of its power.

WM: And Galach is the primary language of the Atreides family?

FH: Yeah they, they speak it in the home, they have other languages, they speak it in the home, because.. it’s it, it’s like the Tsar family speaking English at home… 

WM: Okay.

FH: You see?

WM: Ah well let’s talk a little bit about the linguistic history of the Fremen and the Fremen language then.

FH: Ok That’s out of the Arabic tradition, but an Arabic tradition modified again by lots of evolutionary trauma… a period as slaves, a period as um ah.. fugitives… you follow what I’m saying? 

WM: Yes.

FH: They’re going to have picked up special words. I have a, one of the Reverend Mothers in the new book say.. to the other one, quite seriously; ‘You can’t get good assassins anymore’ [laughs], you see? And the, and the Fremen have the language of, of the poison, and the assassiantion, but within themselves they have this tremendous loyalty which grows out of, out of extreme interdependency. They can’t depend on laws and paper, things that are written down on paper and books, you have to be able to look at a person and say, ‘yes, my life is in your hands, and your life is in my hands’… you see?

[cuts]

FH: These kinds of things… very strongly influence the development of a language.

WM: Ah Jack Vance’s ‘The Languages of bao- Pao’ is a perfect example of that.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Ah let’s turn then w-, now that you mentioned it, to the concept of assassins and the war of assassins, let’s take them one at a time.

FH: This is a permitted form of violence, against which there are multiple layers of defence, that’s why it’s permitted, it’s like a very bloody chess game… It is an outlet, which if you closed off, would only erupt in greater violence, you see? It’s a valve.

WM: Alright safety valve.

FH: Yeah.

WM: And the war of assassins?

FH: The war of assassins is a ah… is a ritualised.. form of this.

WM: Not necessarily a specific war?

FH: That’s right. There have been wars of assassins, there are very likely would have been one like ah like we say W. W. 1. you see. There would be, it’s just like particular chess game where people refer to it oh yes.. you had to be there to appreciate the…

WM: The trenches or whatever.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Okay.

[Cuts]

WM: Now we’re going to get started on something which may take a bit of time, but I have to ask a little bit about the Bene Gesserit.

FH: Ok.

WM: …ah do you have any notions at all about the origins of the B.G.?

FH: Yeah. I thought of them as beginning out of something like a women’s liberation movement, but with a very conscious direction… They said men have mishandled these things, these matters so badly in the past, that we are going to show them how. My model was the Jesuits. Think of them as female Jesuits. Now this means um that they have a very powerful and very tightly.. locked infrastructure, and they too have evolved.

WM: With an Incredible sense of internal obedience. 

FH: Oh that’s their loyalty to each other. Now I based that on the fact, on an observed fact, that I think is true, that.. women.. tend.. to have a sympathy for women which transcends any arbitrarily imposed class structure… I’m sure you’ve observed that we, we have lots, we give lots of lip service to it but I think it’s real there. There is a folk wisdom about this, don’t ah deny the.. authenticity, the truths, hidden in folk wisdom. It tends to be sneered at occasionally, but I, I look at it and say yes that didn’t arise out of nothing, there has to be something there. So with all of these kind of amorphous and specific things in mind, I, I visualised a kind of a, of a cell meeting, as just at the beginning and very primitive in form.

WM: Beginning before or after the Butlerian Jihad?

FH: Oh far before.

WM: Far before.

FH: Oh yes This has roots in the deep lost past. They, um it, it could have arisen out of a trauma, the mistreatment of women.. on a particular planet. I didn’t, I wasn’t specific in my mind, I just said the need arose and some women got together, and these were the things they talked about, and this was the primitive seed, which was set on an evolutionary path of perfection, you see their goal is to perfect these various things – their own structural cohesiveness, their own structural integrity. They have the ah, the strength of a bureaucracy with a life of its own, to perpetuate the life of the institution.

WM: And this.. accounts for the Panoplia Protectiva?

FH: Yeah, among other things.

WM: Do you want to discourse on that aspect for a moment before we go back to the B.G.?

FH: They go into engineering religions, for specific purposes, that’s one of their stocks in trade. Their, their primary marketable talents are… training of Truthsayers… the teaching of females, they’re a finishing school, by teaching females they get the cream of the crop you see? And they pick off the best of them to make them into Bene Gesserit… you follow?

WM: And so the Panoplia has been their seeding of the universe with.. a.. common archetypal mythic pattern?

FH: That’s right, which ah upon which they can depend, it’s there and they know it’s there, they know its outlines, and if they need they can use it.

WM: Alright now.. going back to the seed, cellular organisation of the B.G.-

FH: Before we get off of this by the way – this is a, a primary reason, which I never bring out by the way, I just leave it there sitting in there in ah in the new book, why Leto takes the breeding program away from them… and he also kind of isolates them you see, takes their power away from them, lets them go on, becoming weaker and weaker, but still a structure, they’re still teaching the, they’re still a finishing school for females, for rich females… they’re still producing a few reverend mothers, limited by the fact that he is very parsimonious with his spice allotments to them. He’s keeping them alive you see? They’re another one of the forces in the empire, another spoke of The Golden Path.

WM: Well then let’s go back then to the cellular organisation.. that they.. had as they started and it just sort of grew by process of accretion.. to.. set.. the male chauvinist society straight. 

FH: Yeah, or to, to, yeah to do that, and, but also to control the things that they thought the, the male society could never handle although they hoped it might, and thus the Kwisatz Haderach.

WM: …Ah that, the, the Kwisatz Haderach is pretty clear.. as to what they want there.

FH: Yeah.

WM: That’s pretty clear in the book.

FH: …They’re trying to bridge the sexual gap.

WM: …They’re trying to discover what men really want.

FH: Yeah, and of course in the process you must understand, um they become enormously capable in all kinds of things, including sexuality, the a kind of an ultimate courtesan, they they train their adepts in all.. the available.. tools of manipulation that are available to somebody whom the accident of birth has called female.

WM: And they keep gene records on all of these?

FH: Oh yes – what’s the matter darling?

[cuts]

FH: You hear what she said? ‘It’s no accident that, that you’re born a woman you choose to loom’ [laughs]. Ok.

WM: So ah let’s talk about the Truthsayer then.

FH: The Truthsayer is an obvious um spin off from Voice.

WM: I hadn’t thought of that connection.

FH: Oh Yeah think about it… If you can control one half of the spectrum, if you have analysed that to this fineness, to this much detail.

WM: It’s the reverse.

FH: It’s the reverse.

WM: You’re able to detect-

FH: Yeah.

WM: -whether or not. So the Truthsayer is not one who necessarily says the truth but who is able to detect when truth is said.

FH: Yeah.

WM: I see. Which is the backside of Voice.

FH: Yeah. And really when you get down to it, when you start analysing the nature of truth, what you’re really talking about is that the speaker believes what that speaker says. 

WM: Yeah

FH: You see? The speaker is sincere.

[cuts]

WM: Do you have some notion about the structure of the B.G.?

FH: Oh yes, um it is a ah a feudatory, a female feudatory, with a council which will be dominated, in each epoch, by ah  by one.. primary female, by one alpha female… who, who will achieve this, the way this stature, the, the stature, the way a some primitive tribes selected their chiefs.. the most capable.

WM: And so there would be levels at, as one would work up?

FH: You would have acolytes, trainees, um ah you would have postulants. You see I, I wasn’t putting them down at all, I was building enormous strength into them. There are real strengths here. Because any society is no stronger than its ability to choose, or the way it chooses leaders. This is one of our weaknesses right in this society, the way we choose leaders you see. 

WM: True.

FH: We get the leaders we deserve because of the system by which we choose them.

WM: And, and by which we’re forced to choose them particularly in our tripartite system.

FH: Yeah.

WM: As opposed to say a parliamentary system which gives you a-

FH: So I postulated that the Bene Gesserit had a way of choosing the very best, by their criteria, the very best leadership.

WM: Which leads them to the concept of the Reverend Mother.

FH: Yes.

WM: Which… There are more than one, or is there only…? Let’s talk about the concept.

FH: There are lots of Reverend Mothers. 

WM: Well explain this would you please?

FH: You know originally, there are ah damn few of them at the, in the time of the worm.

WM: You mean at the time of, that Dune takes place?

FH: Leto II.

WM: Oh alright, damn few later on then?

FH: Yeah because that, but that’s Leto II’s, that’s his doing.

WM: Yeah.

FH: But in the time of Dune there are a lot of them because they’re very, they’re riding a high wave at that time, they have a lot of spice, virtually unlimited resource.. for the creation of of Reverend Mothers, they have, their Panoplia Protectiva has set the ah the patterns all through their ah their society for them to ah to perform.. as they wish, they move freely in this society, they’re extremely useful in this society, they fill a function, they have a niche, they’re the advisors of the powerful.

WM: And the phrase Bene Gesserit Witch?

FH: Yeah because they do things that other people don’t feel they can do, and of course the Bene Gesserit would foster that. They would maintain the mystery… you see and that’s, that’s the way witchcraft is maintained, it becomes an esoteric knowledge, which is held by a priesthood.

WM: Or a priestesshood.

FH:Well whatever but I was using the term generically.

WM: Of course.

FH: …The, the nature of it is such, the nature of the society is such, that they know where their strengths are and they know how to perpetuate those strengths.

[cuts]

WM: So when ah Jane Hipolito writes the article at the B.G., she’ll be able to.. create Reverend Mothers and.. places, Wallach IV as I recall is the home planet?

FH: That’s where the Chapterhouse is.

WM: Chapterhouse.. and Chapterhouse being the centre of the training and and everything else and they, they can presumably have been there for centuries. How do they support themselves?

FH: By being a school.

WM: And selling their services?

FH: By selling their services. In fact, read that chapter on the Bene Gesserit report, it, it has a lot of clues to this.

WM: In ah?

FH: In the new book.

WM: In the new book.

FH: They’re very aware of the economic base.. upon which they sit.. but they do put themselves in the exposed position of leadership, they’re always at least one step behind, advising the queen or the king you follow?

[cuts]

WM: Now, in addition to the Bene Gesserit as a mind training.. organisation, you have the Bene Tleilaxu.. as another method of.. mind training?

FH: No I thought of that more as a kind of a, an outgrowth of certain kinds of medical research, which came to ah, control its own progression. I, I consciously and purposefully avoid the use of the word evolution here. Evolution has a kind of a randomity implicit in the the concept. My, my general thought was that certain medical research into gene shaping, and gene surgery, into the knowledge of genetic interrelationships.. would have led some of these researchers to say, ‘we can do it better than nature..’ and they would, would have done specific things which have, would have created a whole body of support labourers… people who were designed to do certain things, not in the, um in the sense of 1984/Brave New World, but because there’s a certain randomity that still occurs in this you see, but where you might have have structured some people to have be very muscular to be handle, to be able to handle heavy weights, other people to be able to deal with a lot of different ah um mental inputs, and, at the same time, and in the process they would have stumbled on the ah the shape changers, the face dancers. What a marvellous tool of espionage hmm? So they have started to move out into the society but of course they’re being discovered [snap] right like that. So, while its useful it has its limits… but they have powerful base, you don’t know where they might be, where all of them might be, not least not until the time of Leto II… and therefore they would have gone along their developmental path, and their choice was.. to ah to do it in the test tube.. instead of the street [laughs].

WM: Okay. Fine.

[cuts]

FH: I bring this right out as, as a specific – where Moneo is telling Idaho um that Leto has deliberately not chosen the Bene Tleilax way, he insists that in his breeding program once he has made the selection – they breed the way humans have always bred. 

WM: I see.

FH: You see? And, and he specifically disavows… the Bene Tleilax way. He, he doesn’t deny them.. their own expression… doesn’t say to them ‘I’m going to exterminate you’, he, he threatens to a couple times but he doesn’t actually do it, because they’re another one of the spokes.. you see?

WM: Alright let’s turn now to um ah another topic ah the um…

[cuts]

WM: Something I overlooked a while back on melange – the concept of melange mining.

FH: Yeah they would find it by odour, and by colour. Um my thought was that it fermented, you see the sandworm might deposit it on the surface or in the depths. If it gets into the depths it’s going to ferment, it’s going to, it’s a complex substance, it’s going to form complex gases and there’s going to be what is called a spice blow. 

WM: Very orgasmic-

FH: Yeah.

WM: -as you describe it.

FH: Oh yeah it just goes, it’s going to create a, a, a fluid motion in a um ah, like a sand like substance lets say, there’s not, I don’t think of it as sand I think of it more as a jeweller’s rouge, in consistency, but it’s going to flow like a liquid.

WM: Now a spice factory then?

FH: Is a way of.. siphoning it out and purifying it on the scene so they haul spice rather than sand. I envisaged it by doing it by centrifugal force… or possibly by a um.. um.. 

[cuts]

FH: possibly by the method of Maxwell’s Demon.

WM: Ah. 

FH: You see? 

WM: Ok.

[cuts]

WM: Now while Melange is.. in one sense the coin of the realm, let’s.. talk about… money specifically. Ahh is there, I mean we have the Imperial credit or, how is this handled specifically?
FH: I thought of it being as handled on very um expensive, very hard to reproduce.. type of paper, and I was nonspecific about it. I originated the idea of ridulian crystal paper a long time ago, I just hadn’t found a um, a, a place where I wanted to introduce it.. where it was absolutely necessary for the progression of the story for me to come in and, and deal with that, as a story element. Um I visualise this paper as being… very strong, it’s only one molecule thick, very very dense, in other words very hard to reproduce, and upon which you can exscribe, inscribe stuff which is-.

File 17:  Willis E. McNelly discussion about the Dune universe prior to publication of ‘God Emperor of Dune’ (1981) and ‘The Dune Encyclopedia’ (1984) part 3

FH: Yeah, my thought was not currency but letters of credit, and a local Great House.. backed.. planetary currency based on the letters of credit which are, are interplanetary, which are imperial credits. All of this of course is based on various things, all of, and all of this devolves down to energy.

WM: Money as a measurement of energy.

FH: Yeah money as a measurement of energy, and that’s what I was, and that was my, my structural ah image of it.

[cuts]

WM: Say that again please?

FH: In the new society of of ‘Worm of Dune’ the new book, Leto has imposed his own economic strictures on that society, he does not allow interest, and undoubtedly there would be small pirating  efforts to.. escape this stricture, and he would allow undoubtedly a small breaking, a sinning against that law, you see? because Leto has constructed ‘the church which is the state’, so you don’t just break a law you commit a sin… and one of the sins is charging interest, he says cash on the barrelhead, which is a very particular kind of society you see. Think about that.. it is a society in which growth is, can be severely controlled.

WM: And which forces you to live in the present not the future.

FH: Oh yes.

WM: Ah this would be-

FH: There’s no pie in the sky… in that kind of society.

WM: Except by and by.

FH: Oh yes where Leto takes you to heaven.

WM: Yes. Alright let’s um let’s turn then from ah the question of money.. to um ah another.. very broad general question and that is the Imperium and its history.

FH: My image of it was a society which had evolved out of a number of convulsions, some of which I would mention. There was ah the great war, ah space war from which the Corrinos arose, they became dominant out of this. The background of that would have been the long.. tough training of the core from which the Saudakar were evolved.

WM: Which we’ll go into a bit later.

FH: Yeah, um, and of course every such convulsion requires that you make readjustments, you ah, and an interesting thing happens out of it too, have you noticed by the way how many Vietnamese restaurants and how much of Vietnam is coming into the flow of American society?

WM: Oh yes of course.

FH: Not just restaurants but there, but social changes out of this. Well you put that on an, a galactic empire scale, there are going to be big changes… out of which these specifics arise – the moment the story begins, it’s the moment Dune begins, you see? My, my thought about the story is that it is a story because you start it here, and you stop it there… you cut a, a slice out of something that is in movement, and it goes on moving, and it had movement before you started it.

WM: Thus there could theoretically have been a novel about let’s say the Butlerian Jihad?

FH: Oh undoubtedly many of them. The Butlerian Jihad I wanted-

WM: But let’s take that up in a minute, that’s a whole other extra topic.

FH: Okay. But that was one of the convulsions.

WM: One of the convulsions.. okay. So as result of these convulsions we get the, we get the imperium as it’s constituted at the beginning of Dune itself, and that has been around for, again, centuries?

FH: Oh yes.

WM: Tens of centuries?

FH: Yes.

WM: Ah why the particular emphasis about the Padishah system?

FH: It’s a hierarchical structure in which the power is recognised and the uses of it are understood.

WM: But Padishah of no particular importance other than.. Persian history?

FH: Oh they, the name came fr- came out of the past, um but it doesn’t have to follow the exact structure of the past. We, we use names out of the past for quite different things. Do you know the origin for example of a dashboard, the name dashboard in an automobile? It was off the buggy days, it was the board in front of you that protected you from the dashing of the horse’s hooves. You see we, the, labels evolve out of, out of the new necessities, the new requirements. The Csar of all the Russians – that’s Caesar.

WM: Caesar, yes… So we can really invent emperors and backgrounds and so on with very little difficulty?

FH: Oh yes, oh yes, no, no problem there and all.

WM: And always cover everything by saying it’s, fragments were lost in the Butlerian Jihad or something like that.

FH: Oh yeah and think of this too, that the specifics of the Imperium government, um.. at the beginning of Dune, are such that you have a kind of a refined constitutional monarchy, but they don’t say a constitution they say the great convention.

WM: And the Landsraad and CHOAM.

FH: And the Landsraad and CHOAM you see. It’s a refined constitutional monarchy, them recognising enormous power in the hands of each one of the elements… enormous disruptive power, so each one of them depends on the other, on the good will of the other.

Hope to hear the quotes [chuckles].

WM: Yes. Well then let’s turn to the next topic would be the concept of um the Butlerian Jihad itself.

FH: Ok um this arises out of the mythology of computers, that they.. can think… that they can.. become pseudo-human… there are limits on that of course. My view of it is that they.. at root are a machine.. and one of the pitfalls of machines is that they tend to condition.. the people who use them to treat their fellow humans like other machines. And you carry that on too far and that’s going to become so abrasive, the treatment of your fellow humans as machines, that.. the whole society is going to turn against what they see as the instrumentality….. supporting this attitude. You see? They will focus on.. a particular thing… the computer. Of course they’re hanging an innocent man [chuckles], but, but, because no computer can think, it will never think like a human. I’ll say this flatly, I’ll go way out on a limb – computers deal.. with discrete bits, no matter how rapidly they deal with them, they are discrete bits like exposures of movie film, each frame. Human beings if we deal with discrete bits, if that is the basis of our operation, our behaviour, they are so fine, so rapid, so multi-linked that.. I think, I, I despair of our ever separating a bit out. The best description of what we do is that we operate within a continuum, where there is no starting and stopping… it’s a flow, unbroken, it’s a continuum. When you try to copy that, to make an image of that, from a system that is confined to discrete bits you are.. reduced to… a system which will never really reach the continuum level, however it can do some things automatically, very rapidly, which is the advantage of computers – they do things automatically, without thinking. Now we have two modes of, of mental operation at least, many more really, but, but I’ll, I’ll just address myself to two. One is: the so called instinctual level, where we do things automatically we react, we, we respond to um a behavioural input from outside. And the other is um that kind of pattern determination, pattern recognition, which gives us language, art… great inventions.. these are patterns, they are imposed patterns. This is part of the, of the wisdom of the Vedanta by the way, where they say that you recognise nothing… except against its background, against a background, and the background of course against which we recognise everything is a background we identify by the label of chaos.

WM: Now were there specific things that happened to incite the Butlerian Jihad?

FH: Excesses, I had, I thought of, of ah um.. great war machines being made which would automatically kill people, um ah machines which would simulate great masses of people and predict their behaviour. I thought of all these uses of machines.. to.. maneuver people, or to replace them… so.. the, the, the, the living organism rebelled, and you could begin with a, at a very small level, but if there were a lot of resentment all through the society, it could steam roller. Look at what happened in Iran.

WM:  I recall um or I’ve made a list of some fifty to sixty named planets in the, in the first three books. And ah is there any specific ones of those where you might suggest that the Butlerian Jihad began?

FH: I didn’t have a planet of origin in mind.

WM: So we can create that?

FH: You can create that.

WM: And then it would be spreading almost… universally simultaneously throughout the galaxy.

FH: It would spread very rapidly.

WM: Very rapidly. And this is.. not really an anti-intellectualism.

FH: It’s an anti – the, the, the specific is, is stated… ‘Thou shalt make no machine in the image of a human mind’.

WM: And.. do you have any idea how long the Jihad lasted?

FH: I hadn’t even thought about it – lasted long enough to accomplish its purpose. Bec- I was dealing in such magnitude you see, time, that I could put it way back there where now they have only the memory of it but it’s a very important memory, because it still carries the weight of law.

WM: The approximately – a, a, a modern analogy might be, almost the racial memory, we here in the West have of the Black Death. 

FH: Yes that sort of thing, yeah, exactly, we, you say, ‘The Black Death’. Oh boy.

WM: That’s worse than the plague.

FH: Oh yeah.

WM: And it it still affects us in deep ways that ah we’re really..

FH: Because it damn near wiped us out.

WM: Oh I know, I know. So ah it lasted how long?

FH: I say it lasted long enough to accomplish its purpose, but it was back there so far.. That the length of it is unimportant.

WM: About 10,000 years prior to the opening of the book as I recall?

FH: Yes, approximately that.

WM: Alright that’s ok so..

FH: But it was a very, it was a very traumatic experience, based on, on a very painful historical lesson.

[cuts]

WM: So it’s roughly the same as that anti-machine movement that took place in, in ah in Britain in the 19th century?

FH: Yes exactly.

WM: Ah I.. The name of it I’ve forgotten at the moment.

FH: Yeah I, I.. 

WM: It’s It’s unimportant at the moment

FH: Yeah okay.

WM: Roughly the ah same, same kind of thing.

FH: But on an enormous scale.

WM: On an enormous scale.

FH: And therefore profoundly influential on everything that comes after.

WM: Now was there some sort of formal… ah end to the Jihad by coming down with some sort of a constitution?

FH: Yeah they had a, it was incorporated into what has now become the Great Convention, and of course it was also incorporated into religious prohibitions. Also be- for the Jihad to have been successful, over this length of time, there had to be.. a, a substitute for that which had come to depend upon the, the computer, and what the computer does best, and therefore we have the mentat.

WM: Alright let’s.

FH: Otherwise you see you would have had people getting computers and doing it all over again.

WM: Then let’s take up the notion of mentat as a, as a topic. This you say is an outgrowth of the vacuum-

FH: Yeah.

WM: -created by the elimination of computers.

FH: Yeah exactly.

WM: Um… any particular ideas you had about its, other than that, about its history, development, ah techniques… the B G are working with it I assume?

FH: Oh yeah, in fact a lot of people are, a lot of people, there are several training schools for mentats, I had envisaged around the empire, it’s not an isolated phenomena. They, if a, if one person can be trained to do it, and you get, and you get a general understanding of it then you’re going to have a sort of itinerant teachers who will develop schools here and there and everywhere producing various kinds of mentats. It is-

WM: The history of mentism in other words?

FH: Yeah, It is, there’s a mentat school right now down in Oregon, based on, on my concept. The, the idea is that what does a computer do.. that makes it valuable? It can handle enormous amounts of data input, correlate it, find the patterns, and express those patterns as suggestions for action.

[Cuts]

FH: You see it’s far more refined than that, it, it has all kinds of pattern identifying.. abilities, in fact the, if you, if you could isolate one thing that I envisaged being trained into a mentat, educated for this, I would say it would be pattern recognition.

WM: You also have a source of twisted mentats.

FH: Oh yeah because people would say’ hey I want one that’ll do this but that’s nasty’.

WM: And ah that’s the Bene Tleilaxu as I recall?

FH: The Bene Tleilax have developed this.. as a side line, it is a cash crop…… One of the reasons they’re called the dirty, the dirty Tleilaxu you see?

WM: Is because of their… So there’s all sorts of schools of Mentism?

FH: Oh yeah, and of course there would be a ah, a kind of a French academy, among mentats, who would um.. try to control this but be unable to really.

WM: Theoretically it’s possible then that were would let’s say something roughly analogous to a Platonic school of Mentism and an Aristotelian school of Mentism?

FH: Yeah, stochastic you see? There could be all kinds of schools of Mentism and of course they would have conventions, and they would meet and exchange views. There would be various schools which would have a better reputation than others.

WM: Are they a new university? or structure? 

FH: They could be, I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought of them in that sense, but I, I just thought there would be all kinds of, it’s an ability which is inherent in a human being I said to myself.

WM: Yeah.

FH: And there are going to be all kinds of people amplifying this, educating it, exploiting it… it’s like the Suk Doctors you see… which is a ah a marketplace for a doctors of a special kind.

WM: What is a Suk Doctor now?

FH: A Suk Doctor is a, a medical practitioner.. who has been heavily conditioned.. to imprint him.. on the people into who’s service he is.. put. There would be people who would, it’s, it’s like the, the school, the scholastic system now where a person will say, ‘well I can see that in about ten years there’s gonna be a big market for engineers so I’m going to be an engineer’. So people would choose this, and they of course there’d be a selection process, everyone who chose it would not be able to get into it. It would be kind of an amplification of the present educational screening system you find in Japan, where it would begin young, a family might say, ‘well.. we have three sons, ah.. we want them to be successful, let’s train the second one to be a, let’s, let’s see if we can get the second one, can get into the Suk School to be a Suk Doctor. It’s a marketplace, I deliberately chose the name, Suk means market.

WM: Oh… okay.. Arabic?

FH: Yeah.

WM: There are other forms of medicine?

FH: Oh yeah, lots of them, but the, but the Great Houses and the ah, and the ah.. the Emperor and very powerful people would want one of these Suk doctors, so there would be a tradition that they were, that they could not be suborned, and the, and the origin of the Suk doctors would be very dependant upon that, it would be to their best interest to make sure that they couldn’t be suborned. That when they imprinted him on the family to whom they were sold in effect you see, because really.. a, a fellow who’s going to says ‘I’m going to be an engineer of a specific kind’ when he goes out on the marketplace he sells himself to that market. And the school might even, and the schools do have systems of helping them sell, the schools sell these people, in fact schools are attractive as they can sell their product.

WM: Did you have any specific place in mind as to where they origin, originated?

FH: No. I just said they’re here, they, there was a need, there this has been filled and, but it only has one source you see.

WM: We can create the planet from which they come?

FH: Which they come. And you, you see the structure, the interdependency structure, it is to the very primary interest of that planet and its school of Suk Doctors that they be pure, that when they say this is a Suk Doctor, whatever you, however you define that Suk Doctor, that’s what you get. But, but the thing they have done is to condition these doctors, make them superb medical practitioners, superb at the state of the art in these days, but also.. have conditioned them so that they imprint them.. on the family, you follow what I’m saying?

WM: The concept of total loyalty to the family.

FH: Yes.

WM: in- incapable of being suborned as you would say.

FH: That’s right, imprinting in the, in the, in the, in the sense of the duckling imprinting.

WM: Yeah yeah that kind of imprintation.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Ah so that’s of course why Wellington is such a, in a certain sense, an anomaly and such a traitor.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Because he’s been traitorous to his own conditioning if you will.

FH: Right.

WM: Which in turn implies that the motive to overcome that imprinting.. or the causes must be overwhelming so-

FH: Enormous you see.

WM: over, yeah overcome that.

FH: I mean what have they done? They have taken his wife… and they have put her in constant torture… she is in agony, all the time until he succeeds…. you see?

WM: And she was a B.G. as I recall?

FH: That’s right.

WM: Wanna by name. Okay.

[cuts]

WM: Yeah I understand the notion of Suk Doctor-Well I want to turn to another major topic – Orange. Catholic. Bible.

FH: [Laughs] my. little. joke. [laughs] ‘If you’re an Orange man you cannot be a Catholic’.

WM: True, true.

FH: My picture of the history behind this was a kind of an ultimate convulsion, of a, a terrible.. tragedy, in which very few survived, and the survivors would.. make common cause seeing that their own survival depended on this, on some isolated little planet somewhere, and making common cause they would find some religious accommodation.

WM: That’s the theory behind it? That’s what brought it about?

FH: Yeah and the kinds of things I thought of, it wasn’t specific, but the kinds of things I thought of were a, a military or violence tragedy in which all the women were killed of one side, or most of them, and, and all the men on the other side.. or most of them. And..

WM: There’s got to be some sort of accommodation.

FH: There’s got to be some accommodation, you see? But it’s lost way back there in antiquity.

WM: And from this convulsion, whatever it may be, we could create it if we wanted to?

FH: You could create it.

WM: Ah Would be, comes the meeting of the various.. 

FH: Of the, an ecu, of really an ecumenism, an ecumenism which transcends all the things of the past and has this hybrid vigour. You see if you ever did get such a melding you would have a hybrid vigour.

WM: Yeah. And the hybridisation of the Bible would include?

FH: Well it would include ah what we now consider to be some of the apocrypha and some new apocrypha. Because I, I envisaged this happening after, at a period when even Christianity.. has lost some of its structural antecedents, although not the important central ones. You, you have to understand that a church.. is a kind of a ultimate living organism.. it perpetuates itself, it adapts to new conditions. Catholicism in Mexico is nowhere even near Catholicism in Ireland.

WM: [Laughs] How true.

FH: Really, they are two different religions.

WM: Sure.

FH: They each have a different body of pagan mythology upon which they have fastened, like a parasite.

WM: And adopted and changed and modified and the rest of that. Yeah

FH: Of course.

WM: Alright now what, what are some of the elements that you see.. working within the Orange Catholic Bible, the, the hybrid, you, you say’s the, some concepts of Christianity, the Old Testament?

FH: Concepts of Old Testament, concepts of Christianity, and a, and a striving toward a  spirituality, ah an essence of the ah, of the preachments, I hesitate I almost said doctrine but I don’t really want to get into that, um but an essence of the preachment so that what they say has a kind of sense of ultimate spiritual truth in it you see.

WM: How much of the Quran is in it?

FH: Oh quite a bit of it.

WM: And the Gita?

FH: Oh yes.

WM: And the Vedanta?

FH: Oh yes. It’s picked up all kinds of threads.

WM: And so we can pretty well make up our own book names, and?

FH: Oh yes, oh yes.

WM: and thread and emphasising the threads and so on, if ah there would be perhaps elements of ah the Bahai?

WM: Oh yeah I’ve quoted the Quran.. right out of the Quran in several instances, in the new book and in the others. Part of the ah, of the background of the Orange Catholic Bible I thought of ah um even as Zoroastraianism. When I went to a number of religious.. roots, and derived an essence and in the process.. thought of that as the process out of which the Orange Catholic Bible arose.

WM: Now the Orange Catholic Bible has been around for several thousand years?

FH: Oh yes, it’s an important book, very important, because it is kind of distilled, you see, of things that, that created primitive religions, such as Christianity.

WM: Now you do have the appendix in Dune about the religion of Dune.

FH: Oh yeah.

WM: However… I think we have to make some distinctions here about the religion of Dune, that is the religion of Dune prior –

FH: There’s a little history in that you see.

WM: to the arrival of the Atreides family, and then the.. religion of Dune after the Atreides family, up to Leto II, and then the religion of Dune after Leto II.

FH: Oh yeah you’ve got-

WM: I, I make at least three distinctions there and just- 

FH: You have Panoplia Prophetica.. in, in the, the original religion of Dune, the Fremen religion, which is a, an earth religion you see, very close to the dirt… um with earth images too, earth archetypes, but this-

WM: By earth you do not mean Terra?

FH: No, I mean the earth of Dune.

WM: Okay and now this is the basic religion of Dune prior to the coming of the Atreides?

FH: Even after they came, cause they only reinforced the, some of the structure of the original. How do they see Paul? as the fulfilment of their own prophecy 

WM: Of their own prophecy okay

FH: He doesn’t bring something new, he adds to the old.

[Cuts]

WM: As I, as I say, ah Paul I believe, totally transformed the Fremen religion although the roots are still there.

FH: Well yes he, he does what always happens when the hero comes, no matter.. out of what roots, out of what demands, what motivated the society to demand the hero, when the hero comes that’s a new thing really, cause it creates its own conditions.

WM: Now Leto II in turn has changed that?

FH: Leto II merely extends it and changes, and adapts it to his demands.

WM: So one might, one might look at it as a linear progression and elaboration or extrapolation of the basic roots of the basic Fremen religion?

FH: Yeah plus the Panoplia Prophetica, plus the, which is again strongly rooted in the Orange Catholic Bible.

WM: And rites and rituals and this that and the other thing, why are sometimes quite clear, sometimes are not quite clear, but ah we can easily work on that one, ah Jane’s going to write this article too.

FH: Yeah ok.

WM: Ah so ah with her knowledge of the, of, of religions in general and, and the books why I think it’s going to be a good one, she’s looking forward to it very much.

FH: Yeah you, you need somebody who has a background in comparative religions because that’s the background out of which I derived it.

WM: Alright then let’s turn to.. the Fremen history.

FH: …What about the Fremen History?

WM: How did you see them originally? Ah not no not see them originally – how did you see them as they were originally, not your original concept of them.

FH: But but – my ah, is how did they derive? 

WM: Yes.

FH: I saw them as um ah having very ancient roots in arabic culture, but an arabic culture modified by the convulsions through which it had gone, over the centuries. They had been enslaved, they had been fugitives, they had been dominant, and then they had been enslaved, and they had been fugitives-

WM: And driven from planet to planet

FH: They’d, they’d been pillar to posted ah quite a bit.

WM: I know you list half a dozen of them there.

FH: Yeah they had vibrated, they had swung with the pendulum of the extremes, which Islam does you know, Islam is a religion of extremes. You see now in Iran very dramatically.

WM: In the Shiites.
FH: Yeah um, so ah, these extremes caused their own enormous.. pendulous, pendulous swings.

File 18:  Willis E. McNelly discussion about the Dune universe prior to publication of ‘God Emperor of Dune’ (1981) and ‘The Dune Encyclopedia’ (1984) part 4

WM: Okay now… how long have the Fremen been on Arrakis?

FH: I thought of them as having been on Arrakis for.. several thousand years. It, they’re, this is a kind of a, of a fugitive.. bolthole into which they have finally settled, and they haven’t caused enough trouble to be exterminated, they’re useful to a certain extent because they have adapted to the desert, they make good guides, they, they help the spice searchers, the spice miners, they have formed an accommodation with smugglers and with the guild. They, they have found a niche, and here it is, they’ve been there long enough to be thoroughly adapted, it has had, the planet itself has had an evolutionary influence upon them, and they upon the planet. They have transformed their religious structure into the creatures of the planet, they have projected it into the creatures of the planet. Shai-Hulud is their god… and their means of transportation.

WM: And their means of support.

FH: Their means of support.

WM: Now what about their military ah.. background?

FH: They’re tough cobs, they’ve been pushed from pillar to post long enough that they are really tough. You, you think of, of the Iber, from which my family name derives, they were a trans-caucasian tribe, not, who had been, pretty soft thing, they’d had a good environment, lots of easy food, and in came some aryans from the east and drove them out, and it drove them, and the migrations, successive migrations drove them farther and farther and farther and farther and finally – these were pretty tough people, and they moved in to a whole peninsula and took it over and it’s now called the Iberian peninsula. But it was just, originally just a tribe from the transcaucasus. They got so tough that they were the spear for hire, that’s how they got into the Norman invasion, the Normans hired them.

WM: What about the sociology of the Fremen?

FH: Well the sociology of the Fremen is a desert sociology, a society of, of interdependence, my basic model was the Eskimo.

WM: That’s news to me.

FH: Yeah you think about the Eskimo – interdependence between the sexes, and the role modelling, which is severely imprinted at childhood.. for the survival of the species.

WM:…And the Fremen religion we’ve already discussed.

[cuts]

WM: Anything else you’d like to add about them that might not be… explicit in the books themselves?

FH: I, I think it’s either explicit or very strongly implied all the way through that they are shaped by their environment and they, much more than they have shaped the environment, and this is a thing they have accepted because it is part of their protective colouration, it’s part of their survival. They have found a niche, they have a history of, of when they become dominant, they are enslaved… and then they must become fugitives. Now they have found a place where they are really dominant but they manage to conceal this.

WM: You have some idea about the population of Fremen ah at the time of the..?

FH: Well desert populations are never as high as more lush populations, however there’s a lot of energy running around on this planet, and it, energy with a sufficiently strong base, that you could import food, you could buy water, you could control the market, the smuggler’s market,  it could be somewhat higher, than what you usually find in a desert.. area where you might find a population of three per square mile, it could be.. three or four times larger than that.

WM: What about the sietch structure?

FH: The sietch structure is based on the caucasian um muslims, it’s where I got the word. The sietch structure, sietch means ‘a haven in time of trouble, a safe, a hide, a hiding hole, a bolt hole’, that’s the implication. And this whole planet is a sietch for the Fremen you see, it’s their bolt hole. They aren’t anywhere else this is where they are. The sietch is concealed, they don’t make smoke… they mask the entrances.. their water reservoirs are underground, they have no exposed water it’s all in canals.. they blend into the background, and this is the model of the sietch, it does not betray itself.. by.. sight, or sound, or smell, and this goes to the, to the training of children, to the imprint on the whole society, day is their night… I even say so, that the gloom of the sietch has become the night of the past.

WM: Ah what about Fremen technology?

FH: Only that technology which can have a ah a basis in what they find on the planet, or what they can afford to buy because of their power over the energy infrastructure. 

WM: What about the ah stillsuit?

FH: The stillsuit is a specific adaptation required for survival. It, it, it again allows them to have more people in a desert environment than they could otherwise.

WM: But they make their own stillsuits?

FH: Oh yes, because it’s, it’s the idea of the man packing his own parachute, you see? You wouldn’t trust somebody else to make a stillsuit if you’re gonna be out there and your life is gonna depend on it… you’re, it’s a long fall.

WM: So their technology is essentially limited to the things necessary for survival?

FH: Of course, they, in fact they take nothing with them, there, there is a tradition that when they go into the desert they take nothing with them.. that is not necessary for survival. That’s their limit of possession.

WM: As far as the stillsuit technology itself is concerned we can ah..?

FH: It’s a cottage industry

WM: We can, It’s a cottage industry, and we can have an engineer dream that up to micro-sandwich and all of that.

FH: Oh yeah, yeah but it’s a cottage industry of a comp- of a very much more sophisticated level then what you find as cottage industry here.

WM: Okay what about their language?

FH: The language is strongly rooted in Arabic, adapted by the elision, the evolutionary elision processes which, and other processes, which influence languages across centuries. They of course speak Galach, everybody does.

WM: I see.

FH: It’s a matter of survival to be able to communicate.

WM: Okay. Let’s turn then to ah the Atreides family.

FH: Okay, you know the derivation of the name – Atreus right? The family of Atreus out of Greek history, with all of the implications inherent there to. 

WM: Yeah.

FH: They are the persistence of the family, as an organism, again having being influenced by the convulsions through which all humankind has gone, but there is a power inherent in them, there is a strength.. that they have, which allows them to come out on top.. in whatever society they find themselves eventually. However they carry all of this roots of trad, all of these roots of tragedy, and flamboyant and grandiose behaviour, they, they depend on the things they have learned as rulers.. which are far more sophisticated then the Atreus family would have recognised you see. They know that they depend on loyalty and that loyalty you buy only with loyalty, so they are intensely loyal to their followers, they will give up their lives for a follower, and it was no accident that I had one of them die in the bullring ah as a, as – entertaining his followers

WM: Leto I.

FH: Yeah entertaining his, his followers.

WM: What about the bullring and the whole question of ah.

FH: It’s a model, it’s a pattern out of the past.

WM: Okay.

[Cuts]

FH: By the way that, that ancestor is now lost you see to history, the bullfighter, he is kind of a, of a, of a blaggard in the family because they think that this was an excess, you don’t do that, you don’t go out there and entertain your people and, and risk your life that way, you don’t, you don’t waste yourself by doing that sort of thing. I was going to do something with that in the new book but it didn’t fit in, I even had some notes on it. That was a bad lesson, you learn by the, you learn by the mistake.

WM: Alright on the same line then let’s talk about the Atreides-Harkonnen feud.

FH: Alright this is a collision of great houses, the incompatibles, and I envisaged the ah, the old baron, Vladimir, as a man who.. who enjoyed excesses, but excesses of a particular kind. He is um ah, he is the kind of person who would use four letter words just to shock people. He is the kind of person who would seek um sensory gratification.. as the end and be all… so that you have to seek a greater sensory gratification and a greater one and a greater one, he becomes addicted to it, you see? And therefore you see that gross body, and that gross person, who has all of these powers… and there’s nothing he, he wouldn’t try or do.. to, for the sensation effect.

WM: Alright it’s the collision of two great families.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Do you have a ah.. notion by the way about the history of the Harkonnen family at all?

FH: My thought was that they.. fell into this through the excesses of one of their ancestors who probably was killed by this baron, to gain the ascendancy, and ah or either that or or was addicted to some sly little drug which put him, made him a subject of this baron, which would be much more like him you see.

WM: The elacca or semuta or?

FH: Yeah, and he would lock this, this predecessor away in a little room and enjoy the person as long the, as that person lived, you see? that’s the kind of of fellow he was, and his empire is built on fear, he runs on fear and guilt, and he doesn’t feel any guilt he’s completely amoral, and he was, he was raising a ah a successor, who will be.. completely amoral you see the conditioning of that person.

WM: Yes… of ah, of the young…

FH: Feyd Rautha.

WM: Feyd Rautha right.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Now what was there was a specific incident wasn’t there? a battle of… of some kind between the two families that ah?

FH: Yeah and then, then there was intervention and they were confined to a war of assassins, because they were, they were bad for business, they were creating too much disruption.

WM: And the specific battle was..?

FH: Oh the specific name slips me at the moment.. But ah it’s in there.

WM: Battle of Corrino?

FH: Ah.. something else, but anyway, the background of it is that.. the Atreides are cousins, removed, of the ruling family, the royal family.

WM: Corrino.

FH: Yeah, they’re an, they are a, another house with ah with marital interrelationships, you follow? Distinct, but marital interrelationships so that their genetic structures is interrelated, the same bloodlines. Corrino has another dominant background, a name, a name derived from a historical moment, you see? as names often are derived from.

WM: This was the Battle of Corrino?

FH: Yeah.

WM: That historical moment? What was that?

FH: It was, it was the, the, the kind of settlement, the final, the final convulsive settlement, of all of the violence which had preceded it when people said, ‘Hey we’ve had enough, and now we’ve gotta solve these things which are bad for business and do something else’. And you had enough.. dominant.. rulers around.. who were able to see the necessity for accommodation, that they could put down the people who didn’t want to be accommodated and come out successfully.

[cuts]

FH: The structural background within which I set my mind is, before sitting down to produce the, these books..

WM: You’d done, you’d done a lot of thinking before you put a word on paper.

FH: Oh you bet I had. Some of it I committed to paper, some of it I did not, but I had it in mind.

WN: The Saudarkar then are an outgrowth of that Battle of Corrino or had preceded that?

FH: Yeah, I envisaged the Saudakar as being developed secretly.. ah, by very tough surroundings, of really an amplifications of marine training, or green beret training, or equivalent, but just selectively putting those pressure on, on people till you came out after several generations with a, with killer group, you know they were really individually berserkers almost… you see? A one of them having the capabilities of nine or ten other soldiers. 

WM: And um… so how bout the military structure of the Saudarkar?

FH: Hierarchical in a feudal, on a feudal base. It’s a natural tribal origin to this you know and it’s built into the psyche of the, of the human being in my estimation. We fall into these feudal patterns too often (snap) for it to be an accident.

WM: Yeah… it’s a pattern that we, we fall into.

FH: It’s an unconscious pattern but it’s there.

WM: Um and so we can create the military ranks I know you mentioned two or three in ah Children?

FH: Bashars and so on, yeah they’re all there. We don’t need to go into, to waste our time on them now.

WM: No but ah we can, we can create those as we see fit, as we see fit. Alright let’s turn then to Arrakis.

FH: …The planet of the worm. 

WM: Second planet of Canopus? Third planet?

FH: Third.

WM: Third planet of Canopus. Why’d you choose Canopus? White sun?

FH: Mhm.

WM: I, I..

[Cuts]

FH: No a white sun, ah distance in time and space so that, we’re not going to go there right away and destroy the ah, the mythical background of the story by discovering that it has some other structure than what we assembled for the myth.

WM: Or no structure at all.

FH: Yeah or no structure, yeah that’s right, well we’re not going to discover the reality which will change the myth, is what I’m saying. Look how ah how the ah the canals of Mars have vanished [laughs] and ah and all of the martian science fiction is gone.

WM: Ah unfortunate, Mars we love you however.

FH: Yes of course [chuckles].

WM: So Arrakis, the name seems to me to resemble Iraq a little bit?

FH: .. Actually I played with sounds and I did have ah um various.. sound patterns.. of our planet, of our languages, not just one languages, indo-european primarily, but um of those languages, of indo-european languages, I had those in, in my mind. I have a theory about sounds, for example the caliphate of the Atreides heirs is the Desposyni – that has an evil sound doesn’t it? the Desposyni – alright that would have, that has an evil sound even to a Russian.

WM: Oh, yeah.

FH: It, it is not a nice sound, well how does that, how does that happen? That things have a nice sound, or a ah a powerful sound, or a mysterious sound, how does that happen? Okay?

WM: Yeah.

FH: It is, it is conditioned out of the.. sounds we normally use for certain meanings, and the ‘k’ sounds tend to have mysterious power, King Kong. [laughs}

WM: Ok let’s turn-

FH: You can follow what I’m saying?

WM: Yes. Let’s continue on the subject of Arrakis, Arrakis has been peopled by the Fremen for x thousand years.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Presumably because of its nature it has not been peopled.. by anybody prior to that time?

FH: It was a one product planet.

WM: Spice had been mined from Arrakis prior to the trouble of one of the Fremen?

FH: Let’s look at that earth based, the earth based historical background for it, the spice trade. The Arabs controlled the spice trade for a long time, and they controlled it with several very clever techniques, number one by keeping the origins secret, number two by cutting the spice with cheap locally available products. If you’re going to duplicate a recipe for example out of the middle ages which calls for cinnamon, you’re going to have to cut it with the bark of a tree from Africa. They also.. hid it.. with.. marvellous tales about terrible creatures who guarded the lanes to the spice. Ok my… thought about the background of this that it was available for a long time, and if some people knew where it was and where it, where it came from.. in a more sophisticated way than we have when, then we see when we look back on the history of the spice trade of this planet, you follow? Ok. The primary controllers were the Guild… in league with the Bene Gesserit, and a few Great Houses who were always trying to find out where it was… But remember the attributes of the spice…  it creates the Reverend Mothers, and it creates the Guild Navigators, it is necessary for them. What does a Guild Navigator do? A Guild Navigator tells where it’s safe to go… and it’s going to show up immediately that’s it’s not safe.. to be, to be the sole power controller of this planet, this source, because then you’re sitting on the explosive substance you see, you’re the object of all of the attacks, it’s a very, it’s it’s the tiger’s tail.

WM: So you let everybody in on it?

FH: So they, they do, they have to, they have to eventually.. release their single grip on it and put in under multiple management – CHOAM, and who sits there and, and governs that, and, and makes sure that the flow of the spice into the ah into the market is not impeded is a very important person in the society you see, this is a, an ambassadorship that you dole out, for services rendered.

WM: Okay now I’m, I’m way back in almost… hundreds of thousand or perhaps millions of years on Arrakis, once a green planet, then through a series of slow circumstances we have beginning- 

FH: A creature evolves.

WM: A creature evolves.

FH: Which just takes the planet over.

WM: And the creature is of course the worm.

FH: That’s right.

WM: And so the.. worm is essentially responsible for the way Arrakis is today or

FH: That’s right.

WM: At the beginning of the novel.

FH: There have been some slight modifications, but very slight.

WM: Yeah.

FH: No real intrusion upon the.. the, the eco-cycle that produces the spice, that’s dangerous you don’t do that… you follow?

WM: This um, alright, and then we have the discovery of spice – several.

FH: Yeah.

WM: Prior to perhaps the Butlerian Jihad?

FH: Yeah.

WM: For that matter, It’s been around for 15,000 years or so whatever.

FH: You could, I didn’t think of it in terms of of actual years, I thought of it in terms of a cyclic span in which the Guild Navigators would finally see they had to share the knowledge to cease being the targets of so much assasination, so much torture, so much trouble, because people all wanted to get and control it.

WM: And as to who discovered the spice in the first place that’s lost to history?

FH: I never even thought of that I didn’t think of that because that’s gone back in antiquity, we can recover it if you want to, if you want to put a, an entry into where you cover the sources of this, the origins, fine.

WM: We may, we may.

FH: Yeah okay, If you don’t fine.

WM: And we may not. Alright to continue.

[cuts]

[cuts]

FH: Okay now-

[cuts]

WM: Now ah, what about ah some… all the questions of the say the geology of Arrakis and the climatology, and the.. things of that nature about Arrakis?

FH: Ok there are several kinds of deserts I won’t go into the various kinds, I’ve, I’ve dealt ah, treated with some of them in the fourth book, but, because we have a, an isolated, maintained desert which requires satellite control of weather for it to exist, and so if you’ll refer to that you’ll see some reference to, to the kind of desert that it is. 

WM: The Sareer reserve.

FH: Yeah the Sareer, yes, but there are several kinds of desert, they’re created by various forces which occur on a planet, the force that controls this one.. is an animal, a creature, which is a unique.. kind of desert you see.

WM: Climatology and all of that we’re free to make up pretty much as we see fit.

FH: Oh yes I have envisaged that in the in the centre of this planet since it has been a desert for so long, it’s been scoured by sand, sand blast, that actually Coriolis effect influences the storm winds, so you get an amplification of storm winds which go.. in the direction of the Coriolus thrust, you see? They will be, they will be that much faster. I went to the limits of what a, a friend told me was possible. Seven hundred plus kilometres per hour.

WM: [sighs] That’s pretty good.

FH: Yeah.

WM: But the whole question of climatology and so on, we can simply get a good climatologist to, desert cosmetologist to work on that and…?

FH: Yeah and remember, he, he, tell him that as far as the central, um as what would be the um the central belt of the planet, the equatorial belt… – that is virtually flat… and the thing which controls the moisture content in the atmosphere, the dominant thing controlling that, because you’ll have cold air in the North precipitating moisture there, um you understand the moisture content of air that the warmer, the warmer the air is the more moisture can carry? Ok ah um that’s where they can have a little bit of water they can mine, they can get ice up there, and they can melt it and have water, and that’s a, um that is the source of wealth, of energy for a minor house on Arrakis. It’s, it’s spelled out in Dune.

WM: I missed that.

FH: Ok.. um Soo-soo sook

WM: Yeah?

FH: Ok the Soosoo. 

WM: Oh that’s the minor house huh?

FH: Yeah. The.. the control, the, the unique thing here is, I go back to it, is the, that an animal is the dominant.. force limiting the amount of water which is free, free water, free moisture on the surface of the planet.

WM: Okay which immediately leads to one other question that we did talk about yesterday but I want to get on tape now, and that’s the oxygen source, for the planet, without green material you have no oxygen.

FH: Well you have a problem if you postulate a, a large creature, a creature as large of these worms, moving through sand, friction is going to create enormous heat, so you have to do something about that, and I, I don’t have the explicit step by step way that’s it’s done, but, but I asked a chemist friend of mine, if there were a chemical way you could.. change that heat, in other words convert the heat, and cool.. and get a by product, and that byproduct be oxygen because that’s what I wanted.. and he came back to me in a couple of days and said yeah you could do it, it could be done, it’s possible, it’s a very exotic [unclear- endutray?] but he said it can be done. So that’s as much as I know about it.

WM: And this is one of the by.. byproducts of the worm physiology or worm passage?

FH: Both.. because the worm moving through the sand is going to create friction-heat,

WM: Yeah.

FH: It’s got to do something with that heat it’s gonna burn up if it doesn’t, you’ve got a red hot hide there… you see? And I went, the way a lot of science fiction does, I wanted a particular.. situation, a particular effect and so I asked is that possible? and I’m told it’s possible… you follow? The byproduct is oxygen, because I had to have some source of oxygen, enormous amounts of oxygen, for ah for other forms of life to be able to exist on that planet.

WM: And so it is part of the physiology of the worm itself that one of its.. byproducts.. is oxygen.

FH: It has a chemical cooling system, whose byproduct is oxygen, but of course it’s an enormously ah productive one because there’s a lot of heat involved.

WM: And that’s up to our chemist writer of this to invent?

FH: Yeah.

WM: Alright.

[Cuts]

WM: So we were talking about oxygen for awhile on, on the planet, on Arrakis ah the ecology of the planet I think is, is pretty clear ah..

FH: Now we’re a carbon oxygen-lifeform by the way.

WM: Yeah.

FH: And I’m postulating that a carbon-oxygen life form can live on this planet, and in fact there are all kinds of variations on this theme, there’s hawks and vultures and those creatures that have been introduced from time to time, by the Fremen primarily and by the ecologist.. Liet Kynes, who is really a kind of subversive character you realise that?

WM: You know he, he in many ways he’s a damn fool ecologist because he does not realise, think through, the consequences of what he begins.

FH: He is my model for all of the ecologically aware, I’ll give you this quote – We need that so we will do this, and then the consequences began.

[cuts]

WM: To ah-

FH: When I said consequences by the way, knowledge of consequences, that was a barbed statement in Dune… And ah, I don’t mean consequences this week, I mean 100 years from now, 200, 500, 1000. 

WM: [muffled]?
FH: The long term, well getting back to Liet Kynes, my view of Liet Kynes was a, a perfect model of the shortsighted… ecologically aware, who wants a particular condition, he’s thirsty he wants water, he doesn’t like brown landscape he wants green… so he.. moves to-

File 19:  Willis E. McNelly discussion about the Dune universe prior to publication of ‘God Emperor of Dune’ (1981) and ‘The Dune Encyclopedia’ (1984) part 5

WM: To return to Liet Kynes..

FH: Yeah, he was my model of.. what we popularly conceive of, of being ah the ecologically aware person, who thinks of consequences. And the whole thrust.. of everything I’ve been doing in the Dune trilogy and again in the new book, is.. to point out, to, point out a kind of a paradox, in the first place I’m saying in there.. that paradox is a hand, a finger, pointing at something that is beyond it. If you encounter a paradox that indicates something beyond it. A paradox should not be a barrier, it should be an indicator, a waymarker. The paradox I’m addressing here is the paradox of infinity. Any, defined, finite, time period.. 900 billion years.. is a blip against infinity.

WM: Very true.

FH: And you have to recognise this, and if you’re talking about consequences, to human survival, then you better have, you better extend your time sense.. and leave it open-ended, and that is the real definition of The Golden Path – the open ended time sense. As long as time, as the time sense is open there, then.. we are surviving… you see? It has no linear direction.. has no choice of, of, of who is human… it just derives from human stock, and it goes on, and it’s really the reason Leto does not.. actually exterminate the Tlielaxu.. or.. the Ixians, or anybody else. He says, specifically, that the only people he considered exterminating… were the Bene Gesserit.. and he considered it.. because they are so near, and yet so far, from their potential, from what they could do, you see?

WM: Alright let take up then a little bit further extrapolation on the concept of The Golden Path ah..

FH: I’ve just, I’ve just given you the, the, the definitive ah definition, the, this is it, this is the only way you can put it into words – the gate is open.

WM: So Leto is at the hub of the spokes of the wheel, and there are all sorts of potential spokes on this-?

FH: The gate is open, that’s all I can say. If, if you put any more words on it you ah, you, you make it less understandable.

WM: Ok let’s talk about Ix then.

FH: Okay.

WM: Why is that ah Ix seems to have escaped, ah or is not following the, The Great Conventions after the Butlerian Jihad?

FH: They emulated.. the hedgehog, and took themselves out of the main-stream. They said ah, and backed it up, if you attack us it would be so costly… finally you see, that it’s not worth it fellas, but we realise that we can make it worth your while, by being too intrusive, by putting a lot of computers back into your society, by a lot, by putting strange inventions into this mainstream of society.

WM: Which will skew it.

FH: Yeah. So we undertake not to do that. This is how I, I set up the survival of Ixians… you see, you see-

WM: Okay.

FH: -the the process?

WM: And they’re a technologically based society?

FH: Yeah they are the machine society, they say that man’s future is technological. And I’m not saying that it isn’t you see in this book, I’m just saying that these are the, are the sociological forces that could change all of these previous patterns. And when I say that if people who, who are conditioned to the use of machines.. tend to.. treat their fellow humans the way they treat machines, that’s a truth, that’s an observable fact.

WM: Okay. And I think, one more at any rate, we have… hinted about this in various things we’ve doing the last couple of hours on these other tapes, but perhaps we ought to speak specifically now of the.. origin, development.. etcetera of the Spacing Guild.

FH: Alright the Spacing Guild were the original.. um.. recipients of the discovery.. of.. the ah, of the spice. My image of the discovery of the spice was.. the.. man in the jungle who finds a rare plant, or strange plant, nobodies ever seen it before, and here it is, it has little blue seeds and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Well our past is full of people who’ve tried these various things, some of them died, some of them had visionary experiences. We learned by experimenting, and the aggressive experimental person often was the male, because they were, they were more reckless in this respect. They were the people who really ate the apple, not the women, that’s a base canard. Eve would have not eaten the apple [chuckles]. It is not a part of the, of the genetic and role.. background of that sex for Eve to have eaten the apple.

WM: Fine.

FH: This is a male story about women.

WM: Alright so the space… so spice-. Alright.

FH: Let me carry out this, this thing – so they a, a, a miner out in the Arizona hills you see? of space, found this strange stuff, on this planet, and he brought this stuff back, brought some of this stuff, and.. he gave some of it to the Bene Gesserit, they had their fingers out everywhere, and somebody to the pre, he was a member of the, of the, of the force that was the pre-Spacing Guild you see, he would of had to be to be in space. So they started playing with this stuff to find out what it was, they can’t duplicate it, they test it, and they find its uses.

WM: I know what his name was.

FH: What?

WM: Arrakis.

FH: Okay fine [laughs] it’s okay with me, yeah.

WM: He gave the name to the planet.

FH: Sure. Okay but he was, he was a guy with a spaceship, a lot of spaceships didn’t come back you know. There might have been other people who got there and found some of this stuff and never got back with it. Or he might have got there and tried some of it, and found.. his mind was open, he knew the way back, he was the first navigator. Of course the spacing guild would have hidden that, but the Bene Gesserit already had some the stuff, so there had to be an accommodation with them, and as I’ve already said, with the use of this – comes the knowledge of its limitations, of the dangers inherent in using it… and those dangers are ah are are I think apparent we don’t need to explore them, we’ve already done so.

WM: Okay. Now um now who builds the guild ships?

FH: Well of course the Guildsmen build them themselves, in space. But they would obviously depend on Arrakis for subcontracts. Arrakis remember is not one planet.

WM: It’s not?

FH: I mean excuse me I don’t mean Arrakis, I misspoke I meant Ix.

WM: Ix.

FH: Ix is not one planet. I was, I was thinking of something else and I, I misspoke that’s all

WM: Ok.

FH: Yeah, Ix is not one planet you realise that?

WM: No.

FH: It’s confederation – The Ixian..

WM: Confederation.

FH: Confederation.

WM: Ohkay.

FH: Now they, think of them as the subcontractors, the people who manufacture the brake assembly and the transmissions for General Motors, you see?

WM: Now.. obviously space travel has been around for some 20,000 years

FH: Oh yeah.

WM: But ah, deep space, was..

FH: Is a translight.. ah monopoly.

WM: Of the Guild.

FH: Of the Guild, and the thing that makes it possible – is the navigator, the thing that makes the navigator possible – is melange.

WM: Alright.

[Cuts]

File 20-21:  Frank Herbert question and answer (probably at California State University between 1972 and 1976) part 1

FH: -American Indian society, and the um Arab culture, Arab society, in each instance they had a way of dealing with what you might call ‘natural sexual deviation’, that is people who ah, men who were more female than male, and women who were more male than female. The Arabs for example, before the Turks brought in purdah and all of that, had a long tradition of females fighting, and warriors, of being warriors. The Amerinds had the same thing and they also ah um had a special category, quite a number of tribes had a special category, of.. males who preferred to be female, but in each instance they they did not go into battle first, and if there was battle between the different tribes, if these particular people went into battle they went in to die. And many times all they had to do was come down the hill with their spear’s showing and the others, and the opposition left the field, because there was going to be trouble, real trouble, um and I’m, I’m describing this as saying to you that there were categories which were perfectly acceptable, within everything that the culture accepted, and that they, a use function was applied to them within the demands of that the culture made upon all of its people. Now to answer this question – do you have three hours? …I spent six years doing research, now that doesn’t mean that um that was all I was doing at that time, but across a six year period I was researching… for what turned out to be Dune, and Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune. During that period, no to begin with, I had conceived of doing a book, about the messianic impulse in human societies, the dangers.. implicit for a society of falling into the hands of a hero. We do it regularly, and everytime we do it, it turns out that bad things happen to us as a result. We have inquisitions and assassinations and wars and god knows what else. So I had that in mind, then I  did a magazine piece about the Oregon coast about a place called called Florence where we were, in the United States Department of Agriculture, were doing a study of dune movement, how you control dunes, to keep them from going on to people’s houses, cause they’re waves, you see very slow, slow motion waves. And.. I’m very organised in putting data together, at least I have, I give the surface appearance of organisation, so I was collecting file folders, and I’d already come to the conclusion that there is something about a wilderness… which tends to evoke mystical experiences, the mystical response to the universe, and a desert’s a form of wilderness. So I, they were side by side in the filing cabinet and I looked at them and I thought well I’ve got two stories going now, the data for the magazine piece, which I wrote, and I started looking into desert cultures and.. the filing folders grew and grew, I studied Arab history, the Arab, Arabic languages um… I developed an elision process for the change of, in the language, how would Arabic change over the next 40,000 years? When I was a, very young my grandmother, singing in the kitchen, would sing in old English, or not Old English, but she would sing in a, in a, not classically Old English, but she would sing in an English dialect which was common in the time of Shakespeare. She had come from a pocket.. which maintained this – in the Tennessee and Kentucky hills. To this day there are people there who speak with that accent. And so I had to think about pockets of… resistance of change, where change occurred but it’d, change occurs very slowly, and I went from the language to the customs, change very slowly, they reflect the old customs, and then I was ever mindful of the Berlin Zoological Garden beaver. The Berlin Zoological Garden had a, had European beaver in cages for about 150 years. These beaver had for 150 years, generation after generation, had known nothing but: god’s hands came into the cage and chose a male and a female and put them into a cage together and they.. went and were, they had progeny and then god’s hand came back again and another cage and so on, and then a disturbance came along called World War II, and a bomb dropped, and some of these beaver were released into the countryside, and my god they began building dams. After a hundred and fifty years of cage existence they began building dams. So, I asked myself the obvious question – what do humans do? What kind of dams do we build…? And I looked around myself, I looked at universities, and businesses.. and corporations… governments, and lo and behold… there they were – tribes, feudatories… hierarchical arrangements, the power over life and death. Now don’t kid yourself, when a business manager says, ‘you’re fired’, he’s saying, ‘go die a starvation you dummy… you’re, you’re consigned to the outer darkness’. There are many many points of association which you make, and then.. because my own background is um ah Jungian analysis and.. and Jungian psychology, I went great on archetypes and ah and the classical myth structure, which is all around us still today, you see it especially under stress. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. These are just high points of the myth structure. Think of it in terms of the Kennedy dynasty. First you have the Great Mother… then you have the Virgin Witch, and the transformation.. from virgin to witch.. witch can, witch can either be plus or minus, white or black right? Remember how we use white and black too, don’t forget white is good, black is bad huh? Think about that… The transformation from virgin to witch is by contact with the Hero… and the Hero has, has something that the Hero does always, the Hero goes on a journey. And I think John Kennedy was killed by, by believing his own myth structure too closely. He went on one journey too many. The Hero goes on a journey to get the Holy Grail. And the Hero.. also has another function, to restore us.. from the sorry condition that we fell into from the Fall, when we were driven from Paradise… to return us to Paradise, to Camelot… when we could talk to animals. If you look at science today, what science, what are the scientists doing? They’re talking to nature, they’re talking to animals, sometimes you know- how many of you have read the test with Washoe? The chimpanzee who has been taught to talk Ameslan, and the chimpanzees which talk to each other in Ameslan, sign language, they’re very facile at it, they do it well. Ok, we’re overseen, always, we make to reference always, to the Father God and we also have the Scientist-Shaman, we have the shaman tradition, and the Wise Old Man, I’m doing this because I wanna, I’m going to be tired later and I’m going to refer to this for some friends. We have the Wise Old Man, the, the Hero is always counseled by the Wise Old Man… and he.. refers to the Scientist-Shaman, and can take from the Scientist-Shaman, or reject the Scientist-Shaman. And behind the Wise Old Man is always the teaching of Father the God right? There’s also,  a Trickster, you watch how a real canny politician works, when, his opponent is always the Trickster. Now the Trickster is not the enemy, the Trickster is a person who deviates you slightly from your course, your journey toward the Holy Grail. If if a ah opposition to this canny candidate comes up and, and comes across with a, with a really great idea, and you happen to be debating, and he says, ‘Oh yes but, but what about?’ you put him, you cast him immediately in the role of Trickster, you say, something like this, ‘My god I never thought of that before, but your right of course you have to keep in mind what that might do to, if we went.. wholeheartedly according to your scheme, what that might do to… the income of our older population and the young’ – you take it in as your own immediately, you see? This is the way you deal, the Hero deals with the Trickster. The Hero also has available to him.. persona changes, masks, roles, he can shift from one role to the other, and each persona change involves a change of name, cause a name is the label, the handle by which you are controlled. Well, having that in mind.. as a, see there’s no content to this, this is just structure.. and having, having that in mind, I put content in it… and did all the other things, and.. forth came Dune…. and that’s the way it was done. Yes?

1st questioner: So you’re suggesting that it’s instinctual for man to be a follower and to join in survival?

FH: No I’m saying it is, it is instinctual, well if you want to use ‘instinct’ I, I.. tend to be very charry of the word, um I use it, but I’m, I have reservations on it, um if you keep that in mind I’ll use the word. I, I.. I think it is instinctual for human beings to shake down into certain kinds of societies, which have characteristics similar to a tribal arrangement. Now that’s, I’ve been very careful about my choice of words, specifically because I don’t want to go outside that. You see all these, when you’re talking about something that has any of the, of the colour of science, um and you’re not speaking mathematics, you float the le- the words, you float the language, and it ah it bobs along on, on a lot of other associations which are in everybody’s minds, but everybody has a distinctly unique language, you all think we’re speaking English together right? We’re not, every one of you has a unique language, and if you don’t believe me, sometime if you have access to the equipment you tie yourself up to a lie detector and have a friend of yours read to you from the dictionary, and watch what happens to the needle, why why should the needle bounce when he says shape, or shoe.. or shore? You see, you have a unique experience with a language and it has coloured your reactions to it.

1st questioner: This gets me to the next part, if you’re going into a tribal kind of organisation, for whatever reason, what then motivates there to be a leader why-

FH: Why is there a leader?

1st questioner: -leader or leaders?

FH: If we, if we shake down into ah, a tribal organisation? Because the the leader, you see the Scientist-Shaman who, who guides the leader, to whom the leader must refer, is the one who talks to that which we do not know… who talks to mystic, who can go into the mysterious and come back with information we must have.. who guides us through the unknown, and I think we still react that way we, I know our whole, our total society in in the broad pattern is still reacting to science in this way. They are going to find a solution to our problem.

1st questioner: You made a separation though, you made a protagonist who is also a Scientist-Shaman, are you saying that the Scientist-Shaman who conducts with, ah communicates with the unknown actually creates a Hero to do his bidding?

FH: No he is part of the, the Scientist-Shaman is part of the structure, which if you want to say it creates, which upholds the, the Hero, you see? and the society, we find ourselves most comfortable in this kind of society, and I think there are real reasons for it, I think there are reasons in our history for it, but  it’s in our prehistory you see, I’m, I use history in the broadest sense. How many of you have read a pig for the ancestors? ‘Pigs for the Ancestors’..? None of you? Oh my god you must read it, you must really read it. I’m sorry, I’ve I’m, I’ve been pushed to my limits, and the name has slipped in the last day or so, um maybe I’ll think of it in a few minutes. But, it’s a story about New Guinea natives.. who.. have a perfect relationship with how many, many people their territory can support, and they have learned to read when to go to war, by how many pigs there are… and.. when they go to war with a neighbouring tribe, well first they they have a big um orgy of pig eating, they kill off most of the pigs and they sacrifice them and eat them in a um, in a ritual which is dedicated to the ancestors, that why they’re pigs for the ancestors. Then they go to war and.. the, there are serious casualties in the war, among women and children. Now you stop and think about it, if a society is going to restore itself and.. you have choices.. of what do you need? a ratio of about ten women to one man right? Is that right? That would do it? And you could, you could restore your numbers. If you’ve got the other ratio, it’s gonna take a while.. to build the population back up isn’t it? Ten men to one woman, and that is the kind of thing, not those numbers, but that is the kind of thing that happens in the New Guinea wars. So there’s a delay factor built in.. to.. restoring the population, also you have to remember that the women are the one who tend the pigs and feed them, it’s a ritualised behaviour pattern, and they read when to go to war, when to cut back the population, slow the growth, by how many pigs there are. And it’s been estimated I think probably accurately because I’ve seen the data, that.. they never get above about 50% of what the landscape will support. Now, we don’t have any pigs to watch… we watch our leaders… we are conditioned to trust our leaders. You know I, I think probably the worst thing that could happen to this world, is for us to get, get as a whole world, into a very tightly linked, that is economically, linguistically, um governmentally – a world government. I think it would be an absolute disaster… because.. we don’t really control societies, the natural form which gives resiliency to the landscape.. is.. for there to be little bunches here, a little bunch there, a little bunch over here, and this buffers us against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. If a group gets wiped out over here.. by a glacier, or a famine, or god knows what, then there’s a hole.. and others come in and fill it… but the species goes on, and I think that we are operating on a species survival law, I think that’s what at the root of all this. And the individual you see is at the bottom of the heap in that, our society has turned this over, the individual is top, but you look at all the, the so called primitive societies, the individual’s down the bottom… and we have this myth that.. our government, the control function of our society, works beautifully, don’t believe it, it doesn’t. I’ll give you.. all kinds of examples – document them. Let’s just take one – 1971 we had a corn blight, right? Corn was just.. almost wiped out, price went sky high, so the department of agriculture, because it can manipulate support and how much.. land can be planted to a particular product, said well we will plant 25% more corn next year, and we’ll arrange the support programs accordingly. The following year there was no blight and it was a great corn year. It was a perfect year for growing corn, so.. we were just overwhelmed with corn, and the price just went way down, and 20% of the farmers who raised corn went bankrupt.. before the government could react and adjust the programs. You see the, you have a control function here, what does it have in it? It has government, church, well church is kind of losing out lately but it’s still there, family, schools, that sort of thing, and it sits up in a little circle up here and it regulates what’s going on.. down here where the large body of existence goes on, and there’s a line coming down which is a control function and there’s feedback going up. Well, a rule is passed, a law is passed or something is done up here in the control function it comes down into this, it sets up reverberations.. and there’s a lag time in it, it’s slow, before something feeds back, up to the top, and they know really what – what’s going on. Bill Cooper, a friend of mine, who’s a pretty good scientist, has a an analog he uses of this that I have adopted wholeheartedly – you probably all drive an automobile – okay you’re in an automobile and you have the steering wheel in your hands, you turn the steering wheel, but aha there’s a three minute delay between turning the steering wheel and the front wheels reacting [laughs]. How soon are you going to be in the ditch? Very quickly very quickly. People wonder why I say the Soviet Union is in bad trouble.. and they don’t even know it yet. It’s because they can drive their system fantastically faster than we can drive ours, we’re going to break down pretty soon, because we’ve been driving our system faster and faster and faster and faster, and payoff is jobs, and we’re breaking down right now. But.. for lots of reasons, the tighter linkages in their control feedback function, they’re much more monolithic than we are, they can drive their system faster, and they’re already starting to drive it at about the rate we were driving it in 1950. So we really didn’t get up to speed until about 1960. They’ll be up to speed.. by.. oh another.. three years at the most, with greater and greater consumer demands, with greater and greater pressure, on energy, which over there as here is primarily fossil fuels, and they’re going to surpass us… fantastically, in the speed at which they drive that system… and that speed has a demand equivalent, it uses that fossil fuel. So the system, it’s, it’s like a car you see, it’s going along, it’s doing 50 miles an hour and getting 20 miles to the gallon, they get it up to 70, now they’re down to 17, they get it at 80, now the’yre down to 14, they get it up to 150 and now they’re down to 6 miles to the gallon huh? or maybe 3 or 4. Well when the get it going very fast, it’s going to go whoosh and the gas is going to be gone you see, the tank is going to be empty, and unless they spot this, and see the, the trap into which they’re falling, they just continue speeding up the system as they are doing now – they’re in bad trouble… But we are going to break down. We’re lucky in this country, we’re very very fortunate. We have surpluses that we can still operate on. The nation of India, right now, cannot.. change from a sickle economy to the harvesting of grain, to a scythe economy, because they cannot afford the fifteen or sixteen cups of grain that they lose if they, per hectare, if they shift from sickle to scythe, they are that close to what the system is demanding. We’re a long ways, we have big buffer areas yet, that we can deal with, but you’re going to see some dramatic changes in things, in areas such as the Los Angeles basin, very dramatic because this is an energy sink, the basin is, it is using much more energy than the entire nation can afford to pour in to one area just to keep that area alive. So here are a few things like people in Santa Ana trading their homes to people in Burbank because the guy in Burbank works in Santa Ana and the guy in Santa Ana works in Burbank, they switch, home for home, and you’re going to see people going much closer to their – where they work. You’re going to see a shift to much more labour intensive activity, bicycles, depend on it, you’re going to see it. This is obvious because, I’ll give you a clue to the future, you’re going to see $20 a barrel oil, in five years… and because of the inflation pressure, and the other.. stop-gaps in.. pressure to keep us from running out of fuel too quickly, you’re going to see gasoline selling for upwards of $4 a gallon. …Now you translate that into your present commuting problem and you see immediately we have to do something. Yes?

2nd questioner: Ah I’m not sure if you’ve talked about this but … , …, rapid transit … [muffled]

FH: Well rapid transit has certain uses but there are really serious problems with it. If you really made rapid transit service communities in this basin – it’d have a track like a worm [chuckles], it’s just one row over the landscape, to pick up people. It’s either that, or you service it with feeder buses… and then you have to work on – what are the routes of the feeder buses? You see? And we have other options, because the cost of rapid transit is just going up, like a skyrocket, but we do have other options. You see I am very hopeful, I really think we are going to translate our, the, the buffer that we have in energy, into some much more useful… forms of energy exchange in, for lifestyle, than some other nations are. The rich are going to get richer, and the poor are going to get poorer. We’re extremely lucky to be in this country, just imagine that you were born in Java, on the island of Java, where there are 100 million people living in an area about one third the size of the state of Washington. I was there most recently, and it’s just a hideous thing to contemplate, because let’s look at what we know happens to an animal population under stress, it happens to trees, plants, all life forms… famine is a stress.. birth rate goes skyrocketing up. Right? Okay, then what if we react out of our guilt because we have been… the consumers of all time, and we start shipping.. boat loads of grain.. to Java. What happens? The population just goes whoosh up, and we are not solving the problem, we’re just pushing it farther downstream, where it will be much worse. Do you, do you see what I’m saying? This is why you see people like Garrett Hardin speaking in terms of lifeboat philosophy and triage. Really. I think that the kindest thing we can do, in the long term is make a very brutal decision, decision which appears at the moment very brutal, but it’s the kindest thing that we can do in the long term, is not to the feed the fire.. not send the ships, of grain. 

See it’s a problem in this country, not in that country, because we will only exacerbate the problem. Then what we should do is work for an exportable.. re.. restorable.. energy technology which will help the survivors, come to more than a subsistence level of existence. You see what I’m saying? Where we’ve made all kinds of just egregious errors because we’ve, we’ve transported, we’ve, we’ve translated our economy, into what we thought were the terms of another economy, and.. just completely upset those economies, upset, upset the whole society. You’ve all heard of the Green Revolution? I recently did a documentary film and I travelled in many places in the world, where we had exported the Green Revolution and I’m here to tell you that the Green Revolution is a disaster, it is a real disaster in, in quite a number of places. Let’s take Pakistan as a good example. What happened? We took no consideration to ah of the way that land holdings are held there, so

File 20-21:  Frank Herbert question and answer (probably at California State University between 1972 and 1976) part2

-transported, we’ve, we’ve translated our economy, into what we thought were the terms of another economy, and.. just completely upset those economies, upset, upset the whole society. You’ve all heard of the Green Revolution? I recently did a documentary film and I travelled ah in many places in the world, where we had exported the Green Revolution and I’m here to tell you that the Green Revolution is a disaster, it is a real disaster in, in quite a number of places. Let’s take Pakistan as a good example. What happened? We took no consideration to ah of the way that land holdings are held there, so there were many many large land holdings in Pakistan. We exported a way of getting a magnificent return on  the existing land, and we will forget of the moment that to do this you have to put outside inputs, you have to put ah um fertilisers in, and we will forget, forget for the moment that we’re using a hybrid.. rice and wheat, the IR8.. that has a very narrow spectrum of survival, see the natural grains have a wide spectrum of survival, they can, they can survive wide swings of climate and rain and what not, but the IR8 cannot, so what did we do? We handed.. a few large landowners… a bonus, they got a lot of money. How were they managing their land before? They were managing them with sharecroppers. So the landowners with a lot of money, turned around and invested that in equipment – tractors, plough, gang ploughs, what not, and.. seven, no, six out of seven of their existing sharecroppers were just booted off the land and were shoved into the cities, more than 100 thousand families, went had to were, were shoved into the cities in Pakistan where there were no facilities whatsoever to take care of them – just go starve. What Pakistan needed was a labour intensive push, something that, that made it more profitable to put a lot more people to work, doing whatever they did. They didn’t need machines, they didn’t need our technology… they needed something else entirely. We exported the wrong thing. And this is pretty much the picture of, of what we have done in trying to export our technology. We have to become much more sophisticated about what we do in so-called underdeveloped nations… instead of making these jackass moves that we’ve been doing. Yeah?

3rd Questioner: Um, is this reason then why ah Russia is underemployed it’s got too many people doing trivial jobs and not enough people in highly paid areas?

FH: Well I don’t know it that’s a, an accurate picture of the Soviet Union. I, I think that if you’re looking at it as an engineer might look at it, as a system, how it works, that one thing that crops up immediately is that in terms of the product they get for how much energy they put into it, whether it’s electrical energy, or fossil fuel, or whatever, they are 40% less efficient than we are… you see? and that’s, that’s a real measure.. of, of where they’re going when they speed up the system. Yes?

4th Questioner: Ah I [muffled…..] in Pakistan where I’m from

FH: Yes? 

4th Questioner: You need technology.

FH: What part of Pakistan?

4th Questioner: Ah I lived In Karachi.

FH: Where? 

4th Questioner: In Karachi.

FH: In Karachi, yes I was, I was there, we were in Rawalpindi up in the Barani.

4th Questioner: [muffled]

FH: Yes, Do you, do you agree with my assessment of what the disaster was? The wrong kind of technology was exported.

4th Questioner: [muffled]

FH: Yeah.

4th Questioner: [muffled]

FH: I can’t hear you. 

4th Questioner: [muffled] However [muffled] I believe that 

FH: What’s being done about the families that were being displaced and pushed into the cities?

4th Questioner: Was that into West Pakistan?

FH: Yes.

4th Questioner: Or [muffled,,,]

FH: No No All over – in, in both sides

4th Questioner: [muffled….] Bangladesh, I’m from Bangladesh on the farm [muffled] many people who live on the street

FH: Yeah.

4th Questioner: [muffled….] India is very good [muffled….] 

FH: You see, yeah.

4th Questioner: [muffled….]

FH: I’m having trouble hearing you because ah there’s a little bit of static here.

4th Questioner: Okay [muffled….]

FH: Yeah.

4th Questioner: [muffled..] one person [muffled..] science fiction, [muffled..] better understand nature [muffled] and in the light of the pursuit of knowledge in physics, and the theory of relativity, and integrate physics knowledge to study the discovery of [muffled….] furthermore [muffled..]

category [muffled] the idea of the [muffled..] man and potentially a metaphysical and ontological meaning existing actually in realms that you can’t go beyond [muffled..], or is science fiction, is science fiction for you merely [muffled] 

FH: Okay I kind of get the question, ah [crowd laughs] but note, but note-

4th Questioner: [muffled…]

FH: Yeah,

4th Questioner: [muffled…]

FH: Yeah well first before you go on with the question, first note the absolute assumptions in the questions, while, while we talk about relativism, in a relativistic universe, there are assumptions in this question which are based on an absolute universe… you see, a universe of not change, note that. Okay go ahead.

4th Questioner: The universe allows [muffled] there’s nothing about that [muffled]

FH: Yeah.

4th Questioner: Furthermore do you add to some kind of value at maximum in your film [muffled] Moreover do you feel the way science fiction [muffled] extrapolations [muffled] now [muffled] in terms of [muffled] etcetera organisation parallel in the future [muffled] individual standard of leadership deriving from group dynamics.

FH: Now the first thing I note about its question is that it shows how far from reality academe can take us. Really. Notice the fourteen dependent clauses. [laughs] Really. Be very, be damned careful with how you play with words, that’s the first thing that, that a science fiction writer has to learn, any writer has to learn. The second thing that you want to note.. about this question.. is its absolute form and its, and its demand for value judgement. Do we use value judgements in writing? Of course we do.. of course we use value judgement, we use the value judgements that any human being uses he is conditioned to use them and because you were raised in Pakistan which was part of the British Raj, you know that you can, that you cannot translate your value judgements entirely into the forms that are accepted here, and I’m well aware that I cannot translate my value judgements, entirely, into the forms for which you are conditioned. I, I’d give you just lots of examples: one immediately comes to mind um a good friend of mine in Pakistan, member of the state television system, um was telling me one time that he was well aware that… that ah there were no longer any real health reasons to keep him from eating pork, and but one time when he was living in London he tried to eat some bacon, and he said, ‘you know, I was shocked with my body, because I couldn’t swallow it…’ he said, ‘I had not realised how deeply the early conditioning went into me.’ Now nobody in this room is outside that kind of conditioning, we all had it, so to ask whether we have value judgments… is, is nonsense questions, course we do. What are those value judgments? That’s a different question.

4th Questioner: [muffled…]

FH: Yeah?

4th Questioner: [muffled…] I’m not saying, I’m saying that you are not doing them.

FH: No No I..

4th Questioner: [muffled…] Again I’m not even reading your books.

FH: I’m sorry I couldn’t even get that?

4th Questioner: Again I said I haven’t even read your books, so..

FH: Yeah.

4th Questioner: [muffled…] imply that I’m saying [muffled]

FH: I got that idea that you were asking about value judgments when of course we use, the, the question to ask is what value judgments.

4th Questioner: Okay let’s [muffled] I do not know [muffled]

FH: Yeah.

4th Questioner: Equal or not [muffled] I feel [muffled] science [muffled]

FH: Right.

4th Questioner: [muffled]

FH: But you cast your question, you see you got caught by academe and you cast your question in the form that academe demands.

4th Questioner: Let’s put it this way [muffled] isolated for example in America isolated [muffled]

WM: I’m going to be the public in here and say time gentlemen please time, ah hurry up please it’s time and we have lunchtime coming up, I have one minute at twelve and we can continue this at one thirty hahaha.

FH: Let me do this up in in, ah round numbers first because I think he deserves an answer really, I’m not trying to put him down or anything else, but ah um, I have been in this traps, I’ve been, I’ve written the the the question with the fourteen different clauses, and and caught myself doing it, and it always gets us away from what we can touch… what we can do, and but, when you get down, when you force him or me or anybody else to say, ‘you know what the hell are you talking about? What’s your question? Let’s skip the fourteen dependent clauses.’ When you force him to, to talk about it in those terms what’s he saying? How do we integrate science into, what we see of science..

4th Questioner: How do [muffled]

FH: How do we make an accommodation with it? Well we, first thing we have to do is understand it.

WM: And we’ll continue this discussion at one thirty.

[crowd laughs, claps, and departs gradually]

FH: -not trying to put him down or deny your question

4th Questioner: You can’t put me down, it’s a debate.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN I’M SORRY THERE IS NOT A CAFETERIA ON CAMPUS, THERE IS COFFEE OUTSIDE AND WE’RE JUST ABOUT RINGED BY SMALL BOB’S BIG BOY TYPE RESTAURANTS, THAT’S WHY WE HAVE AN HOUR AND A HALF SO YOU TIME TO GET OFF CAMPUS.

FH: Neither I am I-

4th Questioner: -Understanding of science and, science is very carefully to acknowledge then this a pure organical it is simply inexorably true, simply a collaboration of higher energy barriers

FH: Right which has entropy.

4th Questioner: Codename? God and Bishop Berkely and where you know they’ve more than proved it, that this thing [muffled] of sound and colours, so in terms of science and physics again we are going into the realm… what is essentially – what is your attitude from data?

FH: Yeah I, I to answer your question in part I would say that I depend very much on the Hindu concept of the void to understand what the hell we’re translating from one energy form to another, does that answer your question?

4th Questioner: Let’s put it this way – it’s desirable even to bring about a duality of energy form, there is no such thing as duality.

FH: Yeah well the duality, the duality exists in the, in the, in the mind which demands a frame of reference, and when you’re talking to that frame of reference, if you’re not going to talk nonsense, you see the frame of reference won’t understand. 

4th Questioner: Yeah.

FH: Yeah then you have to cast it in that, and slowly lead it into the singleness.

4th Questioner: I understand. 

FH: Yeah .

4th Questioner: You’re trying to, the Kantian categories of space and time.

FH: Yes.

4th Questioner: But then on the other hand Einstein’s concept of space-time itself, a should be used as more as ah as your own um ah a very sense of awareness if you’re go to incorporate the same understanding in our general vocabulary of knowing.

FH: Well how are you going.. you see how are you going to translate, why don’t you translate so people will understand it? That’s, you see when you write you translate, now let me finish, yeah. When you’re writing you’re translating, so, you have, when you’re translating you have to consider what the other end will understand, you have to, otherwise you’re making nonsense noises.

4th Questioner: I agree with you.

FH: So you have various serious problems on what you can tell, to that, to the receiver.

4th Questioner:I understand 

FH: Right?

4th Questioner: Yes I understand

FH: So if I have a concept of of, of singleness, of unity, about the, a metaphysical concept you see of what’s going on.

4th Questioner: Yeah?

FH: I can’t just drop it out in front of somebody who has no.. ah association with it at all

4th Questioner: Absolutely.

FH: They won’t understand

4th Questioner: However however I’d like to you know ah mention the school that I’m going to I’ll be doing my [muffled] at Santa Monica, it’s called prosperous, it’s not a, it nots a, it’s very, it’s not a credit school, it’s not a university, ah we hold absolutely radical ideas as far as education is [muffled], the whole business of grading and things that’s total bullshit And our approach to history in that school is that history is essentially going into your own memories to reorientated our understanding of previous events.

FH: What’s your own background?, ah what is the ah, in the class structure that exists in Pakistan, What is, what is your own background? 

4th Questioner: Um.. partly ah [muffled] physics community,

FH: Yeah.

4th Questioner: Partly I’ve messed around with a little bit of agriculture, I’ve developed an interest in Russian literature, and Russian dance music and Russian Philosophy, and ah I think I understand a little bit of macro-economics, so far as, I’ve read Galbraith and [muffled] ah.

FH: Oh, your flow economics.

4th Questioner: Let’s say rather than specialise in one thing I like to get into as many of these so called.. ‘subjects,’ for the knowledge. At one point I come to believe that when everything, any of these subjects in isolation and preoccupy yourself with them, there’s going to be some fuck up involded.

FH: Well look.

4th Questioner: I’d much rather a general system-

FH: Science fiction. If you asked me what science fiction does, I would say that one primary function it fills in the society is translate the what science is doing in the terms that others can understand, you see, outside of the mathematical language, and so- 

4th Questioner: Like I said I wasn’t pressing you, I will not, it was not an antagonistic ah whatever

FH: I understand

4th Questioner: But rather something that I can know better myself by questioning, and by trying to use the ideas of metaphysics.

FH: Yeah, and and and I do that myself, I deal in metaphysics.

[now a line of other approach him]

Woman: Sharpen your pen Herbert… look what’s coming

FH  Oh for god [laughs]

Man: Mr. Herbert, thank you very much for this. I have to leave this half, I enjoyed the half that I heard.

FH Oh I’m glad we could be together at this time anyway. 

Woman: These are a package deal – more than one.

FH Ok Man I’ve read both your earlier Dune books and I’m looking forward to the third one.

FH I’ll get to that one in a second.

Girl: Um could I have that in Arabic too? Do you write it as well as [muffled] it?

FH No I don’t .

Girl: aww oh okay thank you.

FH: I don’t.

2nd girl: How about Urdu?

FH: You want it in Urdu?

Woman: try to please [muffled] for him.

[a minute of muted background noise]

Man: Thank you kindly.

Young man: How long is your third Dune book going to be?

FH: About as long as the first one.

Woman: good Dune Messiah didn’t last long enough.

Young man: Thank you.

FH: You might be interested to know that I threw away a 65,000 word version of that, because I, yeah I threw it away and completely came back and redid because I had been ah playing ah greater white father anthropologist ah talk about ah about Indians you know in the first one yeah. 

Girl: Yeah well [muffled] paternalistic attitude that we have.

FH: Yeah you’ve got to be damn careful about that. There you go.

[muted background noise continues]

Frank Hebert Masterpost