No, I think some of my views may come from interviews, or my time on Dune forums ywaras ago. I was quite the fan years ago. As much as a WOT fan at some point, you might say. I grew up with Dune and the other books and novellas (that change my point-of-view of the books as well, a great deal. Most of Herbert's books but Dune didn't remain in print long, and most of the American fans have not read them. The novellas are long gone in English - I'm not even sure they ever were collected as books (I checked. They were, they're just long gone in print). Not so in French - all of Frank's books and novellas are still available and the translations are good. Let's just say that reading everything gives another view of Frank's thoughts (it's obvious from his other books that he wasn't a mysogyn in the least, for instance), as he returned many times to the same themes and ideas in his other books, though often he mixed different ones or otherwise changed the cocktail of themes.). He always hated formulaic answers - a great deal of his thinking is open-ended, leaving the reader take over.

I see where you're coming from with your vision of the books changing with time and experience. At 14 I saw Dune as a LOTR in outer space. As a young adult though, Frank's ideas and opinions played a part in shaping my worldview. He certainly helped me develop/deepen my fairly critical opinions on religion, and politics. His negative views on the Hero worship in religion, history and myth I only really returned to in my readings after I had read Joseph Campbell and some of Jung (which inspired Herbert a lot - it's where the Other Memory arose from, notably). It's only then I realised how negatively Herbert considered Heroes, how Dune wasn't an heroic epic but a demonstration of how Heroes and "gods" are crafted, and how dangerous they can be.

The stuff about his dislike of catholicism I mentionned comes from his biography, I think. Frank detested being told how to think, and he saw the catholic church as a huge machine designed to do ejust that. Nuns crept him out from more personal experience - he's hated them since his childhood and when he crafted the Bene Gesserit he modelled it on them.


IRRC, only three or maybe four of his books have either a foreword or afterword and only two are by Herbert instead of by Guy Abadia, his French publisher and friend. As far as I remember, Frank's afterword in the sixth book is the only one that's there in the original as well, though Abadia's second afterword speaking of Herbert's death and the writing of Chapterhouse isn't. I would have to dig the books out to be sure. I have not re read them in French in over 25 years and as I won't re read them in translation ever, they're in storage. Or perhaps I gave them away to friends. I don't remember. The only French books I have on the shelves are those not yet reprinted in English (in the last years many have been), like the Jesus Incident/The Lazarus Effect and the Ascension Factor that I love just as much as Dune, in some ways more and in some ways less. They were written in parallel to the Dune books (the last four)and deal with many of the same themes, with additional ingredients thrown in (environmental issues and how environment shape people (literally as well as psychologically), religion and politics is more deeply explored in that series. Dune skims the surface a bit in comparison. In Dune the machine-minds have been fought and defeated. In the other series, it begins with the sucessful attempt to create a conscious AI and then goes downhill as the AI (a spaceship) turns against its creators and decides it is God. The stand-alone novel stops at that, the other three are a much later expansion co-written by Bill Ransom on what comes next after Ship stopped above an extremely unhospitable planet and ordered its worshippers to settle it and multiply. It explores issues of differences and racism as people mutate, and symbiotic as well as predator-prey relationships. Pandora becomes the antithesis of Arrakis at some point, after an eco-disaster turned it into a river world. Some of these themes resurfaced in Dune 7, alas in a pedestrian fashion but KJA and Herbert junior destroyed it as a novel certainly but it's still interesting to dig up the ideas of Frank in there. Perhaps because I know well his other books and the last one written in solo by Ransom was in preparation while Frank was outlining Dune 7, I tend to quite disagree with those who thought Dune 7 was very un-Herbert like and Anderson made it all up. In truth, it explores stuff within the Dune setting that Frank was also exploring in the Pandora setting from another angle at the same time, which is quite typical of the way he worked on his parallel projects all his career).

Frank Herbert is one of those Americans who enjoyed more early popularity in France than in the USA. The French SF circles (which were quite small - think of enthusiasts in the vein of the Doherty of the early years, except they were writers in their own right too) almost worshipped Herbert. And his wife. They were the first ones to recognize Bev's great indirect input in Frank's novels, as his springboard for his ideas. Abadia invested great efforts in having Herbert's books translated, especially the "tougher ones" like the Whipping Star, which was quite a challenge (the central character is a being that doesn't think or communicate in human terms at all and doesn't even exist in the same dimensions - it's a mystery novel, with the protagonist attempting to solve how to communicate with that "Fanny May" and learn why beings like her are disappearing.). Not that Herbert wasn't popular in the USA, but he was even more in France. I guess he appealed to their cartesian tendencies.