Frank Herbert

Frank Patrick Herbert (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was a critically and commercially successful American science fiction author. He is best known for the novel Dune, and the five other novels in the series that followed it. The Dune saga dealt with themes such as human survival and evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, and power.

Status and impact in science fiction

Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel, and the Dune saga is the best-selling science fiction series, ever. In addition, Dune has received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Nebula Award in 1965 and sharing the Hugo Award in 1966. According to contemporary Robert A. Heinlein, Herbert's opus was "Powerful, convincing, and most ingenious."

Related Topics:
Nebula Award - Robert A. Heinlein

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Dune is also considered a landmark novel for a number of reasons:

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• Like Robert Heinlein's 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land, Herbert's 1963 Dune represented a move toward a more literary approach to the science fiction novel. Before this period, it was often said that all a SF novel needed to be successful was a great technological idea. Characterization and great story took a distant second place.
• Dune is a landmark of soft science fiction. Herbert deliberately suppressed technology in his Dune universe so he could address the future of humanity, rather than the future of Humanity's technology. Dune considers the way humans and their institutions might change over time.
• Dune was the first major ecological SF novel. Frank Herbert was a great populariser of scientific ideas; many of his fans credit Frank Herbert for introducing them to philosophy and psychology. In Dune he helped popularize the term 'ecology', and some of the field's concepts, vividly imparting a sense of planetary awareness. Gerald Jonas explains in the New York Times Book Review: "So completely did Mr. Herbert work out the interactions of man and beast and geography and climate that became the standard for a new subgenre of `ecological' science fiction." As popularity of Dune rose, Herbert embarked on a lecture tour of college campuses, explaining how the environmental concerns of Dune's inhabitants were analogous to our own.
• Finally Dune is considered truly epic world building. The Library Journal reports that "Dune is to science fiction what The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy." Frank Herbert imagined every facet of his creation — lovingly including glossaries, quotes, documents and histories — to bring his universe alive to his readers, and no science fiction novel before it had such a deeply realized reality.

Herbert wrote over twenty novels after Dune that some regard as being of variable quality. Books like The Green Brain, The Santaroga Barrier and Hellstrom's Hive seemed to hark back to the days before Dune when a good technological idea was all that was needed to drive a sci-fi novel. And some fans of the Dune saga are critical of the follow-up novels as being sub-par.

Related Topics:
The Green Brain - The Santaroga Barrier - Hellstrom's Hive

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Herbert never equalled the critical acclaim he received from Dune. Neither his sequels to Dune nor any of his other books won a Hugo or Nebula. Some felt that Children of Dune was almost too literary and too dark to get the recognition it may have deserved, and that The Dosadi Experiment lacked an epic quality fans had come to expect.

Related Topics:
Nebula - Children of Dune

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To conclude, Malcolm Edwards in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction wrote:

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: "Much of work makes difficult reading. His ideas were genuinely developed concepts, not merely decorative notions, but they were sometimes embodied in excessively complicated plots and articulated in prose which did not always match the level of thinking...His best novels, however, were the work of a speculative intellect with few rivals in modern ."

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