Last Podcast On The Left - Dune: The Duke of Caladan - An Interview w/ Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Side Stories is taking this week off for Thanksgiving, so instead of a regular episode, here's a Patreon interview that Ben 'n' Henry did with Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson — authors of the new book DUNE: THE DUKE OF CALADAN.Side Stories will be back next week. Happy Thanksgiving and hail yourselves.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Hey, what's up, everyone? How you doing? Ben Kissel here from Side Stories. We are doing a special episode this week because it's Thanksgiving! Gabble, gabble, gabble. It's an interesting interview that Henry Zabrowski and I did with Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert. You may know Brian Herbert's name from the famed Dune series. Of course, I'm sure if you listen to this show, you've heard Henry talk about Dune and you've heard my befuddlement. So we'll get a little bit of that in this

interview as well. It's a great conversation. We hope you enjoy it. We hope you're having a great Thanksgiving so far and the family isn't driving you too nuts and hopefully you're not feeling lonely or anything like that. Enjoying some turkey, some toe furky, some wine, some good grape juice, whatever the hell you're into. We hope you're enjoying yourselves and we hope that you enjoy this conversation. Today we are honored to have with us

and this is really Henry. What a moment for you. I'm so excited for you. I'm excited for me and I'm excited for the audience. We are honored to be joined by Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert. They are the authors of an upcoming book called the Dune called Dune, Duke of Caledon and I am very excited. Jesus Christ Kissel! I mailed it, Duke, Dune, Duke of Caledon. Is that better? What am I supposed to do? This sounds like Marning Talk radio in Los Angeles. It is very, very similar.

What did I do wrong? Dune, Duke of Caledon. Now you got it. I said it before. I said it right three times. I like Marning Talk radio. I didn't say I didn't like it. What is going on? Oh my goodness. I am so happy that you are here with us today. Our audience has become more and more into Dune. I think you can thank the movie for that. Now I feel like there's a real Dune Assance happening right now that is kind of in the air

because I am one of those. I still love the David Lynch Dune but I know that there was a lot of problems there but now it seems like this new Dune is a way to really bring it back around to the people but now it seems like finally people are paying attention to the books. Brian, have you felt as if people, as if there's a resurgence in the interest in Dune, specifically the books? Well, I'm co-manager at my father's estate and I've hired me as a writer separately and I've hired Kevin

and I probably would fire myself before I fired him. So I know what's happening with the books. The sales of Dune have just exploded. I mean upward. I mean it's just incredible. We're seeing it all across. We have 19 or 20 books and we're seeing it all across. We also have games being developed that we're watching the Dune cannon on. We're not just letting anything happen. Kevin and I are writing a three-part graphic novel plus some short stories with boom. Right.

With the Duke of Caledon which just came out last week, that's our, I believe it's our 15th Dune novel that we've written over the past around 21 or so years and our first one was in 1999, House of Trades and all of the ones since then have been national, international bestsellers. So we've really kind of kept things coming out and the Dune fan base has been building and we got generations of people reading not just our new books. They're kind of like gateways into reading the

Frank Herbert books. Right. The deals on the Frank Herbert books have just skyrocketed. We've been kind of watching. I send Brian a little scan every month when I get my science fiction bestseller list thing that the original 1964 version of Dune is number one bestseller everywhere and it's been so cool. It's one of the most important books ever written. As far as I'm concerned in terms of sci-fi, I believe that the idea of

the, because I was reading a little bit on the an essay that Frank Herbert had written about, the idea of the fallacy of believing in the Superman. Like I've been trying to explain to people that that's what the core of the original trilogy, which seemed to have all been written in one go, right, that he kind of pieced those first three books together. But it's about this idea, which I think was revolutionary at the time, despite this, even all the very on the forefront ideas about

ecological problems. There's this base of this idea of like if Superman was president, things would be really bad. Well, dad said that it would be dangerous to follow a hero because they could, a charismatic hero, they could lead you off the edge of a cliff. And he'd like to give the example, Frank Herbert was a Republican speechwriter in the 50s. And so his bad, his bad examples were all Democrats. So his bad example was the very charismatic John Kennedy, who he liked

personally. He actually liked him personally, but he said that kind of a leader could lead the followers right off the edge of a cliff. So your dad was more of a Barry Goldwater supporter. I didn't say that. Good, thank you, Kissel. Don't poem him in a corner. You're putting words in my mouth. I am not putting words in my own mouth, let alone somebody else's. He was a Lincoln Republican, maybe even a Rockefeller Republican. He was very much

in the middle, but leaning right. So it's amazing that people, when I tell people that in the audience, they drop their jaws, but yeah, he was an environmentalist. He led students down the freeway and he was wearing a beer. He looked like a Democrat. Well, and of course, you know, Republicans and Democrats, that's an ever moving ideology within both parties. And you never know what he would be today. When it comes to the books, dude, and when it comes to what you guys have been

working on for so long, why do you think they have had such a long shelf life? It is so rare to create something that lasts, especially now everything comes and goes before you even realize it was here. It is now gone and people are like, you weren't into the fad of planking. It's like, I didn't know it was a thing. Why do you think Dune, as an entity, has been able to survive? I mean, what are we at? 50 years now? Yeah, but it's not just science fiction. It's actually mainstream. It's about people. I mean, here you have this universe

where there are no legal computers. So it's about human beings, about people. It's become part of our society. I mean, you can read it as Paula Trades' heroic journey when a lot of our younger fans do that, but there's also the environmentalism, the women's issues, religious issues, political don't don't be as very dangerous to follow, just follow people without thinking. Absolutely. Kevin and I were talking at a bookstore in San Francisco, right down on

Market Street, and there was a man sitting quietly off to the side. He was an older gentleman, and we had this large, packed, enthusiastic audience, and we were, I think we were talking about Paul of Dune, and it's one of our sequels. And this man stood up at the end and he said, Mr. Herbert, I've been sitting over here listening, but I've never read Dune. I've never heard about Dune. Why should I even read Dune? And I said, well, if you don't read Dune, you're missing part of our culture. It's that much integrated into our culture.

And Kevin even asked a busboy one time. Go ahead, Kevin, on that one. Well, this was this was really funny. So before our very first one came out, House of Trades, the Bantam Books published it. And they had, because Frank Herbert had ended his series with Chapter House Dune, and it sort of ended on a cliffhanger. And then many years later, Brian and I picked up and we started doing some prequels and Bantam Books bought it. So we're at this Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe, just meeting with the deputy publisher.

And Brian and I are, we are very intense, very enthusiastic about Dune. But here's this, here's the publisher who's, you know, she gets that they bought this big book and is coming out and they're going to a Science Fiction Award ceremony. And I kind of looked her in the eye and I said, you need to understand that you're not just publishing a Science Fiction book. That's like a big Science Fiction book. This is Dune. This is a cultural phenomenon. This is really important. This is more than just a Science Fiction book.

Everybody who's ever read any Science Fiction has read Dune. This is really important. And right then the busboy walks up with a tray of ice water for us. And just, I turned to him and I said, like you, you've read Dune, haven't you? And this kid just goes, oh yeah, Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of God. And he just goes on and on. And the publisher, I watched this light bulb go on over her head because this was like, I can't, they thought that I had staged that somehow. Right. Also, this publisher

could splurge a little bit, get you some Diet Cokes. What's going on with this? But that was just a thing. Kevin doesn't need any more caffeine. That helps. It gives you the edge. I honestly have a question about that. Like, how do you, the end of Chapter House Dune, obviously ends on a cliffhanger. All of the Golas are all children, which I think is a fun thing that I think most of the movies miss, where it's like, Paul Trades was very young.

But how do you, the end of Chapter House Dune, you have all of your father's notes. How do you translate this? Like, how do you go from continuing this like very famous like storyline and just, you just jump off? Like, you, like, how do you know that you're staying true to your father's dream? I just want to say something briefly and then give Kevin most of the airtime here. But I thought that when Frank Herbert finished Chapter House Dune,

he did this incredible dedication to my mother and they were writing and she had died while he was writing the book and she died in Hawaii. And I thought since they were a writing team that he should end right there. That was my emotional feeling about it. And so for years, I did write the biography Dreamer of Dune about his life and their love story and the origins of Dune. But I thought the series should end right there. And then Kevin sent me a letter. I didn't know who Kevin was, but I soon learned what an enthusiastic

Dune fan he was and what a great writer. So it's been a really good team. We've had like a half hour argument. Then Kevin apologized and we moved on. Let's see, I mean, Brian's, Brian's emotional thing was right. I mean, that was just such a perfect ending to Chapter House Dune. But as a Dune fan, you could see the story isn't over. I mean, it's clearly Luke, I'm your father and that's where the book ends. It's huge cliffhanger. But when Brian and I first started talking, I mean, the original idea was we were just going to finish

that story that Frank Herbert had left unfinished. But it did so many years had passed. I don't remember, Brian. I think it was 14 years since your dad had passed away when we actually started. It's something along those. Yeah, pretty cool. So we felt that it wouldn't really be the best thing to just jump right in and say, oh, by the way, here's the last chapter that that you haven't even remembered for the past 10 years. We we found there was so much backstory to tell and we really wanted to introduce

people to we wanted to bring a lot more readers into Dune. And because we just love this universe and we didn't talk much about my background before I met Brian, but I'd written a bunch of my own books. But also I had done a whole lot of work for Lucasfilm and Star Wars. I had done 50 some Star Wars projects. I had millions and millions of Star Wars readers. And a lot of those readers followed us into the new Dune books. And then we sort of like like sitting there with the gravelly voice on the counter like, come here, kid, here's some candy.

It's called Dune. And then you're going to go in. That's good grooming. That's very positive. But what Brian and I did first was we wrote a trilogy called House of Trades, House Hartman and House Carino, which is the story of young Duke Lado, Lady Jessica, Baron Harkin and how Crown Prince Shalom becomes Emperor Shalom and sort of like the generation before. And that got everybody who had read Dune, the original Dune, kind of back into the universe. And as we read Frank's notes for Dune 7, which was I think was a seven page

outline or something that he had a bunch of other notes. We there's so much historical underpinnings that that we sort of needed to lay down with the whole war against the thinking machines, the Butler and Jihad, how this universe came to be this far future medieval society with no computers and and you know the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and the sword masters and the Sook doctors. And so we wrote that whole trilogy all kind of building up to to building the audience

into this grand finale and then for Frank Herbert left 10,000 years worth of history. So we're now we're exploring some other parts of that with again Ben, what was the title of the book? Well I'm talking to Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. They are the writers of a book Dune, The Duke of Caledon. Now we got it. I wanted to riff off what Kevin said. When Kevin and I are working together we we kind of riff off each other like a jazz performance. Well you know he was talking about where we were going to start the series

and we talked about either Dune 7 which would be the sequel to chapter house Dune which we ultimately wrote as two novels or we could have gone back to the Butler and Jihad, but we decided to go to these the house series 35 years before Dune but that really kind of is a microcosm of really what Dune is all about. You can start at like 10 different starting points and when people ask me well Mr. Herbert where should I start?

Well I say read Dune if you can. Read it. That's the best starting place but wait there's other starting places and wait there's more you know so it's an incredible universe. You can just dip into it anywhere that you please. Can I pitch an idea to you guys to pitch? Oh you're doing the elevator pitch now Henry? I was thinking about this the other day. Is there a way to do a young scrappy version of a of young of Leto 2 in high school like or in college trying to get along? Like wait there's

something about him half worm half man like once he's in transition about him trying to discover like how mean I'm going to be but also how difficult is it how difficult is it to date for a god emperor who has no penis? Um uh no. I have to get off the phone. Great job Henry. That was my shot. Great job. I know 2 1 0. Yeah exactly or One Tree Hill or a whole series of great great things starring James Van Der Beek which I think was Varsity Blues. I want to go back to what Henry had

mentioned earlier though that this is something in the Children of Dune mini series uh Young Leto the Second was played by James McAvoy. Okay? The character Leto the Second in the book Children of Dune is eight years old. Wow. James McAvoy is not eight years old. No. At the time but he looked like 22 or 25 or something like that so they they ageified the but it's so much more impressive of an eight-year-old doing jumping through the sand like when he does it when he first attacks when he goes back and he first like he's discovered by the

the rebel group and he is defying them. The idea of like an eight-year-old like a haunting image in my mind of an eight-year-old acting like a thousands year old like collection of dictators and thought to me is really really interesting and if you've met child actors they act like that. Well Alia you know the the actress that played Alia in the David Lynch movie my mother met her and and she said this is this is a genius this is a an adult in a in a child's body and that's really perfect for the character of Alia. When it comes to just the process and

I know Henry will have more questions about the inner workings of the world of Dune but when it comes to the process of writing something like this with such an expansive world you mentioned how the audience is like where do I start from an audience perspective where do you start how do you begin to blow out this and expand this world that that Frank Herbert began in the early 70s how has that process been for you guys because you can take this anywhere how do you ground it?

Well the the first thing to do is I think Mark Twain said you get your facts straight so I spent about a year putting together a Dune concordance that is not published and we're not going to publish it. It's 600 pages single space and I actually got like repetitive motion problems because I what I would do is I would highlight something from a book and I drag it over to another document and I formed this concordance so we had all the descriptions of Lady Jessica Duke-Lado

we had the Bene Gesserit history little references to to situations that Frank Herbert didn't write much about like that Norma Senva really you know got the the full space system with Holzman engines going and not Venport you know so a kind of timely wasn't it a woman not getting credit the man took the credit so we take we find little details like that and we we would expand on that and there's many other details that we have expanded on but sometimes it would be in an appendix to Dune sometimes it would be in Frank Herbert's

notes and sometimes it would come out of our head but we knew we knew how it should fit into Frank Herbert's universe we knew the material we were ready for the exam wow so everything tied back into Dune in one way or another you guys made sure that that happened with doing the the research up top yeah and now the concordance that I did is all six books that Frank Herbert wrote so it's all it's all into one one document big document I mean that seems to me like prepping before you paint a house by

being like you got to put tape on everything to make sure you don't mess up and that really is more difficult than the painting part so it seems like you did the due diligence got all the information and then we're able to go from there right plus I spent five years before that writing a biography of Frank Herbert and that man going back and meeting people that knew him and I remember interviewing one man in Tacoma who was no he was an uncle of my dad's and he said that Frank Herbert scared us when

he was nine years old because he was just like we were talking about with Ollie or maybe would lay it later the second he was a brilliant and he would walk around with a backpack full of Shakespeare books and he read the whole the whole the whole bunch of them but my uncle said that he frightened us he was so intelligent that he frightened us I imagine that would be very scary to have Frank Herbert as a father honestly just because his mind is so intense and just been like dad I made a hand turkey today in school and he's just like you need to learn about

sand I won't say it again just read Dreamer doing but the biography that I wrote of him and it's about my journey to understand this brilliant man it's on my way it's on its way to me literally yeah right now I can't wait to read it I mean honestly that must have been such a trip to research your own father like that and did you at some point during the research disconnect from the fact that you are you are his son at some point were you able to just look at him like all of us are trying to look at her

fathers like human beings so we don't judge them so harshly and just be like they all make mistakes they're just people were you able to sort of figure out your father in a way that most children perhaps can yeah and I was also able to figure out myself and see some of my own pettiness and how I contributed to situations so right it really gave me a more balanced look at it and it was it was a great a great journey I mean it was I guess in a sense it was a heroic journey

trying to figure out your father especially a man of that intelligence who was an IQ maybe 190 which is higher than Marilyn Monroe who had a high IQ absolutely and he looks and he looked just as great in a dress I loved him when he would stand over a subway great and the dress would blow up just over his head and we could see those great Herbert Balls he's got those beautiful legs what I've seen is that Frank Herbert had a higher IQ than Einstein wow this guy was really smart wow well what he did so well I think in the

original books is that idea of what you said now that you're fulfilling you're filling it out with the concordance but dropping little seeds of ideas that are obviously massive that just fill the world of dude and make it feel like it's been there for thousands of years and that a lot of the history is kind of like already assumed that you know kind of as a reader and you kind of just have to keep running like as you go like being in the universe of dune 24 7 do you feel like lost in it is it ever feel like that does it ever feel

like a a burden almost or it's like this idea that you're like everywhere is doing if you read a murder mystery there's all kinds of little clues laid and the resolution of that mystery the reader says oh yeah that's right so what Kevin and I try to do is we want the parts to fit in and the readers will say oh yeah that that's how it should be it fits that's right well and one of the things that we're astounded by is I mean how many words he wrote and how complex these things are and remember this is before Microsoft Word and

doing a global search and replace right this is for running like like searching for what color we're count Fenring's eyes I can't remember that this is all like on a manuscript and real like time and it's all in his head and and one of the look I can't even tell you how many times I've read doing probably 18 or 19 times but just in as we mentioned Brian and I did a a scene by scene definitive graphic novel adaptation of Frank Herbert's Doom. The first volume comes up from

Abrams in in a month or something like that beautifully illustrated so it's volume one volume two and volume three and we just well we finished and delivered the script for volume two so we're two-thirds of the way through the novel and while writing the script I mean you're we're going page by page trying to convert what's on the page into an illustrative panel and there have been times that it's just sort of stopped us cold to go I never noticed that before

that little detail ties back to this other little detail that I didn't notice either but it ties into this other detail and it just kind of like mind blown you can't believe that that he had all of that in his head all interconnected all there and the I think Ben said something earlier about writing the first three books just in one big fell swoop and that's he wrote dune in the I think it was published in a volume form in 1964 and dune messiah was 71 or 72 and children of dune was 1976 so there was

there was a long time in between those first three books and in fact a trivial trivia note that children of dune was the very very first science fiction novel that said science fiction on the spine to ever hit the new york times bestseller list wow that is my favorite children dune is my favorite of the of the series I mean god emperor just because I see myself within lido the second um and I I appreciate ever when children came out uh frank Herbert my dad said

it's a runaway bestseller which means it's selling more than they than they printed and so Kevin and I had that on a on a smaller scale actually with with dune house atreides it also was a kind of a runaway bestseller out doing what they printed but frank Herbert really hit it with that children of dune it just went went big and then other science fiction writers then they got bestsellers after that but frank Herbert started it can I have I have a question just about science fiction in general

when it comes to how it relates to you know modern reality or whatever whatever it is we're living in today why is science fiction a great way to explore just sort of society as a whole well like what do you think about what does science fiction allow you to explore in a way that might um in a way that might intrigue somebody to like you know be interested in society like how like what are some of the liberties and some of the freedoms that science fiction allows when it comes to explaining our

our world and specifically power constructs and and politics as we were talking about earlier and all of that well i'll get i'll give kevin a little segue here frank Herbert said that it gave him elbow room for the imagination well one of the one of the challenging thing i wouldn't suggest a science fiction writer should write a story about how the world reacts to a brand new pandemic showing up i don't want to hear about it my wife was also a bestselling author like every night we watch the news we

just shake our heads and go if we wrote this in a book the critics would tear us to pieces oh my god i completely unplausible not realistic so when you're writing in science fiction you can explore these these thought experiments and you can you can go well if this if this big pivotal event happens how is society going to react how are how is science going to change how are our politics everything going to change and you can basically run an experiment and and play with it and let people

you know sort of do a test run so that when something really similar happens in real life that go wait a second i read 1984 i'm not ever going to believe propaganda from the government again right exactly we've seen john carpenter's they live we know yeah so that that lets that gives you the freedom in science fiction but uh that doesn't mean people listen well we'll take a real situation and we'll exaggerate it or extrapolate it um so we begin with little realities that we see and we push them and into an extreme

can i ask a question about writing mechanics because i am an undisciplined writer i've only written i write the exciting world of writing mechanics isn't this this is a new segment we're working on i at the auto shop or something like that i'm covered in oil is this wrong am i not supposed to be covered in oil um but i might the idea of writing a glossary for your own book like i think that the when i have people that are new to dune the first thing that they always say to me is just like

holy shit there's a dictionary attached to this and i'm like yes there is it's important for you to get into the world but how does one create such like get into the world of the world of creation so deep that they're making their own language like a toolkit like how do you get into that mind space like do you find yourself like having to bend like as like now continuing the dune universe do you find yourself like having to invent new language new things as you go and like how to like how does it

how do you wrap your brain around it you see that that's why i'm on the phone i'm not on zoom because you would see that my head is turned into a guild navigator hit well i would just like to point out that in the duke of caledon we considered putting in five pages of poetry in fremen language just so that the readers could get the experience like in lord of the rich yeah you have to feel merrily i have to point out though that when you're doing the glossary that's like the last last thing i mean it's after the book is already finished

and written and if you write a glossary you're going through proofy and go oh there's a name i got to put in the glossary and there's a name but if you look at at frank herbert's glossary it's called terminology the imperium it's like that that was part of his world building he did a lot of these entries in the glossary that you can't even really find what it's relating to in the book it's tangent on certain things which is cool for brian and me because then it gives us ideas to write back into the story right

but so he just would come up so you just like i mean i don't mean to be like it simplified so much but you're like okay i need a thing with the pointy thing what's the pointy thing called gum jabbar i'm just gonna write that down and then he writes it down and then he has to decide afterwards like after writing it then you go back and define or are you this is already like a set thing because i know that frank herbert worked on the original trilogy for years before he even began writing it so i imagine he may be brainstormed that

beforehand but it's just kind of crazy to me that you can just be like there's a new word done well you know i was going to write some scenes that involved the the drug sapphoe but frank herbert or samuta but frank herbert had set it up to where it had to be triggered by music and so i was kind of digging through the terminology of the imperium and i found that it had to do with burning ilaka wood and it was that was like the second stage crystal

crystallization or all and all that to get to samuta but the first stage of burning was the alaka drug so i switched it and i i didn't want the music to activate the drug so i just went with the alaka drug that frank herbert had in the terminology of the imperium see the first stage of the alaka wood drug is only triggered by country and western music normally that's i we say alaka wood we say four fingers of bourbon right kissal absolutely five in my case depending on the mood okay have we gotten obscure enough

no no this is honestly i feel like our audience is begging for more obscurity absolutely no i mean that must be insane when it comes to creating language when it comes to creating dialogue how is that um and again kind of i don't know i'm not in the world as as nearly as much as henry is obviously but when it comes to creating language how has that changed how you view the world in general when it comes to dialogue when it comes to different we always there's always an ever-changing flow when it comes to how the the youth they're talking or whatever language

changes it expresses the same thing over and over again how was how was that altered how you view um just how we communicate in general i mean you guys are the gods you're i i think you're suggesting that gurney how like what is ballast that should be doing rap music honestly that's a good way to make it viral if we want to make it viral we could take a blue man who looks like gurney has i could see kevin anderson writing some great hip-hop lyrics well we are

go ahead brian and i'll jump in i was gonna say we're we're not we're not necessarily adapting ourselves to the hip culture i believe so well and in fact if you look at the original tune that he's got a very very formal very medieval language and that's one of the other reasons why i think it has really um endured for so long because our language really changes what imagine if frank had written it in the people talking in the slang of the early 60s yeah it would sound ridiculous and outdated now yeah being like that flips

my way that's i totally dig that very careful about you know using in our dialogue using anything that is very 2010 or 2020 or 99 or whatever because and that's that's another thing we touched on it before when brian was describing that there was a technology but there's when frank herbert was publishing doing one of the other biggest names in science fiction was isaac asimov and isaac asimov though i i grew up reading i really enjoyed all this stuff but it doesn't

it doesn't have the staying power because it was all about technology and the technology when you read isaac asimov's i robot from 1950 whatever seven ancient you read it and you just go they're on a starship bridge using slide rules and frank herbert consciously didn't rely on technology where i mean think about it if you were if you're writing a young adult modern day kids having trouble in high school right think about 10 years ago you wrote the most cutting edge because you had a

15 year old daughter or something like that and your book is all about how much time she spends on her desktop computer watching space right daniel's like this is already i'm out of this now you know it's over but that's why dune has a certain timelessness that's what's really i think why it's then so popular and another thing i think features into it is the fact that the characters in it for what i think a lot of people view as like intense sci-fi is actually the the characters are very relatable

and there are they are each one people i recognize even baren harkinen like there's in the book in the movie he's way more of a cartoonish villain in the book he actually has like motive like he had and it's like the wind he's like i feel sorrow for how he must die like like the way he feels about like upset like he's upset that duke ledo went down like that like you know which is a it's a nuanced view so the whole series that frank herbert laid out is all about human beings um

computers are illegal they're used by the benny jesserit but it's all about human beings so if you look at the great schools the benny jesserit are trying to breed for this perfect superhuman being which is frank herbert said himself could be a fallacy you've got the mentats that are human computers basically you've got the navigators that expand and fold space so it's all about human potential and then on a much smaller level you have the individual characters that are very relatable so it's about

people i mean you don't have computers in here that are the size of planets that were written about in the 1950s frank herbert neatly set them aside and didn't say how big they were right no it kind of carries do you have you ever um in your travel met anyone who believes themselves to be like a quote-unquote honored matron okay kevin you remember that little girl i was just gonna say though the woman who said she was doing the the ray bradbury yeah describe that yeah that's it it was just like in

Fahrenheit four or five one where each person was a book at the end this woman was i guess it was it was a young woman she was doing she knew it word for word it was incredible wow oh no i was talking to it it's like some woman just showing up just being like i'm gonna control this whole room of people with my vagina it sounds very very scary to me the honored matrons well there are such a fascinating where that could happen henry there are certain established it's true i just love i love the war between the honored matrons

and the benny jesserit i just love the two of them well what it that's what what is so interesting what i've been picking up on here is how frank was able to make this timeless because he didn't he understood that the technology of the time was gonna be moved on and it's going to move it it will move on it's going to move on fast you know completely freaking you know calculators used to be massive you know 10 by 10 things and now of course our phones are a thousand billion times more powerful than than anything we could imagine in the early

70s so do you that's why the future is human which is kind of what he shows and do you think that was something that frank because in the world of sci-fi you know obviously again you can sort of offshoot into all these different directions all of these interesting technological things and advancements and all this you know but when it comes to keeping it human why do you think frank was why do you how do you think he got there and how did you guys sort of expand on that because it is so easy to get lost

in so much of the other aspects of the sci-fi world to keep it human that must have been that that's kind of difficult to do it and rely you have to be very creative to keep it sort of based in that sort of reality he would take real situations that he saw such as charismatic leaders like mousseline is just one example and just the entire nation gets goes off the edge of a cliff but he would take these examples and hey let's let's put that into this science fiction book and let's instead of just a country or just

instead of a planet let's make it a whole galaxy and here's this charismatic leader and billions of people have died in dune messiah the sequel to dune where frank herbert flipped the hero mythology of dune and a lot of people didn't understand that national lampoon made it uh they kind of lambasted it but ultimately people started to understand it because people the frank herbert went out and and had to explain his his second book but um it's um it's quite

an exercise in in psychology with frank herbert too he knew a woman that had studied under carl gustav young um in uh in europe in the 1930s in in xeric i believe it was and so frank herbert had access to this woman's notes and her name was iran slattery and so he studied youngian psychology so you'll see all this stuff immersed into his characters and really when you're developing a character and the relationships it's all about psychology anyway but on a little bigger scale frank herbert like to end like for

example he ended dune he said i like to end the novel with detritus with little bits and pieces of the characters still clinging to my readers and so they want to go back and read it and what do you know when you go back and read dune like a classic novel or or even like seeing a classic movie you see things you never saw before you can read it dad used to say you could read it as an ecological novel you could read it for the religion you could read it for the politics for the women's issues women are running

everything by his fifth and sixth books yes or you know interestingly take some of those beautiful beautiful paragraphs that he wrote and set them up like a poem it's poetry it's just beautiful can i ask a question i feel like god emperor is the least talked about of the books i really do think of the main sexology the that is the one in his least approach because i wonder if it's because god emperor is i'm not going to say a sympathetic look but it's an it's a look at the inner workings of what would you call

a dictator and seeing like this idea of like a sympathetic dictator it's interesting i remember talking to my dad he lived in port towns in washington the olympic peninsula at the time and i was talking with dad about god emperor of dune when he was writing it and he said i'm writing a love story such as never been written before you know and so it's this love story of this person that becomes a monster and he loves a human and but it starts the novel starts out with all this great action and then you have all this nonaction in the middle of it and then it ends with

action um and really it's a bridging novel between two trilogies so you have dune dune messiah and children of dune is one trilogy then dune messiah is a bridging novel and then he intended to write heretics of dune chapterhouse dune and one sequel dune seven that he called it so so really god emperor of dune stands on its own um a lot of a lot of people like it like it the best of all the sequels it's it really is kind of a touching love story

and i love the the reoccurrence the idea of a dunk in Idaho that keeps coming back keeps coming back and being like i started thinking in my mind that that's like the exteriorization of what used to be the human part of leto the second and he's kind of keeping it on purpose because i think that's a big question i also get a lot being like why is dunk in Idaho there and it's like well i think he's doing it to kind of keep it to keep a touch in and then when he meets what he tries to make his wife it's very very difficult for him

but man when he fucking kills all those people in the town square he starts flipping around that's one of my favorite scenes in the entire book series when he's just like oh you guys don't think i can move and then flip flip flip flip flip that's sweet i don't know why i'm doing this that's not even a question i'm just talking it he only got letters from reader and they say why did you kill off dunk in Idaho so it's sort of like steven king with his misery the book misery we're in the movie kathy bates you know wants that doesn't want misery killed

so some of the fans didn't want dunk in Idaho killed so frank herbert brought him back and he didn't do it you know didn't do it the same way that lucas did it so frank herbert had his own way but also remember with uh with uh light of the second who's this horrible tyrant one of the things that he says i mean he's horrible tyrant and killing these people he says i'm doing all this so that you will never ever ever let someone like me happen again interesting yeah he goes a 2000 year reign the golden path

no one understands but him he's trying to do it for everybody's go every that's what they don't understand he's trying to help everyone what do you think uh mr frank herbert would think about 2020 do you feel as if he saw this what do you think he would think about if he woke up right now and was like yep this is just like i wrote it exactly as i scripted this to go or do you think he'd be more shocked by the uh i'm just going to say stupidity of humanity i think you i think you'd say i'm

sending out a lot of tweets that were highly intelligent and philosophical and and all encompassing maybe reaching across the aisles instead of all this these people shouting at each other shouting over each other and not understanding each other i think he would find a common ground i mean look at some of the things that he combined in dune you've got religions like the orange catholic bible you've got uh sufi or you got this uh buddhist lomic uh combined so i think he saw basically the good in in all kinds of

different things and he would see that carried forward so he would want people to find a common ground and not have it as it is now yeah i completely agree we need to do that that's for i can definitely see trump in a big cart like being driven one of those automatic carts honestly i really think that he'd much or prove that you much rather do that than walk bro ask you a question because i've never asked you this before it frank was frank optimistic about humans or

pessimistic i i i think it was both the it's the pessimism and the optimism fighting against each other it's like you're good and your bad side fighting so he that's what it's all about to what what is the definition of being human well it's all about basically that of trying to overcome your bad side but it's always going to be there and it kind of makes us interesting it makes us more interesting i mean if we were all um like there's there's a certain religious

persuasion i won't say it specifically but they write these histories of their families and if you look in in the history there's nothing bad in there about anybody it's like they whitewash all the interesting people that were bank robbers and everything so frank herbert understood that we are more interesting with our good and their bad yeah and it's an ongoing thing and we're going to go forward and sometimes you do bad things for good reasons you know yeah that's very complex but that's where i think i'm

starting to see a line of thought in a lot of the books of like this idea of because leader one with paul tradies when he finally becomes more deep he knows the future so he views the idea of walking this narrow specific line saying it has to be like this but then his son is the opposite his son says like actually we should it should be like this free thing like the idea that knowledge balances on the edge of a knife like he actually believes that we should be more free-flowing and it seems to be there's this fight like

especially with the honored matress versus the benny jester it where it's like benny jester it's the same thing they believe in the means to an end and that we need to control society and have it be a certain way for it to come out meanwhile the honored matress are like fuck that we're going to rip it all apart again which is he seems to that's like a focus yeah and i noticed i noticed you're not very excited about the series too that was like a thousand word sentence that was one sentence with no period in it i'm sorry i just don't i'm not a i'm not a novelist

well and remember also that you learned that the honor matress are are scared poopless and they're running from something even worse so that kind of gets revealed that they're you know they're like the biggest he is biggest toughest meanest people that are coming in they they're the planet doomed to a cinder they're knocking everything to pieces and then you find out oh crap they're running from something even worse and but they're also bad that they're the bad side of the benny jester at human nature

but i tell you what though i would definitely want to date an honored matress once i'd want to just go out just for a little while oh what a lucky lady that'll be brian herbert and kevin anderson i don't think you'd survive the first date kill me just kill me just do it fast we are speaking with brian herbert and kevin anderson check out their new book dune the duke of caladan it's on sale right now so check that out well my final sort of just thought here oh uh what do you

want to achieve with this uh sort of resurgence of dune uh what would you like the audience to take away uh from what you are what you're what what you're saying is there anything specifically that was motivating you uh that you really want to uh make sure the audience understands well ultimately we're we want to expand the audience for dune so through the games through the graphic novels through the comics all these things that are happening there's even merchandising but we want

ultimately to have people go back and read dune and and i and i don't want people to think that any of the things being done have diminished the quality of dune we're trying not to but we're also trying to broaden the the readership because this is an incredible book and people that don't know about dune um this is just it's just a loss i mean you really they really have to have to get to know it well and dune is is i mean it's just so much a part of my heart and brian's too that this is it's our we're passionate about it it's our favorite

science fiction novel ever written and if we can find like like ways to get more people to read the book to get the same experience that we did you know you know sort of like going door to door with your little religious pamphlets that's going hard on the good word about dune i feel i'm doing the same thing i'm doing the same thing for you i'm the i'm the i'm extending this um and again and then the movie should probably do quite a bit for that the new movie and and thank you for your enthusiasm i i really appreciate it henry

that means a lot you're the first person ever thank you for my enthusiasm oh and henry thank you for turning ben and and travis in the background there into dune fans maybe they'll read the book now they got to well i'll definitely listen to him yelling about it which is how i absorb knowledge and it all comes through the through the uh filter of henry so i'll get a whole series of things wrong but you know i'll try i'll be able to sit at the bar and have a conversation about it so that's all that matters and i will scream the praises of all things dune

brian kevin thank you so much for being with us today guys we really appreciate it and we are gonna we are gonna move some product we are moving books thank you all right there it was everyone our conversation with mr herbert and mr anderson what a great duo and it was such a privilege to speak with them all right well we hope you enjoyed the conversation hope you got some knowledge in your brain and maybe even some laughter in your belly and have a wonderful rest of your holiday weekend hail yourselves everyone we'll chat with you soon

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