Frank Herbert: The Man Who Made Arrakis from Oregon Sand

Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma on October eighth, nineteen twenty. He grew up moving between Tacoma and the peninsula communities to the west and north, the Kitsap Peninsula, the Olympic Peninsula, the coast around the Hoh Rain Forest, the Quileute reservation near La Push. The Pacific Northwest was in him before he understood what he was going to make of it.

He worked as a journalist for most of the nineteen forties and fifties, writing for papers in Oregon and California while publishing occasional science fiction stories. His first novel, a submarine thriller called The Dragon in the Sea, came out in nineteen fifty-six and earned modest attention but no lasting readership. Then in nineteen fifty-nine, his editor sent him to Florence, Oregon, to write a magazine article about an unusual federal project: the United States Department of Agriculture was stabilizing a field of coastal sand dunes using planted poverty grass to stop the dunes from migrating and swallowing the surrounding landscape.

Herbert went to Florence, looked at the moving dunes, and found himself unable to write a magazine article. What he had instead was an obsession. He had realized, looking at the sand, that a landscape could be a character, that an ecology could be the subject of fiction the way a person could.

He observed that moving dunes could swallow cities, lakes, rivers, highways. He talked to Native American mentors on the reservations of the coast, including a man named Howard Hansen of the Quileute who told him, in words Herbert later recalled: white men are eating the earth. They are going to turn this whole planet into a wasteland, just like North Africa.

Six years of research and writing followed. The novel Dune was serialized in Analog science fiction magazine between nineteen sixty-three and nineteen sixty-five and then rejected by more than twenty publishers before Chilton Books, a company better known for automotive repair manuals, accepted the manuscript. It appeared in print in nineteen sixty-five and won the Nebula Award and shared the Hugo Award in nineteen sixty-six.

It is now the best-selling science fiction novel in history. The desert planet Arrakis, with its ecology, its politics, its resource conflicts, began with a field of moving sand dunes on the Oregon coast, seen by a journalist from Tacoma.