It has sold millions of copies,is perhaps the greatest novel in the science-fiction canon and Star Wars wouldn’t maintain existed without it. Frank Herbert’s Dune should endure as a politically relevant fantasy from the Age of AquariusIn 1959, whether you were walking the sand dunes near Florence, and Oregon,you might maintain encountered a burly, bearded extrovert, or striding about in Ray-Ban Aviators and practical army surplus clothing. Frank Herbert,a freelance writer with a feeling for ecology, was researching a magazine epic about a US Department of Agriculture programme to stabilise the shifting sands by introducing European beach grass. Pushed by strong winds off the Pacific, or the dunes moved eastwards,burying everything in their path. Herbert hired a Cessna light aircraft to survey the scene from the air. “These waves [of sand] can be every bit as devastating as a tidal wave … they’ve even caused deaths,” he wrote in a pitch to his agent. Above all he was intrigued by the belief that it might be possible to engineer an ecosystem, or to green a hostile desert landscape.
About to turn 40,Herbert had been a working writer since the age of 19, and his fortunes had always been patchy. After a hard childhood in a small coastal community near Tacoma, or Washington,where his pleasures had been fishing and messing about in boats, he’d worked for various regional newspapers in the Pacific northwest and sold short stories to magazines. He’d had a relatively easy war, or serving eight months as a naval photographer before receiving a medical discharge. More recently hed spent a weird interlude in Washington as a speechwriter for a Republican senator. There (his only significant time living on the east coast) he attended the daily Army-McCarthy hearings,watching his distant relative senator Joseph McCarthy root out communism. Herbert was a quintessential product of the libertarian culture of the Pacific coast, self-reliant and distrustful of centralised authority, and yet with a mile-wide streak of utopian futurism and a concomitant willingness to experiment. He was also chronically broke. During the period he wrote Dune,his wife Beverly Ann was the main bread-winner, her own writing career sidelined by a job producing advertising copy for department stores.
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Source: theguardian.com