AUDIO
Frank Hebert Masterpost
Ellen Svaco: My name is Ellen Svaco and I’m the director of the campus events speakers program, and I have just one announcement for you, and that’s that on Thursday May 9th at the Wadsworth theatre, campus
events and public lectures, and the undergraduate English department, will be bringing you Tom Wolfe, who um wrote the ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ From our house to bath ‘From Bauhaus to Our House’ and ‘The Right Stuff’ so you want to look for information about that in the Bruin. Now I’d like to introduce you to Leanne Sharpe who is the I Triple E president and member of the engineering society
Leanne Sharpe: hello um as she said I’m Leanne Sharpe and I’m
here to introduce Frank Herbert but before we do that we have a couple of announcements we have to do in conjunction for engineers week. One: tomorrow at noon in the court of Sciences we’ll be having the egg drop, off the top of Boulter Hall, and the car races so if you’d like to come out and see that we’d all appreciate it, and then Friday will be having the 16th annual paper airplane contest, we’ll fly those off a Boulter Hall, and then we’ll also have a talent show that night, and then tomorrow we’re going to be also having um Brian Tilly talking about fiber optics on the third floor of Ackerman and Friday we’ll be having a speaker on the
space shuttle which will be in the second floor lounge of Ackerman,and then thirdly we’d like to announce the winners in our drawing we had yesterday at the microcomputer fair, and the winner for the, the computer is Ruth Yoon, Y, double O, N, she’s a computer science graduate and for the HP calculator is Fernando Bravo, and then we have two winners for the um Intel puzzles, which is Gerald or excuse me Gerald Lyon Ellie and Todd Selbo so if they’re here or you know them tell them to come by 4800 Boulter hall to come claim their prizes and that’s it for the announcements for engineers week and I’d like to introduce Frank Herbert he’s written many books, 27 in all, um probably most familiar with the Dune series, he’s also written things like ‘The Eyes of Heisenberg’, ‘The White Plague’, ‘Worlds of Frank Herbert,’ and his newest book Chapterhouse 1, it’s another book in the Dune series, when it was shipped three days later it was on the bestseller list of New York and it’s number 2 in the Dalton and Walden books, their bestseller lists, um he currently resides in the Olympian Peninsula in Washington and has a winter home in Hawaii, and today will he be talking about is mythology of futurism, and so afterwards we have microphones on either
side, if you have questions you like to ask him just use those, and then after that we’ll be having a book signing in the back, and if you don’t have the book, you’d like to purchase it, it’s back there and now I’d like to introduce Frank Herbert.
[applause]
Frank Herbert: Hi gang [chuckles]. This is water not Gin [chuckles]. How’s that? you hear me okay? yeah okay. I thought I would talk about the mythology of futurism because.. this is one of the things I’ve addressed for a great many years, longer than I care to tell you about, and I’d like to begin by telling you.. what got me started on it. In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt appointed a group that you may have heard about, it’s called the Brain Trust. The Brain Trust was supposed to lay out the course of hard science and ah social ah development for the next 25 years through 1958 right? The interesting thing to me was to look at
what they did not mention, no transistors, no atomic energy, no antibiotics… no faster than sound travel, no space probes.. I mean the U2 preceded that you see, and no World War II. Now it struck me that those things had some sort of influence on those 25 years, so I started looking at prediction, and I’ve been following it very carefully ever since. Herman Kahn, the late Herman Kahn fascinated me because he was another one of these absolutists, as Roosevelt was, because by appointing the Brain Trust he was playing along with this mythology that you can lay out the future, and the whole idea of ‘the future’ struck me as rather interesting because that’s almost a Presbyterian statement if it’s
the future it’s already there, and we’re just approaching it… nothing’s going to change, well it’ll just unfold suddenly and there it’ll be. So the future is one of these great mythological statements that’s buried in the language. What I’m addressing is this whole idea of absolutes, and your helplessness in the face of such overwhelming movements in mankind.
Now we get overwhelmed occasionally but I think each of us has a future, and lots of times individuals can have a tremendous influence.. on the futures of all of us. I don’t have to list the people, from Michelangelo on, just from that time, to make this an important statement to you, Einstein… these people said, they’re almost on a one track, they said ‘Hey this is, this is fascinating, and I’m going to study it, and see what I can discover’ and this is the door I would like to open to you especially, it’s one of the reasons, one of the major reasons I came here today, because you are engineering students. Now you’re movers, you take the substance of our universe and you do things with it. Now I’ve been playing that game for years because, when I’m not writing books I’m experimenting with a dedicated word processor that we’ve been working on for five years, I’m building ah with my own hands ah things to reduce the energy load of my house in the northwest, making ah, solar collectors out of grab-bag materials, seconds in ah, thermopane and beer cans, it was fun getting the materials together.
And these things work. I made a methane collector out of ah, ah, truck inner tubes, which wasn’t, well it was successful, it ah allowed me to use the methane from poultry manure to singe them when we slaughtered them and put them down in the freezer which I called ‘using everything about the pig including the squeal’. When I wrote ‘Dragon in the Sea’ my preferred title was ‘Under Pressure’ about ah, submersible.. carriers for liquid cargo, I experimented and made.. models, found out how to, how to get a hydrostatic balance, with different cargoes, with oil and whatnot, so that when I wrote the book I was speaking from personal knowledge. I went down in a submarine, at the dock, they took me down, they couldn’t take it out in Puget Sound, but they could, at the dockside with wring ties, submerge it, to show me how it worked – so I went down in a submarine. I did all of these things because.. how we influence our surroundings.. the impact of human effort, on the world around us, is
the most fascinating thing about our world to me. I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea.. that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead ‘may be dangerous to your health’. I mean I think the most dangerous president we’ve had, or one of the most dangerous at least, not because he was a bad guy, but because people didn’t question him, one of the most dangerous presidents that we’ve had in this century was Jack Kennedy because people said ‘yes sir Mr. charismatic leader what will we do next?’ and we wound up in Vietnam, people don’t realize that he was one of the major moving forces getting us into Vietnam, because he locked us into a commitment there, and I think probably the most valuable president, of this century, was Richard Nixon, because he taught us to distrust government…and he did it by example… which is the best kind of teaching. Well anyway I wanted to do this thing about messiahs, and charismatic leaders, I mean why do nine hundred people go to Guyana and drink poison kool-aid…? Why do… the citizens of an entire nation, most of the citizens anyway, say Sieg Heil and murder some three million Jews, and Gypsies? Why do they not question their leaders? Okay I was going to do this book, and I started researching a lot of things, the research is, oh boy that’s the fun part, anthropology, comparative religions, geology, I spent six years.. preparing, and in the middle of all of that, I went down to a place on the coast of Oregon called Florence Oregon, because I was supporting a very expensive writing habit by being a journalist. I was going to do an article about the US Department of Agriculture’s project at Florence Oregon to control sand dunes, now sand dunes are like slow-motion waves, they’ll move across roads, across highways, they’ll inundate whole plantations of forest, but they do it slowly… and I was flying an airplane over this… experimental project this.. test station on the coast of Oregon, leaning out the window taking pict- the desert of course is the wilderness of the Bible and these, in the desert, the wilderness is where a great many religions have originated, and I started researching ecology, how we inflict ourselves upon the planet. Well after six years of this marvelously interesting research, I had the system loaded, and I
sat down to do a book. The book as I conceived of it was the first three books, they were one book in my head, and I told my.. agent this, and after he recovered from his heart attack he said ‘Do you think you could split it into three at least, maybe four?’ Well I split it into three, and I thought I was through with it, except that I had created a character in the third one, who would not leave my head, now authors have a solution to that: we can write them into a [skips] having done that I had opened Pandora’s box, and I was having so much fun with it I told people I would
continue to write Dune books as long as they interested me, and as long as they interested the readers. And that’s what I’ve been doing. I have been having fun with what I do, which if I give you nothing else, about what you do with your lives, and these interesting things that you’ve learned in this excellent educational institution, ‘institution’ is a marvelous word’… find something that you like to do, and even if you’re supporting your habit… by.. something that you don’t like as well, the two together, that’s what I did by becoming a journalist… Remember that, there’s nothing at all wrong with saying that the Protestant ethic.. is full of it… that it’s alright to enjoy your work. You don’t have to fight your way out of bed every morning, you can get up every morning eager to go do whatever it is you do. Have a love affair with your, with your world, and remember that you’re not going to be able to predict every consequence of what you do. There is so much [skips], what I do on that experimental farm in the northwest, [skips] teII you what I’m doing. The farm in the
country where you go and become absolute [skips] version of the home built catch, that you get into and sail off to a South Sea Island, where brown-skinned maidens pour coconut juice in your mouth… not to mention the sand crabs, and the flies, and other things that are down there. Mythology is a great beckoner, it says ‘come on come on it’s great in here come on’, examine your mythologies, examine your absolutist criteria, question things, I have the most fun when I’m writing questioning things that people do not question, the assumptions that everybody knows are true. I’m going to declare a heresy for you.. all science, if you go back into its roots, saying ‘why do I believe this? well I believe this because of these tests and this, this proof, well why do I believe this? Why did I set up this test? Why did I believe that proof?’ All science goes back to something, that we believe because we believe it… we believe it because we believe it, and we have no proof for it, it’s like a religion. So when you dig into the roots of science.. [skips] a gray area at the bottom… but it’s like a balloon, and the surface is [skips] word that computer science has given us. I love this language. The surface of the balloon.. is their face, with what we do not know, inside the balloon as we blow into it, is what we have proved okay? But as we increase what we think we know, we increase our exposure to what we do not
know. This is one of the inevitable laws of our universe. But isn’t it more interesting, to live in a universe, where there are unknowns.. to discover.. new lands to explore, then to live in an absolute box, where when you find the edge ‘that’s it baby’, no place to go from there. I like the fact.. that we cannot predict every[skips (probably ‘thing’)]. I like the fact that we live in a universe where anything, may happen, because the alternative to me, is.. a constricting dead end. In my original conception of the first Dune book, those first three books, I.. had Paul blind in the second book because.. to my way of thinking that was.. the ultimate exploration of absolute prediction. He did not need to see, he knew what was going to happen, he knew who was all around him without eyes. Now you think about that a minute, I won’t give you a full minute to think about it, you’d start squirming in your seats, but.. th[skips] you right now, an absolute… unvarying invari[skips] happen to you from this moment, here in this room, to the moment of your death, I can’t predict [skips] be an absolute utter bore, your life would be instant replay, you’d be sitting there now saying ‘oh and next he’s going to say, oh my god is saying it’ and you would not be able to change a thing. Now this.. really states the fallacy.. that Herman Kahn, wanting to set our future in concrete, I’m sorry about that, and.. Roosevelt and others, find it so difficult to face. It is the unexpected, the surprises, that make the important differences in our lives, even some of the nasty surprises. Now I said, that I was going to give you about a half hour, to ask questions, because as far as I’m
concerned this is not communication. Now I’m up here playing lecturer, and you’re down there playing audience, and we each know the role don’t we? hmm, we’ve played it before, we learned this very young. We learned how to find out what that.. figure up there wants, and then we regurgitate that for them. I came on the fallacy of this, before I get into the Q&As, I came on the fallacy of this one time when I was in the fourth grade, ten years old, I had a teacher.. who had been a teacher for a long time, she was a large woman, do you know any, know any women who have, wear tight.. sleeves and their flesh bulges out? she was one
of those, and she were these glasses that looked like the bottoms of coke bottles… and her class just bored the hell out of me, I would read the book and I’d know the answers and.. so I come to class to throw spit wads and… do other disruptive things, and I was continually being asked to stay after school, and she was one of these.. ruler users you know ‘hold out your palm WHAM’. She could have been a nun without any trouble at all. Anyway, I had done something terrible in class, I don’t know what it was, but she brought me up finally to sit beside her desk, and she had a chair.. beside her desk, now Taquamada(?) I think designed this set up, the chair sat so that my knees were exposed, beyond the edge of her desk, and she sat right there correcting papers forever. Now an imaginative ten [skip] ‘I don’t know what to do to you’ and your imagination can construct a lot of things that she will do to you including the bastinado. I was terrified, and I sat there, and I sat there sweating it out, not able to utter a word, and finally she would had a platform and her chair swiveled, wheels on it, and she wheeled over right in front of me and she was right there, and she said ‘I don’t know what to do with you’. Well I made an ultimate mistake right then, because.. teachers go to special courses to learn… how to deal with problem children, and how not to lose their cool, so I said ‘Why are you mad at me?’ I was practically crying, she got all red in the face, reached forward and grabbed my shoulders and she was shaking me, pulling me up to those pop bottles and back, saying ‘I’m not mad, I’m not mad’. I mean it doesn’t take a genius to see that she’s mad, but what’s coming out of her mouth disagrees with that… So what I learned right there, I didn’t put it all together, but I learned to be watchful. I learned that you don’t pay as much attention to what people say as to what they do. What they do is the real.. jungle telegraph, that tells you what they’re really up to. Now it is that jungle telegraph that is a main.. leitmotif of my writing, what’s underground? Where does the word ‘iatrogenic’ come from? It means a disease or.. other difficulty, created by the doctor, or what is done to you in the name of the doctor. Why is it.. that we keep approaching the problem of.. hard drugs the same way, even though we know the system doesn’t work it never has.. and we know, that at least 75% of the new users, we have good, good solid information on this from studies that have been made by SRI and others, that at least 75% of the new users are not joyriders they’re people turned on to the hard drugs, by the existing.. addicts, to build a market, to support their own habits. So why don’t we look at it and say ‘hey… we’re not going to really eliminate the problem, but we may be able to reduce the impact on our society by taking the profit out of it’. Only about 11 and a half percent, of the new users are joyriders, the rest are created by medicine and other factors, more than 75% are created by the system. But we have a big bureaucracy.. and a big criminal.. system, that supports itself on it with a lot of money, it supports a big bureaucracy, it has enough money on the criminal side to buy FBI agents, I hope you all read the news and know this is true, to buy.. whole strings of border guards, to buy the ah briefcases, ah envoys from foreign countries, to buy the key… to the police… storeroom in New York City, do you know what happened to the heroin? in the French Connection? it disappeared, from the police storeroom in New York City, it just vanished, isn’t that amazing? So if we take the profit out of it and turn it over to the Public Health Service, and say ‘ok, we know we’re not going to solve the problem, this way, but we will look at lea, at least reduce the arena, in which it occurs, if we make could available, at $0.50 a crack, at a public health service [skips] right out of it… then we have, because most of the theft in New York City and other major cities right now supports the heroin and other hard drugs [skips] the rug out from under.. the criminal syndicate, or a major element of the criminals, criminal syndicate. But we have also done something else. We had [skip] or and who’s not, who’s guilty and who’s innocent, in a different way, and a lot of people have trouble with that. We want to know who the goats are, the sacrificial goats are… But I’m suggesting to you that we could do this practically overnight, when they did it in England, what happened immediately, was fascinating. Well the first thing was that the criminal syndicate turned to major robberies… that’s when that big train holdup occurred in England… because we had taken a large part of their income away from them. Okay, enough of these crazy ideas from a crazy science fiction writer. Grand canyon between us I wish were not there, I wish we were sitting in a room with a few beers and rapping, but we can’t do that okay what’s on your minds? [skip] but ask me a question, show me ahead what’s this guy down here?
1st questioner: [To soft to be audible]
FH: The Bene Gesserit in the book Dune yeah
1st questioner: [To soft to be audible – [are breeding Paul]]
FH: Well we do it with cattle…. and dogs… And the ah aristocrats of our world have done it for centuries. The question is ‘do I think it’s wrong.. to ah, um meddle in the randomity of genetic selection? I was making a point that unexpected things can happen. I’ve made that point several times in different books, ah that was, that was what I was doing. I know we’re going to do these things, we have done them in the past, and we’re going to do them again. So I was just saying what happens? what if? which is the beautiful door that’s open in science fiction, why I write it, there’s lots of elbow room. I was saying that the Bene Gesserit had been doing this for a long time, they had this end in mind, and they got something they did not expect – do you see what I’m saying? yeah okay.. any more questions? there’s another question right over here, speak up so I can hear you well. Oh the, hold on this guy at the mic over here. Yep.
Paul Twine: Hi my name’s Paul Twine I would like to know what inspired you to write the book Dune?
FH: What what [PT: what inspired you to write Dune] what inspired? [skips] ah I wanted to treat with a, treat an idea about how [skips] and how much do we contribute to the power they hold over us? And [skips] as it is today the rest is history. I decided I was going to write by the
way, when I was aged eight, how many of you in here want to write? hey good come on in the water’s fine, and the competition, really don’t, forget about the competition, we’re not competition, the more of us who are writing well the more people are going to read and the better it is for all of us.
3rd Questioner: Mr. Herbert I’m on your right [FH: okay, over there] yeah as a major author of great creativity and insight you have gained the respect of millions, yet [FH: gee watch out for my head it’s coming up like a balloon] I think it’s gonna go [FH: okay] down in a sec. Yet you have chosen to cast token gay characters in a negative light. The images that you present in your popular work Dune and it’s movie specifically can only [FH: Well I didn’t do the movie you understand that?] can only promote bigotry and violence against lesbians and gay men and silence
FH: Of course what I was, what I was doing with with the, with the gay population there, I was only saying one thing. I was saying that, that homosexuality is a natural occurrence in our society, ah in your teens you’re naturally this way, and some people are beyond, and primitive societies have dealt with it in a different way than our society deals with it, and lots of times we create the aberrant gay, and there are aberrant gays just as their aberrant other individuals, by our social reactions to them, and I just gave you an aberrant gay, in the, in the Dune books, but what I was also saying to you was, that, sadomasochism sometimes is a part of this, I can give you chapter and verse on that, and that gays have a hard, much harder problem coming out of the social pressures, than the rest of us do, in many instances, but I didn’t have anything else in mind with this, that, that was what I was doing.
3rd Questioner: Well I hope that in the future [FH: Yeah] that you portray, in any books that you do write in the future, do in fact [FH: Well there’s another thing I was saying-] responsibly represent lesbians and gays in a manner consistent with your non-lesbian, non-gay characters.
FH: Well there’s another thing I was saying is that gays have opted.. to.. not continue the species… that’s just true… now, um… yeah well it, it’s a choice anybody can make. I’ve made that choice with my new lady, because they’re enough of us already. I mean I didn’t ah, I had three children, ah and a 35-year marriage and my wife died – I thought that was the end of it, but it wasn’t [Woman: Excuse me][3rd Questioner: GAYS HAVEN’T OPTED FOR ANYTHING. Sexual orientation is a natural part of myself, I didn’t choose to be gay I just am gay].
Of course I’m, that’s what I’m saying, a person doesn’t, a person doesn’t
choose, it happens, but it happens for a lot of reasons, sometimes it happens for psychological reasons [3rd Questioner: we’re just the way we are, and secondly I happen to know many gay people being openly gay, gay people who are not safe to be as open with me, and most gay people have nothing against children, most gay people even want their own children so what just said
FH: Well um, it’s a lot more difficult… that is going to be a sensation.
4th Questioner: Hello Mr. Herbert [FH: yeah] on your left [skips] I’d like to thank you for the enjoyment you give me through your books, you’re a
really good author I.. enjoy it, and I was wondering in your book Dune series – the Bene Gesserit it seems like parallel Honored Matres what would what
FH: They’re on.. kind of a.. wild offshoot yeah but, but much more rambunctious. My [skips] not always but most of the time, willing to take a backseat and be the king-makers.. rather than to get up front and be the king, which can have its.. bad points you know because we tend to treat ah, people with power, ah.. rather badly occasionally. You see, I think that there is a bad idea… around in our world, and that idea is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think what really happens is that power attracts the corruptible.. and [skips] been reading the news out of bon, called the Kremlin, the Pentagon. I would make it a criminal offense for any.. military officer.. to accept [skips] after retirement, in fact to accept ah [skip] giving the fox the key to the chicken coop, and of course we get gold-plated.. weapons and whatnot that.. Are absolutely useless. I can document, I was a correspondent in Vietnam, risked my neck over there to learn it firsthand. Um I can document that trying to gold-plate the M16 cost us about ten to fifteen thousand, ten thousand to fifteen thousand lives in Vietnam, course Vietnam was a.. disaster from word one, but, the military made all kinds of egregious errors over there. I was fascinated by the.. thing around Westmoreland, because I hoped against hope that he would never win that case, not because I thought he.. was a liar, but I know we were lied to over there, I can document that, and if Westmoreland didn’t know it that’s [skips]
5th Questioner: I know the difficulties in adapting literature to the screen but.. I really felt cheated in the way they changed the ending for, to suit the movie.
FH: Okay let me give you a capsule history of how that happened. There’s about five hours of Dune on film. The distributors want a film of about two hours so they can show it more than once in a day and get their money, and they put the arm on Universal, to cut it that much, but now there’s a kind of a little underground movement to ah, put all that film back in there and create.. a miniseries… and if they do I will try again, I tried before and failed, I will try again, to change the ending and get that damn rainstorm out of there because [skips]
6th Questioner: This is engineer’s week and we’ve had [FH: I’m sorry I’m having trouble hearing you] um okay I just this is en[skips] [FH: horse pucky] that’s just I want to know what you thought about that [FH: yeah] because there’s so much that we do that it’s import[skip]
FH: – interesting and useful things with the knowledge you have gained here, and that’s why I’m [skips]
7th Questioner: I was wondering if you could elaborate on your um, your experiments with a self-sufficient environment or [skips]
FH: as part of our social glue. I think it is dangerous, for everybody to go off and become their own little thing.
7th Questioner: Okay well um, I think when I read your ah, read your books you have a little, they had a little um, a um, note on you in the back, it said you’re dealing with an energy self-sufficiency, I don’t mean socially [FH: well that’s right] okay, I wonder if you could elaborate on that.
FH: Oh you want me to elaborate on what I did up there? [7th Questioner: yeah exactly] okay, well we played with a panemone, gee I don’t have to explain a panamone to this audience do we, we played with a panemone wind machine, um, and ah, well I’m a pilot, and so.. we went back to what we’ve learned from.. aircraft design and redesigned the blades, keeping in mind that we wanted something could be stamped out, rather.. quickly the way they’re stamping them out over here right [skips] ten-foot tall model, on the roof of a ah, a shop in Astoria Oregon produces ah, seven-and-a-half horsepower in a 50 knot wind but the important thing is it works in a 50 knot wind. How many of you have seen ah, ah, this windmill orchard over on the way to the desert? yeah, horizontal axis wind machines, they’re a dead-end street, they have to be feathered out when you can, wind gets around 35 knots, we need something that can be used in high winds, ours is designed to operate in a 90 knot wind… and we patented it, nobody seems to be interested in it yet, but ah, we’re back redesigning it and improving it [skips] a wrecked truck, a, a van for a hundred and fifty dollars [skips] an hour ah, ten to twenty times [skips] streets on a backcountry road, all I had to do was phone down to the sheriff’s [skips] a bureaucracy has taken over… well that was one of the reasons I chose this small town to do this sort of thing. We experimented with a duck pond, duck manure is a great.. sealant for the bottom of ponds, and.. we created a culture in the pond that would grow lots of algae, and it fed the Ducks about half their food, so we raise ducks with about half the input of.. purchased foods, and they were quite healthy ducks, and they tasted nice too, canard a l’Orange from your own pond. Well if you don’t have fun doing these things why do them? That’s what we did up there [skips] hours.. and we did it just before.. oil started to skyrocket [skips]… that’s what we did, and that’s what you can do. That answer your question? [7th Questioner: yeah great] okay.
8th Questioner: Yes I have a question about your career choices. I think I read somewhere that you had once considered a career in marine biology, is this?
FH: As a marine, well no I’d, I’d been a um, I had an uncle who was one of the first agriculturists in the Pacific Northwest, he brought in oysters, in a place called Henderson Cove, and… he also used some Japanese exchange students, from the University of Washington fisheries department, during the summer, to work for him, and I went over there and they taught me what they knew about oyster culture, and.. I didn’t think of this as a career to follow, it was an interesting thing I did for a time. Ah what I had almost became was a professional historian, I’d debated that one time, that was a possible career choice. [Skips]…
FH: Yes?
[skips]
I don’t know any more beyond that probably not.
9th Questioner: and is, is Duncan Idaho [skips]
FH: down here [skips] the noble savage of course in this, on this continent was the American Indian, who did everything right – not quite. Once the horse got in here, things were very very different, and even
without the horse, the Indians probably would have wiped out the Buffalo before long because they had developed a system of, of driving them off cliffs, and taking what they could. So even primitive societies… do not always make the best choices, they operate without.. any real awareness.. of how they wipe out.. their substance, the sustenance that they depend on, just the way [skips] are tied to each other: Canadian lynx will kill off enough rabbits that the population drops dramatically, the lynx population drops, the rabbit population comes up, the lynx population comes up, and it’s just a… sine curve. So that’s the kind of game I’m playing. Okay over here where I can see you.
10th Questionnaire: Ah hi Mr. Herbert, I’d like to start out by
saying I’ve enjoyed.. your books very much.. Ah [FH: you’re supposed to, if you don’t [laughs] if you don’t enjoy ‘em I’m cheating you] okay some books are not designed for pleasure though so, ah in Dune [FH: you get a lot of those here I would imagine [chuckles]] In Dune there are
some aspects of that book: such as the Butlerian Jihad and ah, some of the conditions on Dune itself, which ah, prevents a kind of free reign of scientific knowledge and, the use of science, ah most, most science fiction has kind of a negative view of science, and views it as kind of a, a potential monster, a anti-nature force [FH: no it’s a natural force] I wanted [FH: we’re natural] I want to know your opinion on that.
FH: Yeah we’re natural, we’re part of nature, what we produce is part of nature. It is the interpretation of consequences that interests.. me anyway – what happens when you do this? You see I think that, one of the most serious errors that we made as a democracy was the creation of a civil service, and it was sold to us on the basis of a lie, the lie was: that that was the only way to correct the excesses of the spoils system, it was not the only way. But what it did was it took.. a greater and greater element of power out of the control of the voter, it watered down your vote… and every bureaucracy, of this kind in history, and I have read my history carefully, every such bureaucracy.. eventually becomes an aristocracy, just as it has in the Soviet Union, they have demonstrated the truth of what I’m telling you, they have developed an aristocratic bureaucracy over there. What are, what are that what are the tests of an aristocracy? The aristocrats get all the perks hmm? They don’t have to stand in lines to.. get their meat, they have cars, they have servants, they have special dachas for.. their vacations, but the ultimate test is:
do they pass the power along to their children…? Yeah.. they do it quite openly now and it’s announced in Pravda… We’re a long way down that road in the United States, we don’t have to go down that road, and I hope we don’t… because I believe, I really believe in power to the people. I think if you put responsibility on people, we rise to the occasion, and I know a lot of closeted aristocrats.. in our society.. some calling themselves liberal, and some calling themselves conservative… who are fostering this bureaucratic growth, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether it’s a fascist bureaucracy, a so-called capitalist or oligarchic bureaucracy, or a communist or socialist bureaucracy, to the people looking up at the bottom of it they’re identical. When was the last time you were treated courteously by a bureaucrat..? They don’t have to treat you courteously, you can’t fire them, you can’t vote them
out of office… Okay have I, have I kind of skirted around, answered some of your question at least?
10th Questionnaire: ah.. well, I basically wanted to know what your view on science itself was
FH: On science itself? Okay on science ah, I speak to a lot of um, political science audiences, and I love to get in front of them and ask them ‘how many of you believe politics is a science?’There’s a mythology of science – science fiction. Really what most of us write is technological fiction.. we say what will happen if this technological development, coming out of science admittedly, runs this course? What happens to the society? To individuals in the society? My view of science is that it is a natural outgrowth of man’s curiosity, and therefore it is natural, it is the consequences of what we bring up that we have to deal with, and it’s very important, extremely important, increasingly important, that we start looking into how we interact as societies, on ONE planet, that’s ALL we have. Now I am not a hot gospel ecologist, we got into these problems, together, we’ve got to get out of them, together. I don’t believe in.. trying to find the guilty, and saying ‘get them’ and put in a new gang. If I had been born in my grandfather’s time I would have made my grandfather’s mistakes. I just think it’s nonsense, stupidity to make my grandfather’s mistakes today. That’s my view of science.
10th Questionnaire: thank you.
11th Questionnaire: In your books you stress individual responsibility [FH: I-I’m sorry I’m having difficulty hearing you can you get up in the?] okay, in your books you stress individual responsibility, and I was wondering what you think we as a society can do to.. promote this since.. it doesn’t exist really..
FH: I don’t think a society can do it, I think individuals have to do it.
11th Questionnaire: What do you think we as individuals can do?
FH: Well you all can make choices you know.. we all have to make choices in what we perceive as good and evil. I had to speak at a Jesuit University, at their commencement exercises, not long ago, I’ll, I’ll give you the speech. I got up and I said ‘you’re all graduating today, and you expect me to tell you what you will face out there in that big real world. The only thing I’m going to tell you is: that if only one of you.. chooses to live by the golden rule, this will be a better world’ and I sat down… The applause lasted longer than the speech, I think they were applauding the shortness of the speech, but, but you see, if you do look at your fellow human beings as individuals, with feelings, and… hangups the way you have some… and say ‘well if I can help you I will… I’ll try not to exacerbate your problems… I won’t always succeed… but that’s my main goal’ then this is a better world, but you have to make the choice individually, and you have to make it all the time, you can’t make it once for the rest of your life. You can be like.. some people are and you say ah, ah ‘well if I don’t George will’ I mean all, that just makes two of you you’ve see and you can each lean on each other and say ‘I’m doing it because George did it, does it’ and George can say ‘I’m doing it because you’re doing it,’ so don’t fall into that trap… and yeah people will take advantage of you, of you if you try to live this way, but they hurt themselves more than they hurt you, they really do. I’m happy with my life, I have no trouble at all looking in the mirror every day, most days anyway I make mistakes, but, and shaving every morning, I do shave so no beard now. Um, it’s just an ongoing commitment that you have to make, and you have to do it individually, and society cannot do it for you..
12th Questionnaire: Hi um, concerning the ah, I have two questions, ah first concerning the ah 7th Dune book your planning – do you have ah, plan to have it like go back in the history of the saga to you know kind of explore the rise of the guild [FH: to do a prequel you mean?] yeah yeah that’s it.
FH: Yeah I’m going to, I’m going to do a short story or.. novelette on this in the next year.
12th Questionnaire: Okay great, and my second question is did Lucas ever pay off on that dinner he owes you?
FH: [Laughs] No Lucas has never admitted that ah they copied a lot of Dune, I’m not saying they did, I’m just saying that there are 16 points of identity between the book Dune and Star Wars. Now you’ve had stat, what, what is it? it’s 16 times 16, 16 times.. over 1, the odds against that being coincidence, there aren’t that many stars in the universe. [12th Questionnaire: Thank you very much.] I think he at least owes us dinner, if only out of coincidence.
Ellen Svaco: Hi Mr. Herbert I just wanted to announce that we only have time for two or three more questions and [FH: okay] also remind people that there will be a book signing afterwards.
FH: Ah why don’t we, why don’t we knock it off with a, a question here and a question there, okay.
13th Questioner: Um with the widespread use of the computer and dependency on it being such a recent phenomenon, ah I find it fascinating that ‘Destination Void’ was written when it was, and my question is when you wrote that did you have ‘The Jesus Incident’ in mind or was that a later idea?
FH: No that was a later idea, ‘The Jesus Incident’ was. Ah ‘Destination Void’ was ah, an exploration of our.. unconscious commitment to the idea, that the only thing wrong with the universe is that we haven’t invented the right machine yet.
Yes?
14th Questioner: Okay my question concerns um your creative process when you write, when you have a book, when you write your books, it’s a whole new world ecology etc. etc. and then there’s characters interacting in it, what comes first how does it develop as you write?
FH: The the, the chicken or the egg, yeah okay, what comes first? An idea often, and then I people it, I say this is has to happen to somebody, and then it has to happen somewhere, Now science fiction gives you the option of having an enormous… open universe out there where you can have it happen anywhere you can invent, that’s why I write science fiction. And I have to close it down now, because there are a lot of other things going on today. I’ve enjoyed this being with you, and I wish we could rap together in smaller groups sometimes.