The Spice Must Flow, page 15
Although Herbert’s messiahs in the first two Dune novels were specifically male, everything after Children, and specifically the creation of Siona and Sheeana, suggests his belief that the future was female. In the final moments of God Emperor, after worm-Leto has been killed, Siona explains to Duncan that her fate is invisible to any form of prescience. “I’m the new Atreides,” she says, closing the novel. “The multitude is there, but I walk silently among them, and no one sees me.”
“Frank believed women should be running everything,” Theresa Shackleford tells me. “He worshipped women. And I think that comes across in those books.”
For whatever reason, neither Siona Atreides nor Sheeana Brugh tends to make it on the list of everyone’s favorite Dune characters. This is a small tragedy because the final three Frank Herbert–penned Dune novels are filled with several underrated and very interesting people who are basically invisible to fans because the vast majority of readers never make it beyond the first book, much less the third or fourth. Herbert’s characters in the second Dune trilogy may not seem as classic or original as those who populate the first novel. But even when the characters are remixed with familiar names and attributes, Herbert still tries to do something new. Even the titular God Emperor of Dune, Leto II, is essentially a new character. In Children of Dune, Leto II is a child who, like his father, Paul, before him, shoulders a huge burden and takes over as ruler of the universe by the end. But in God Emperor, thousands of years have passed and Leto II is a giant half-sandworm mutant.
And though we get a variety of different versions of Duncan duplicates in God Emperor, Heretics, and Chapterhouse, each of those Duncans is, technically, a different man. If there are contemporary Dune movie adaptations or TV series that tackle the post-Children novels, Jason Momoa clearly has his work cut out for him.
It is certainly not true that God Emperor of Dune is the greatest of Herbert’s books. But because the central character is a half-worm/half-man dictator in charge of a breeding program that leads to his own downfall, it’s certainly the Dune-iest and straight-up weirdest of the books. For this reason, it’s possible that the very best version of God Emperor might be the rare, almost never discussed shorter version, buried in the pages of the January 1981 issue of Playboy. Unlike the first three Dune novels, which were serialized in the science fiction magazines Analog and Galaxy prior to publication, the fourth book appeared in Playboy roughly four months before the hardcover novel version was published by Putnam in April 1981. But this was no ordinary book excerpt designed for a magazine. Instead of chopping up God Emperor of Dune into bite-size installments spread out over several issues, legendary Playboy fiction editor Alice K. Turner convinced Frank Herbert to do something radical: condense the entirety of the novel into seventeen large-format pages of an oversize “Holiday Anniversary” issue. With a cover dominated by Barbara Bach; an extensive interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono—published literally the same month as Lennon’s death; an essay from Stephen King on the state of horror movies; and a new short story from Ray Bradbury, it’s understandable that God Emperor of Dune’s big debut is somewhat muted in this particular vintage Playboy. And yet, it is mentioned on the cover, at the bottom of the right-hand side: “The New Episode in Frank Herbert’s Great ‘Dune’ Saga.” By 1981, Dune was mainstream enough to make the cover of Playboy but also, apparently, malleable enough to present its most complex installment in highly abridged form.
Alice K. Turner acquired and edited fiction for Playboy from 1980 to 2000. She was an iconoclastic editor who published a variety of prominent writers in Playboy, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, and countless others. Her attitude toward the rest of Playboy was famously flippant and adversarial, meaning her work as an editor was often transgressive. The publication of God Emperor of Dune certainly fits with Turner’s style: The story appears to support a creepy worm-man who has an all-female cult worshipping him, only to reveal an ending in which that man is killed by his followers and a woman wins true freedom for all mankind. And in the shorter, breezier version of God Emperor that she published in Playboy, the paradox of the later Dune novels, prequels, and spinoffs is fully revealed. These books are perhaps more fun to talk about than to read.
Despite not hitting number one on the New York Times bestseller list, God Emperor of Dune was solidly reviewed and sold extremely well in hardcover. The Cincinnati Enquirer enthused, “Once again, Frank Herbert has given his best.” Meanwhile, The Baltimore Sun pointed out that God Emperor “allows Herbert to bring much that is buried perplexingly in its precursors out into the light.” This assessment is essentially correct: If you feel like you didn’t fully grasp the contradictory and winding philosophy of Dune, then God Emperor is the book where Herbert makes it all much clearer, by making it way more complicated. God Emperor serves as both a cap to the story that began with the first novel and also a soft reboot, allowing Herbert to jump ahead even further into the future for the fifth book, Heretics of Dune, which takes place fifteen hundred years after God Emperor and ends with the destruction of Arrakis.
In 1981, Frank Herbert inked “the biggest science fiction book contract in history” for Heretics of Dune. But because of Beverly Herbert’s failing health, this book wasn’t completed until 1983. At this time, the Herberts were living in Hawaii, hoping that the weather could help the ailing Beverly. Her battle with lung cancer had been ongoing since 1974, and although several surgeries had prolonged her life, she died on February 7, 1984, in Maui, at only fifty-seven years old. The Lynch film was in post-production. Heretics was about to hit bookstores, and Frank Herbert’s life had changed forever.
Anyone who might think Herbert’s courtship and marriage to Theresa Shackleford happened quickly after the death of Beverly Herbert would be correct. But it’s also important to note that Shackleford had never met Herbert until the spring of 1984 and tells me, “Frank would have never looked at me had Bev been alive.” In fact, before meeting the legendary author, Shackleford had no interest in science fiction, Dune, or Frank Herbert at all.
“I was in LA at the time. Putnam would hire a publicist to arrange the schedule, and that would mean I would be there to get the author a glass of water or whatever,” Shackleford says. “What was funny was that Dick Francis—who wrote all those great mystery novels—was coming to town at the exact same time Frank was gonna be there. And I was like, ‘Oh, please let me get Dick Francis.’ But Putnam told me, ‘Frank is a very important author to us, and he recently lost his wife, and he’s very fragile, and we want you to just be with him and treat him with kid gloves.’ Evidently, after Bev died, he’d gone into seclusion for a while. This was his first foray out into the world again. They were worried about the pressure he was feeling. He and Bev were famously joined, you know?”
In the days before text messages and cell phones, book publicists anonymously met authors by casually holding a copy of the author’s novel in a predetermined place. Wearing a “blue dress” and waiting in the lobby of a Beverly Hills hotel, Theresa Shackleford held a copy of Heretics of Dune, to let Frank Herbert know she was the person handling him for the Los Angeles leg of the book tour. But, just a few weeks prior, Shackleford had obtained CliffsNotes for Dune in order to give herself a crash course on the novels up to that point.
“That cracked Frank up, later,” she tells me. “He didn’t even know there were CliffsNotes of Dune. He was like, ‘What did they say about me!’ He thought it was hilarious. Of course, after we got together, I read all the books and loved them. But I had the benefit of being able to ask the author any questions I had.”
Shackleford was twenty-nine years old when she met Herbert in that hotel lobby. For her, it wasn’t love at first sight.
“I didn’t think of him as somebody to date, at all,” she tells me. “I know there were several women who were chomping at the bit to go out with him. But in those first two days when I was with him on that book tour, he did seem sort of fragile. I remember before we got out of the car to go to a restaurant, I just put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Hang in there.’ I said to him, ‘You’ve just got one more thing to get through and then you can go back to the hotel and you can rest.’ And he looked at me like I had scalded him. I surely didn’t think he was falling in love with me. I thought maybe I’d done something wrong by touching him. Later he would tell me that when I touched him, it did sort of sear him.”
After Herbert had finished with his LA events for Heretics of Dune, he flew to DC to be interviewed by Larry King. But he called Shackleford long-distance to tell her he was in love with her and wanted to marry her.
“It was one of the most shocking conversations of my life,” Shackleford says with a laugh. “I was a little freaked out by him at first. But I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, and we started talking on the phone. For four and five hours at a time, and those were still the days when an operator would come on the line and tell you that somebody had to pay for the call! I don’t know if other people have told you this, but Frank was the most fun person to talk to. He was the most fun person to be around. He knew something about everything, but he wasn’t pedantic about it. And he never made you feel inferior or lacking in any way. He’s the most brilliant person by far that I’ve ever been around.”
By the end of 1984, Herbert had moved in with Theresa Shackleford, and the two lived in Los Angeles together for the last two years of his life. They weren’t married when they attended the premiere of Dune in Washington, DC, in December, but by 1985 they were. Herbert told Waldenbooks in 1984 that he’d shaved his beard to “rebrand,” and because he was “uncomfortable” with his fans thinking of him as a kind of “bearded guru.” But it seems just as possible he shaved that beard for Theresa.
Frank Herbert felt that his marriage to Theresa Shackleford had given him a new lease on life. But from 1984 until his death in 1986, he was plagued with health problems. At one point, doctors worried Herbert had Crohn’s disease, but then, in 1985, Herbert was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the liver. To treat this cancer, Herbert underwent a radical procedure at a university in Madison, Wisconsin. His body was given a fever on purpose as part of this treatment, which caused Herbert to lose weight. Eventually, it was determined that Herbert had pancreatic cancer. Following surgery to remove that cancer, Herbert died not from the cancer itself, but from a blood clot in his lung. This pulmonary embolism is what killed him. Tellingly, in these final days, Herbert had begun to write again and had had a special new computer and keyboard set up in his bed. He died while typing.
“Pancreatic cancer was a death sentence back then,” Shackleford tells me. “I’m sixty-six now. I’m older than he was now when he died. I can’t believe that.” Today, this kind of cancer is still hard to beat, and Shackleford suggests that what kept Herbert alive longer than many others with the same diagnosis was the radical heat treatment.
When Frank Herbert died at sixty-five years old, many newspapers carried a photo of the bearded version of the author. The man who had become reborn, the man who looked thinner and younger than he’d been in years, the hopeless romantic who was suddenly wearing jeans and living in LA, was gone. Herbert is remembered for Dune, and the image of him as the real-life messiah of Dune has endured. But the man who loved with abandon was lost to time. If Beverly Herbert was the Chani to Frank’s Paul, then Theresa Shackleford is Princess Irulan. The one who was left behind, to remember and remind us that once, the messiah was just a man.
11
Walk Without Rhythm
The phantom menace of the new Dune novels and the Sci Fi Channel miniseries.
Damn sandworms, up thirteen percent . . . welp, I better find a job.
—Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice (1988)
For teenagers in the 1990s, the two most famous men to have ever tangoed with sandworms were Michael Keaton and Kevin Bacon. Although neither Keaton nor Bacon has ever been attached to a Dune film or TV project, they starred in iconic movies sporting sandworms, both of which couldn’t have existed without Dune. In 1988, Tim Burton’s gothic tour de force Beetlejuice—starring Keaton in the title role—gave the world skinny, black-and-white-striped Claymation sandworms, not unlike those that artist Don Punchatz drew for the 1974 Ace paperback edition of Dune, on which a Fremen outstretches his arms like a rock star. In 1990, Kevin Bacon created one degree of separation between himself and Dune by starring in Tremors, a horror-comedy in which people in a small desert town in Nevada are plagued by attacks from “Graboids,” miniature versions of shai-hulud, that come across as what Dune’s sandworms would look like if they were imagined by Oscar the Grouch.
If you add up the appearances of the Graboids in the various Tremors films,[*] the sandworms in Beetlejuice, and the wildly popular animated cartoon of the same name,[*] the total number of minutes in which ersatz, non-Dune sandworms are seen on-screen is easily quadruple the amount of screen time legit shai-hulud sandworms got in the 1984 Lynch film. So if you were a young person in the 1990s, and you’d never read Dune or watched the 1984 film on VHS, cable, or network TV, then your idea of what a monster sandworm was came exclusively from Dune parodies. When Fatboy Slim and Bootsy Collins recorded the dance hit “Weapon of Choice” in the year 2000 (it was released the following year), the lyric Walk without rhythm and you won’t attract the worm could only really be a reference to the book versions of Dune, since, at that time, sandworm imposters were much more well-known than the real thing. So listen up, goth kids of the nineties and early aughts: If you believed Fatboy Slim was making a Beetlejuice reference in the year 2001, you’re totally forgiven. It was a confusing time for sandworm lovers everywhere.
There’s no question that the biggest Dune renaissance occurred in the twenty-first century. But that process began in 1999, arguably one of the most pivotal years in science fiction history, period. That year saw the release of The Matrix and the first Star Wars prequel film, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And in October 1999, five months after George Lucas went back in time to tell the origin story of his galaxy far, far away, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson released the first Dune prequel, House Atreides.
Set thirty-eight years before the events of the first novel,[*] the story of House Atreides connects the Dune dots for various character histories. Calling it House Atreides is a bit of a misnomer because the book reveals the backstories of Jessica, Duncan, Emperor Shaddam IV, Duke Leto’s father, and Duke Leto himself. In their quest to fill out the entire history of the Dune universe, Herbert and Anderson have left no grain of sand unturned, resulting in books that have been as controversial as they have been bestselling. As Frank Herbert’s eldest son, Brian Herbert had been a novelist in his own right for decades before coauthoring House Atreides with Kevin J. Anderson. Meanwhile, Anderson was a successful science fiction writer, too, widely loved for his various Star Wars novels.
According to Brian Herbert, he’d initially resisted writing Dune continuation novels set in his father’s famous fictional universe. But an editor named Ed Kramer “kept after” him. Kramer’s initial concept was to coedit a one-off anthology of short Dune fiction, with each story written by a different science fiction author. One of the authors who was interested was Kevin J. Anderson. Around this time, Brian Herbert got a call from his estate lawyer, who informed him of the existence of two safe-deposit boxes that, according to Brian Herbert, contained “papers and old-style floppy computer disks that included comprehensive notes from an unpublished DUNE 7.” As far as most people know, nobody has seen these disks and notes other than the lawyer, Anderson, and Brian Herbert. To date, none of the raw material has ever been made available to the public. This isn’t to say what the younger Herbert has divulged is somehow not factual, simply that we have no other sources to confirm it. Even aspects of “Spice Planet” are contained in the Fullerton library archives. But any raw “Dune 7” notes remain within the purview of the Herbert estate, perhaps for understandable reasons.
The long and short of all of this is that these notes apparently contained a narrative smoking gun that allowed Anderson and Brian Herbert to retroactively create prequel novels, which would eventually justify a huge twist in the long-awaited concluding novels. “By the end of Chapterhouse, the characters had been driven into a corner, utterly beaten,” Brian Herbert said. “And then the reader learned that the Honored Matres themselves were running from an even greater mysterious threat . . . a peril that was drawing close to the protagonists of the story, most of whom were Bene Gesserit reverend mothers. . . . Now Kevin and I knew for certain where Frank Herbert had been headed, and we could weave the events of our prequel into a future grand finale for the series.”
