Science Fiction is a genre that’s getting a great deal of attention of late. There are tons of good science fiction novels to read, and probably more movies in the genre than ever before. But do you know which is the best-selling science-fiction novel of all time? It’s Dune first published in 1965 by Frank Herbert, who was born October 8. 1920.
Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington and brought up in a rural environment on the Olympic Peninsula. He was a quick learner and could read pretty well by the time he was 5. But his first real interest was photography. He bought a Kodak box camera when he was just ten, and by the time he was in his teens, managed to acquire a color film camera. It was the era of the Great Depression, though, and in 1938 he left home to live with his aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon — probably because of his family’s poverty. He graduated high school, then lied about his age in 1939 to get his first job, which was at the Glendale Star newspaper. He worked as a reporter and photographer.
He served in the US Navy in the early stages of World War II, but was discharged after a head injury. He went back to journalism, working for the Oregon Journal in Portland. He had started writing stories, and managed to sell two adventure stories to pulp magazines. That led indirectly to his first marriage — he and his future wife had both enrolled in a creative writing class, and they were the only two in the class who had actually sold their work.
Herbert’s first science fiction story was published in 1952. He later said he’d been reading science fiction for years before he started writing it, and apparently the years of study paid off; he became pretty successful pretty fast, publishing multiple stories, and, in 1955, his first science fiction novel. He wasn’t successful enough to do it full-time, though; he was also working as a speechwriter for politicians. But then his wife went back to work full-time as an advertising writer, and that enabled Herbert to concentrate on his fiction. He started researching Dune in 1959, and it was published in 1965. He explained that he got the idea from a magazine article he wrote about the Oregon Dunes near Florence, Oregon.
Dune was rejected by nearly 20 publishers before it was published, including one who turned out to be quite right when he began his rejection with “I might be making the mistake of the decade, but…” Dune became a virtual franchise after that, and Herbert wrote quite a few other books as either sequels or related stories in the Dune universe. Things really took off in 1985 when the first Dune movie was released (there have been several). Both the reputation and success of the Dune stories has increased since then, but Herbert didn’t live to see much of it; he died in 1986 at 65. His son Brian has continued to publish stories set in the Dunes.
