Frank Herbert – Author, Intellectual, Hero

I had been an avid reader since I was eight years old, when in the third grade, I began reading novels. I quickly began to read the books that inspired me most, over and over again. I read all kinds of things, but at the age of fifteen I still mostly read fiction; it was then that I first read Dune.

It was 1984. I had taken a copy from the carousel of paperbacks in the English Room/Library at the alternative high-school I was attending. I read that copy, perhaps not as carefully as I should, but as carefully as I could, I found it somewhat dense, even challenging.

I went to see the motion picture when it came out later that school year, in 1985. Needless to say, I found David Lynch’s adaptation to be one of the worst movies ever made, and with that screening Dune passed from my thoughts for a time.

However, in the summer of 1988 I was visiting a friend in Bigfork, Montana. I was in a bookstore looking for something to read on the bus ride home to Minneapolis. I picked up a copy of Dune.

Four years had passed since my first go at it, my understanding of the world had expanded, I was able to engage the book in a completely different way…and I was hooked; I was nineteen years old and Dune changed my life.

Since then I have read it and the other five books in the original Dune series, eight times over, as well as everything else Frank Herbert wrote…if I could find it in print.

Frank Herbert was a giant, among the foremost intellectuals of his era; I am deeply indebted to him. I have given away dozens of copies of Dune throughout my life, and recommended it to more people than I can count, always with these words born directly from my experience:

This book will change your life.

Many (not all) came back to me to tell me that it had.

Frank Herbert wrote science fiction, but the science he wrote into his fiction had less to do with spaceships and laser beams (though it had those things), and more to do with the science of politics, religion, ecology and psychology…with the multi-dimensional human-person occupying the center of his imagination.

Through his insight Herbert challenges the reader to explore what it means to be human. He asks open-ended questions about the range of human potential, in a way that allows the reader to believe in those possibilities for themselves…his own view concerning the range of human potential is inspiring.

He believed that we can do more, be more, see more of the world than our senses allow…if we are disciplined. He believed that if we are attentive to the world around us, if we cultivate within ourselves the desire to live a life without fear, we will secure a future for humanity beyond our solar system, we will spread throughout the galaxy…and beyond it.

Frank Herbert died thirty-eight years ago today, and a heroic light left the world.

He is missed.