ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Frank Herbert
Brian Herbert
Kevin Anderson

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FRANK HERBERT

Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune.  He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind.  His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre.  Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy.  It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies.

As a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading.  He loved Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be a author."  His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child's body.  In grade school he was the acknowledged authority on everything.  If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. He'll know."

His curiosity and independent spirit got him into trouble more than once when he was growing up, and caused him difficulties as an adult as well.  He did not graduate from college because he refused to take the required courses for a major; he only wanted to study what interested him.  For years he had a hard time making a living, bouncing from job to job and from town to town. He was so independent that he refused to write for a particular market; he wrote what he felt like writing.  It took him six years of research and writing to complete Dune, and after all that struggle and sacrifice, 23 publishers rejected it in book form before it was finally accepted. He received an advance of only $7,500.

His loving wife of 37 years, Beverly, was the breadwinner much of the time, as an underpaid advertising writer for department stores.  Having been divorced from his first wife, Flora Parkinson, Frank Herbert met Beverly Stuart at a University of Washington creative writing class in 1946.  At the time, they were the only students in the class who had sold their work for publication.  Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, one to Esquire and the other to Doc Savage.  Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine.  These genres reflected the interests of the two young lovers; he the adventurer, the strong, machismo man, and she the romantic, exceedingly feminine and soft-spoken.

Their marriage would produce two sons, Brian, born in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951. Frank also had a daughter, Penny, born in 1942 from his first marriage.  For more than two decades Frank and Beverly would struggle to make ends meet, and there were many hard times.  In order to pay the bills and to allow her husband the freedom he needed in order to create, Beverly gave up her own creative writing career in order to support his.  They were in fact a writing team, as he discussed every aspect of his stories with her, and she edited his work.  Theirs was a remarkable, though tragic, love story-which Brian would poignantly describe one day in Dreamer of Dune (Tor Books; April 2003).  After Beverly passed away, Frank married Theresa Shackelford.

In all, Frank Herbert wrote nearly 30 popular books and collections of short stories, including six novels set in the Dune universe: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune.  All were international bestsellers, as were a number of his other science fiction novels, which include The White Plague and The Dosadi Experiment.  His major novels included The Dragon in the Sea, Soul Catcher (his only non-science fiction novel), Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier, The Green Brain, Hellstorm's Hive, Whipping Star, The Eyes of Heisenberg, The Godmakers, Direct Descent, and The Heaven Makers. He also collaborated with Bill Ransom to write The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.  Frank Herbert's last published novel, Man of Two Worlds, was a collaboration with his son, Brian.

BRIAN HERBERT

Brian Herbert, the author of numerous novels and short stories, has been critically acclaimed by leading reviewers in the United States and around the world. The eldest son of science fiction superstar Frank Herbert, Brian moved his home twenty-three times before graduating from high school.

Finances were tight in those days, as his father (with success still years away) worked on and off as a newspaperman and sometimes solely as a writer, neither of which brought in enough money to support a family of three children, including Brian, his younger brother, Bruce, and their older sister, Penny.

Life was never dull, however. An impulsive, restless man, Frank Herbert constantly sought out new opportunities and fresh adventures. This included two writing sojourns with his family to Mexico, including one with fantasy author Jack Vance, and another in an old Cadillac LaSalle hearse—the family car.

An honor student, Brian was skipped ahead, so that he graduated from high school at the age of 16. He married at a young age as well, and while a full-time student at UC Berkeley (where he received a BA in Sociology), he worked in order to support his wife, Jan, and their first daughter, Julie. The marriage has been going strong for more than three decades and has produced three daughters.

Brian has been involved in a wide variety of professions and endeavors, including work as an author, an editor, a business manager, an inventor of board games, and a creative consultant for both television and collectible card games. He did not begin his writing career until he was nearly thirty years old; prior to that he worked as an insurance underwriter and agent, an award-winning encyclopedia salesman, a waiter, a busboy, a maid (not a typo), and a printer. He and his wife once owned a double-decker London bus, which they converted into an unusual gift shop. Brian also operated a mail-order record and tape business, in which he sold "golden oldies" music to remote regions of the world, including the Australian outback.

Brian Herbert's first two books were humor collections, Incredible Insurance Claims and Classic Comebacks. After that, a steady stream of novels ensued, including Sidney's Comet; The Garbage Chronicles; Sudanna, Sudanna; Man of Two Worlds, with Frank Herbert; Prisoners of Arionn; The Race for God, a preliminary Nebula nominee in 1990; Memorymakers, with Marie Landis; and Blood on the Sun, also with Marie Landis. He has also edited The Notebooks of Frank Herbert's Dune and Songs of Muad'Dib.

When Brian was in his late twenties and early thirties he began to grow closer to his father, who was a complex, enigmatic man. Brian's efforts to unravel the intriguing mysteries of his father began with a detailed journal that Brian maintained for years, chronicling the fascinating events of the Herbert family—a document which ultimately included the tragic deaths of his mother and father, and which he expanded into a comprehensive biography of Frank Herbert. Tor Books published this work, entitled DREAMER OF DUNE in April 2003. The quest to understand one's father—which Joseph Campbell has described as one of the epic hero journeys of mankind—continued as Brian studied the entire six-volume Dune series and created a massive Dune Concordance. This would prove to be an invaluable reference book during the writing of additional Dune books in the three-volume Prelude to Dune series, which Brian undertook with Kevin J. Anderson in 1998, and with the publication of the new Legends of Dune series books, DUNE: THE BUTLERIAN JIHAD (Tor; September 2002), DUNE: THE MACHINE CRUSADE (Tor, September 2003), and DUNE: THE BATTLE OF CORRIN (Tor, on-sale: August 17, 2004).

KEVIN ANDERSON

In the last five years, 27 of Kevin J. Anderson's novels have appeared on national bestseller lists; and he has over eleven million books in print worldwide. His works have been translated into over 22 languages including German, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Hebrew.

For a book signing during the promotional tour for his comedy/adventure novel AI! PEDRITO!, Anderson broke the Guinness World Record for "Largest Single-Author Signing," passing the previous records set by Gen. Colin Powell and Howard Stern.

Kevin worked in California for twelve years as a technical writer and editor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the nation's largest research facilities. At the Livermore Lab, he met his wife Rebecca Moesta and also his frequent co-author, Doug Beason. After he had published ten of his own science fiction novels to wide critical acclaim, he came to the attention of Lucasfilm, and was offered the chance to write Star Wars novels.

The novels in his Star Wars Jedi Academy trilogy became the three top-selling science fiction novels of 1994. He has also completed numerous other projects for Lucasfilm, including the 14-volumes in The New York Times bestselling Young Jedi Knights series (co-written with his wife Rebecca Moesta). His three original Star Wars anthologies are the bestselling SF anthologies of all time.

Kevin is also the author of three hardcover novels based on the X-Files; all three became international bestsellers, the first of which reached #1 on the London Sunday Times bestseller list. Ground Zero was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1995" by the readers of SFX magazine. Ruins hit The New York Times bestseller list, the first X-Files novel ever to do so, and was voted "Best Science Fiction Novel of 1996."

Kevin's thriller Ignition, written with Doug Beason, has sold to Universal Studios as a major motion picture. Anderson and Beason's novels have been nominated for the Nebula Award and the American Physics Society's "Forum" award. Their other novels include Virtual Destruction, Fallout, and Ill Wind, which has been optioned by ABC TV for a television movie or miniseries. His newest collaborative works are ARTIFACT (Forge Books; May 2003), a thriller written with F. Paul Wilson, Janet Berliner, and Mathew Costello. DUNE: THE BATTLE OF CORRIN (Tor Books, on-sale: August 17, 2004) written with Brian Herbert, Book 3 of their acclaimed Legends of Dune trilogy, and the sequel to the bestsellers DUNE: THE BUTLERIAN JIHAD and DUNE: THE MACHINE CRUSADE.

Kevin's solo work has garnered wide critical acclaim; for example, Climbing Olympus was voted the best paperback SF novel of 1995 by Locus Magazine, Resurrection, Inc., was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, and his novel Blindfold was a 1996 preliminary Nebula nominee. Anderson has written numerous bestselling comics, including Star Wars and Predator titles for Dark Horse, and X-Files for Topps.

Kevin's research has taken him to the top of Mount Whitney and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, inside the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex, into the Andes Mountains and the Amazon River, inside a Minuteman III missile silo and its underground control bunker, and onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, inside NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. He's also been on the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange, inside a plutonium plant at Los Alamos, behind the scenes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and out on an Atlas-E rocket launchpad. He also, occasionally, stays home and writes. Kevin and his wife writer Rebecca Moesta live in Colorado.