![]() ![]() While this concept was still fresh in my mind, I went to Florence, Oregon, to write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there. The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. Yes, there are analogs in Dune of today's events-corruption and bribery in the highest places, whole police forces lost to organized crime, regulatory agencies taken over by the people they are supposed to regulate. It's all right to include a pot of message, but that's not the key ingredient of wide readership. How do they originate?Īll of this encapsulates the stuff of high drama, of entertainment-and I'm in the entertainment business first. ![]() They are like a flood tide that picks up everything in its path. Systems originate with human creators, with people who employ them. It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous Systematic is a deadly word. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced-in a word, insane. And sometimes you run into another problem. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet. But the most casual observation reveals that neither was bigger than life. Both fitted themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming bigger-than-life appearance. Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap himself in the myth fabric of the society. Even if we find a real hero (whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader. This grows from my theory that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. How did it evolve? I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. The story was all in my head until it appeared on paper as I typed it out. ![]() It has never been reprinted, and most DUNE fans have not had the opportunity to read Frank Herbert's description of creating his masterpiece.ĭune began with a concept whose mostly unfleshed images took shape across about six years of research and one and a half years of writing. This essay was originally published in the July 1980 issue of Omni Magazine. ![]()
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