He spoke at the first Earth Day in April 1970 in Philadelphia. I mean, I went to school in Berkeley, so I don’t want to sound derogatory. The Whole Earth Catalog, which was … I don’t want to say it was a hippie publication.

So if water were your finite resource, well, let’s make it all a desert. So he started thinking about that and he started thinking about finite resources, and he zeroed in on water. And what that meant was that the party-the group that controlled the water in, say, Mesopotamia-would control the environment. One of the things he noticed was that in history there was something he called hydraulic despotism. He told me once that he couldn’t read one page of an encyclopedia without reading the opposite page. Perhaps the most relevant layer, right now, is the environmentalism. It’s like a great old movie-you watch it and there’s stuff in there you’ve never noticed before. I mean, that’s incredible, finding more and more. He also liked to say that he’d like to send his readers spinning out of the end of the book with detritus clinging to them from the characters and the events and the scenes. It was kind of a tricky, psychological thing that he did. He wrote these layers so that you could go back and reread the book. Was that something your father ever talked about?ĭad told me he did that intentionally. WIRED got on the phone with him to talk about the novel’s legacy, its many interpretations, and why now might be a good time to reimagine the book that inspired so many works of sci-fi that came after it. He’s been advising on the script and believes it will be the definitive adaptation of his father’s book. In 2003, Brian released a biography of his father, Dreamer of Dune, and he estimates that he’s contributed nearly 3 million words to the canon himself.īrian Herbert is also, yes, involved with the upcoming Dune film from director Denis Villeneuve.

For much of his youth, he butted heads with his dad, and it wasn’t until he was an adult and doing his own writing that he began to appreciate Frank’s influence. The younger Herbert also manages his father's estate, which essentially makes him the keeper of the canon-a big deal when it comes to one of the most beloved stories in all of science fiction.īrian’s OK with that-he’s been working in the Dune universe for decades-but it wasn’t always so. Frank Herbert, who wrote the original book and many subsequent novels, died in 1986, but his son, Brian Herbert, went on to cowrite several more novels set in the world Frank built. It’s not an easy thing, being the heir to Dune.

Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert