Dreamer of Dune
The Biography of Frank Herbert
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Everyone knows Frank Herbert's Dune.
This amazing and complex epic, combining politics, religion, human evolution, and ecology, has captured the imagination of generations of readers. One of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, winning awards, selling millions of copies around the world. In the prophetic year of 1984, Dune was made into a motion picture directed by David Lynch, and it has recently been produced as a three-part miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel. Though he is best remembered for Dune, Frank Herbert was the author of more than twenty books at the time of his tragic death in 1986, including such classic novels as The Green Brain, The Santaroga Barrier, The White Plague and Dosadi Experiment.
Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's eldest son, tells the provocative story of his father's extraordinary life in this honest and loving chronicle. He has also brought to light all the events in Herbert's life that would find their way into speculative fiction's greatest epic.
From his early years in Tacoma, Washington, and his education at the University of Washington, Seattle, and in the Navy, through the years of trying his hand as a TV cameraman, radio commentator, reporter, and editor of several West Coast newspaper, to the difficult years of poverty while struggling to become a published writer, Herbert worked long and hard before finding success after the publication of Dune in 1965. Brian Herbert writes about these years with a truthful intensity that brings every facet of his father's brilliant, and sometimes troubled, genius to full light.
Insightful and provocative, containing family photos never published anywhere, this absorbing biography offers Brian Herbert's unique personal perspective on one of the most enigmatic and creative talents of our time.
Dreamer of Dune is a 2004 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Related Work.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Frank Herbert's oldest son (playfully called "number one son" by his father) paints an extraordinary portrait of the visionary behind the ecological SF classic Dune (1965), its bestselling sequels, the David Lynch film and many other works. Compulsively readable, despite the often extraneous detail, the biography explores the evolution of a "modern day Socrates" who "tore into... unexamined linguistic and cultural assumptions," extrapolating "words and traditions he thought might exist in the future." At age eight, Herbert, the child of impoverished, "on-again, off-again alcoholic" parents, announced, "I wanna be a author" and went on to sell his first short story at 17. Brian charts the influences on his father's masterpiece, from T.E. Lawrence and Jung to world religions, particularly Zen Buddhism. The author also depicts the symbiotic relationship between Herbert and his second wife, Beverly (Brian's mother), a talented copywriter, but admits that Herbert, an incessant nitpicker, never quite accepted "number two son" Bruce's gay lifestyle and regularly used a lie detector on both boys. Estranged for many years, Brian and his father eventually made peace, learning "how to talk story" and collaborating on Man of Two Worlds (1986) shortly before Frank's death from cancer at age 65. This moving, sometimes painfully obsessive biography is an impressive testament of family loyalty and love. A must-read for Herbert fans (both senior and junior), it includes family photos and a bibliography.
