Skip to main content

dune - How true to the original vision of Frank Herbert were the sequels published by his son?


Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson based their sequels to original Dune series on research material composed by Frank Hebert before his death.


Are there any sources that describe how much material was found and what it contained?


Anything that can help to evaluate how true both authors kept to the original vision.



Answer



I started with the Brian Herbert wikipedia article's references section. There are a lot of sources here but here are the ones I think are the most significant.


First there's this archived blog post by Kevin J. Anderson where you could see those disk :



To the left, I'm posting copies of the actual IBM diskettes containing the files, with the labels "Dune 7 Outline" and "Dune 7 Notes" in Frank Herbert's own handwriting.




Dune 7 outline disk Dune 7 notes disk


And lower on the blog post you could read :



When Frank wrote HERETICS and CHAPTERHOUSE he obviously intended to complete the story. He had planned an entire epic that tied his chronicles back through his whole projected history.


Frank Herbert wrote a detailed outline for "Dune 7" and he left extensive "Dune 7 notes," as well as stored boxes of his descriptions, epigraphs, chapters, character backgrounds, historical notes -- over a thousand pages worth.



Second there's this interview with Brian Herbert



Q: Did Frank Herbert leave you any notes to guide you in writing these prequels?



A: When dad died he was using a yellow highlighter on Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune. That's all I knew. Then I got a call from an estate attorney who asked me what I wanted to do with two safety deposit boxes of my dad's. I didn't know they existed. So we went down there, and in them were the notes to Dune 7 -- it was a 30-page outline. So I went up in my attic and found another 1,000 pages of working notes. As far as filling in these stories, Dad would say for example, "Between Dune and Dune Messiah it's been eleven years and billions of people were killed in the jihad." That's very enticing. So we're staying right on the Frank Herbert thread of his story line.



The others references are almost the same, except that they all mention getting the notes box in the garage instead of the attic.


Finally, in this interview, there is a passage concerning the possibility of releasing the outline or the notes.



[Q:] Is there any chance to see Frank Herbert's outline for "Dune-7" (we mean the notes) or some other articles devoted to "Dune"? Are you going to publish them anyway? If so, may we have your comments on it?


[A: ] We’ll probably include some notes or correspondence in THE ROAD TO DUNE -- but if we publish the notes and outline, then people will know the whole story! We want readers to get all the details from the published novels.



But the content of the now released The Road to Dune don't mention anything about that, so we could guess they wont publish it since they wrote the books and I don't see any argument to publish it (from their point of view).


So they started from a 30 pages outline and wrote 2 book of 700 pages each. There's also the notes, but we could imagine must of it was background material and they also wrote all the prequels books. So, we could imagine they stayed inside the parameters defined in the outline and notes, but there was some larges blank spaces to fill.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

futurama - How much time is lost in 'Time Keeps on Slippin''

In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.

harry potter - How could Expelliarmus beat Avada Kedavra?

I want to be very careful about how I ask this question – I am not asking How did Voldemort die? [CLOSED] Below the text is the relevant passages from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows if anyone wants to review them (I'm sorry for the amount of text). How did Expelliarmus beat Avada Kedavra and kill Voldemort? I feel the reason Harry's Expelliarmus overpowered Voldemort's Avada Kedavra curse has to do with who was master of the Elder Wand and how the Elder Wand works. I've always had trouble understanding fully how the Elder Wand works, though. How much did the fact that Voldemort never truly won or mastered the Elder Wand factor into how Expelliarmus reacted to Avada Kedavra and caused Avada Kedavra to rebound and kill Voldemort? An answer based in book canon would be especially welcome, but any canon source really is fine. Harry heard the high voice shriek as he, too, yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Draco’s wand: ‘ Avada Kedavra !’ ‘ Expelliarmus !...

Is there good canon evidence for the "Nightmare Matrix"?

On the Matrix wiki, there's an article about the Nightmare Matrix which says: The Nightmare Matrix was the second prototype Matrix, designed by The Architect after the massive failure of the Paradise Matrix in the hope that human minds would more readily accept an imperfect world with suffering. Unlike the first version, this Matrix instituted a basic cause-and-effect programming and forcibly made those connected to it accept the program. Vamp Prime, a possible remnant of the Nightmare Matrix. It also featured programs that resembled mythical evil creatures in various human mythologies such as vampires, werewolves, zombies, aliens, etc. It also failed, but many of the programs who were designed for it survived deletion in exile. The Merovingian and his wife, Persephone may have had their roots in this version of the Matrix. Upon its failure, the Merovingian started a smuggling ring of programs and information to provide a haven for exiles that would last for 6 cycles in the final ...

story identification - Anime with a boy hiring a creature from a stone, meets a man named Dante and starts a journey to collect crystals

I am from India, this anime or animated series (I can't remember this was made by the Japan or other countries) was aired between 2009 and 2012 probably in Jetix/Disney XD (but I'm not sure). This anime starts with a boy (the main character, I forgot his name) who find a stone (or crystal like thing) in his dad's property, his dad was missing that time. Some day he accidentally hire a creature/monster from that stone. Other day some creature attack him and he was saved by his creature and the story begins. In his journey to solve the mystery he meets a middle aged man 'Dante' (probably that was the name; this is the only character name I can remember). He had also some stone. After that they meet with one girl and a women (one of the girls is same age with the main boy character and probably will become his partner as the story goes on). Another women probably Dante's partner. Four of them started their journey to collect all the stone/crystal. They are collecti...