Dreamer of Dune Read Free

“Jesuit” are similar, as he envisioned his maternal aunts and the Bene Gesserit of Dune as female Jesuits. The attempted brainwashing by his aunts, as he later termed it, was performed over the protestations of F. H., who was an agnostic. Before giving up the fight, F. H. had many arguments with Babe over this. In the end, the boy’s religious beliefs became more like those of his father’s than those of any other adult he knew.
    It would be impossible, perhaps, to categorize Frank Herbert’s religious beliefs. He ascribed to no single organized belief system, but instead drew from many. He was attracted to Zen Buddhism in particular, as can be seen in his classic novel, Dune , where there are wordless truths and “Zensunni” and “Zensufi” belief systems. Though he would not study Zen in detail until he met Alan Watts in the 1960s, he was exposed to it in his childhood. For a time, he had Nisei friends, second-generation Japanese who were born and educated in the United States. Some of them held Zen Buddhist beliefs.
    He also knew Coast Salish Indians, and would come to know and respect their religious beliefs. This world view would become central to his only non–science fiction novel, Soul Catcher (1972).
    At a time before television, the children, particularly Frank, became adept at imagining adventures and frightening tales. In the evening around the fire at scout camp, everyone came to count on young Frank to come up with a scary story. Typically a boy or a counselor would call out a blood and guts idea, such as “blood in the well” or “a screaming eyeball from hell,” and my father would fill in details to create a story around it. He never failed to entertain. In darkened bedrooms with his cousins, where mattresses and sleeping bags were thrown on the floor, he would do the same. His stories were filled with fright, adventure, voice alterations and sound effects, and frequently involved ghosts, the old West, and the sea.
    In 1928, while still on the state patrol, F. H. moved his family to Burley, where they maintained a small subsistence farm for the production of family foodstuffs, with a cow, chickens, and pigs. Bub, “the dog who hated clams,” accompanied them. They had a large vegetable garden, with corn, peas, beans, carrots, lettuce and other crops. Young Frank, now seven, had chores to do, and he accepted responsibility for them. Regularly rising in the frosty time before dawn, he milked the cow, collected eggs and fed the pigs. Sometimes the farm animals were treated as pets, and the boy named them. He stopped doing that, however, when a favored chicken ended up on the chopping block.
    â€œNever name your dinner,” his mother told him one day.
    He was in the 4-H club, and participated in a number of county fairs held in Burley. In one 4-H project, he raised and canned five hundred chickens by himself.
    Children in town didn’t have to go to school on their birthdays. In October 1928, on the morning of his eighth birthday, Frank Herbert went downstairs to a breakfast of sourdough flapjacks and real maple syrup, favorites of his that had been prepared specially for him by his mother and paternal grandmother. After the breakfast dishes were cleared away, he climbed on top of the table and announced to his family, in a very determined tone, “I wanna be a author.”
    That morning he wrote his first short story, entitled “Adventures in Darkest Africa,” which he read to his family. Crayon drawings accompanied it. A jungle tale that began with a pretty good narrative hook to get the reader’s interest, it involved an interesting character who had to surmount obstacles and find his way back to camp. The jungle, though described with childish inaccuracy, was nonetheless a threatening, problem-filled environment. Young Frank had been on a number of hunting and camping trips with his father and uncles in the forests of