Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [294]
Upon learning of my interest, prominent writers approached me with offers of collaboration. But in tossing ideas around with them I couldn’t visualize the project coming to fruition. They were excellent writers, but in combination with them I didn’t feel the necessary synergy for such a monumental task. So I kept turning to other projects, avoiding the big one. Besides, while Dad had sprinkled many provocative loose ends in the fifth and sixth books of the series, he had written an afterword for CHAPTERHOUSE: DUNE that was a marvelous dedication to my late mother, Beverly Herbert—his wife of nearly four decades. They had been a writing team in which she edited his work and acted as a sounding board for his overflow of ideas . . . so with both of them gone it seemed a fitting conclusion to leave the project untouched.
The trouble was, a fellow named Ed Kramer kept after me. An accomplished editor and sponsor of science fiction/fantasy conventions, he wanted to put together an anthology of short stories set in the Dune universe—stories by different, well-known authors. He convinced me that it would be an interesting, significant project, and we talked about coediting it. All the details weren’t finalized, since the project had a number of complexities, both legal and artistic. In the midst of this, Ed told me he had received a letter from best-selling author Kevin J. Anderson, who had been invited to contribute to the proposed anthology. He suggested what he called a “shot in the dark,” asking about the possibility of working at novel length, preferably on a sequel to CHAPTERHOUSE: DUNE.
Kevin’s enthusiasm for the Dune universe fairly jumped off the pages of his letter. Still, I delayed answering him for around a month, not certain how to respond. Despite his proven skills, I was hesitant. This was a big decision. By now I knew I wanted to be involved closely in the project, and that I needed to participate to such a degree in order to ensure the production of a novel of integrity, one that would be faithful to the original series. Along with J.R.R. Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS and a handful of other works, DUNE stood as one of the greatest creative achievements of all time, and arguably the greatest example of science fiction world-building in the history of literature. For the sake of my father’s legacy, I couldn’t select the wrong person. I read everything I could get my hands on that Kevin had written, and did more checking on him. It soon became clear to me that he was a brilliant writer, and that his reputation was sterling. I decided to give him a telephone call.
We hit it off immediately, both on a personal and professional level. Aside from the fact that I genuinely liked him, I felt an energy between us, a remarkable flow of ideas that would benefit the series. After obtaining the concurrence of my family, Kevin and I decided to write a prequel—but not one set in the ancient times, long before DUNE. Instead we would go to events only thirty or forty years before the beginning of DUNE, to the love story of Paul’s parents, to the Planetologist Pardot Kynes being dispatched to Arrakis, to the reasons for the terrible, destructive enmity between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, and much more.
Before writing a detailed outline, we set to work rereading all six Dune books my father had written, and I took it upon myself to begin assembling a massive DUNE CONCORDANCE—an encyclopedia of all the characters, places, and wonders of the Dune universe. Of primary concern to us, we needed to determine where Dad had been heading with the conclusion of the series. It was clear that he was building up to something momentous in DUNE 7, and without intending to do so he had left us with a mystery. There were no