Professor Willis E. McNelly

recorded and typed an interview that he made with

Frank Herbert and his wife Beverly Herbert,

in 1969 and sent it to Turkey in 1997.

Professor McNelly has stated that

we may use this text in any way we like.

So we decided to retype the interview

and publish it in sexek.

The original text is 46 pages but the 32^nd page is missed.

Sorry for that inconvenience.

California State College, Fullerton

INTERVIEW BETWEEN: DATE OF TAPE:

INTERVIEWEE: Frank Herbert (FH) and his wife, Beverly (BH) 3 February 1969

INTERVIEWER: Willis McNelly (WM) DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION:

SUBJECT: Herbert’s science fiction novels, “Dune” and “Dune Messiah” February-April, 1970

WM: This tape recording is being made February 3. 1969, in the home of Frank Herbert in Fairfax, California. Frank and his wife Bev are sitting around including myself, Dr. Willis E. McNelly of Cal. State English Department, Fullerton, California; sitting around, talking about science fiction. Frank Herbert, as you all know, is the author of “Dune” and many other science fiction novels. Frank, I wonder if you’d tell us a little bit about the origins of “Dune”. You started a little earlier and you said you could trace the germinal idea?

FH: Oh yes. The idea come came from an article (I was going to do an article, which I never did) about the control of sand dunes. What many people don’t realize is that the United States has pioneered in this, how to control the flow of sand dunes, and it started up here at Florence, Oregon. There is a pilot project up there of the U.S. Forest Service which has been so successful that it has been visited and copied by experts, related departments from Chile, Israel, India, Pakistan, Great Britain, several other countries…

WM: Well, I know I drove along the Oregon coast this summer and you had mentioned this a year ago, that it had begun with this, what was happening along Oregon. I remember stopping t one for there, right south of Columbia River, it is Oregon State Park now…

FH: That’s, well, Florence is considerably south of that.

WM: South of it.

FFH: Yes. It’s about centrally located on the Oregon coast and it was an area where sand dune blew across Highway 1. U.S. Highway 1, frequently blocking the highway, and the forest service put in a test station down there to determine how they could control the flow of these sand dune. And I got fascinated by sand dunes. And I got fascinated by sand dunes, because I’m always fascinated by the idea of something that is either seen in miniature and the can be expanded to the macrocosm or which, but for the difference in time, in the flow rate, and the entropy rate, is similar to other features which we wouldn’t think were similar. Like a river…

WM: How long ago was this, by the way?

FH: Oh, this was in ’53. This was considerably…

WM: Fifteen years ago, more or less…

FH: Yes. It was a long time ago. Sand dunes are like waves in a large body of water; they just are slower. And the people treating them as fluid learn to control them.

WM: Fluid mechanics, in other words.

FH: That’s it. Fluid mechanics, with sand. And the whole idea fascinated me, so I started researching sand dunes and of course from sand dunes it’s a logical idea to go into a desert. The way I accumulated data is I start building file folders and before long I saw that I had far to much for an article and far too much for a story, for a short story. So, I didn’t know really what I had but I had an enormous amount of data and avenues shooting off at all angles to gather more. And I was following them … I can’t read the dictionary, you know; I can’t go look up a word…

WM: (Laughter)

FH: I get stopped by everything else on the opposite page. But … so, I started accumulating these file folders, which I’ll show you later, and as a result, I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was, for a science fiction writer anyway, it was an easy step from that to think: What if I had an entire planet that was a desert? During my studies of deserts, of course, and previous studies of religions, we all know that many religions began in a desert atmosphere, so I decided to put the two together because I don’t think that any one story should have any one thread. I build on a layer technique, and of course putting in religion and religious ideas you can play one against the other. Now this is … you see, I’m talking about surface now…

WM: That’s right.

FH: I’m not talking about the way things are layered…

WM: …within the novel itself.

FH: That’s right. Yes. The way character is developed for various reasons in the story … this is just the germ of the idea, but that’s where it begins.

WM: It began fifteen years ago, then. Well, what made you or at what point did you go from the sand dunes of Oregon and the ecological background there to the decision to utilize let’s say the Arabian mystique as another counter notion or contrapuntal notion working within the novel?

FH: Well, of course, in studying sand dunes, you immediately get into not just the Arabian mystique but the Navaho mystique and the mystique of the Kalahari primitives and all...

WM: Kalahari primitives?

FH: Yes, the Kalahari desert, the black foot (people) of the Kalahari and how they utilize every drop of water. You can’t just stop with the people who are living in this type of environment: you have to go on to how the environment works on the people and how they work on their environment. Just as … I mean, you could look at this thing on the Oregon Coast quite simply, if you wanted to, and say, yes, the sand was covering the highway, and that’s bad, so…

WM: …so we plant certain grasses, and that stops the sand from moving, and that’s good.

FH: And that’s the end of it, you see, that’s the end of it. But if you start going into the mechanics of how the United States Forest Service set up this project and all of the internal politics undoubtedly that were involved … I only know part of them … but I do know enough of them to know there were quite a few more … Then you would probably have a story there, a “main street” type of story. But I got off on a different kick because of the science fiction angle and the emphasis on ecology. It’s been my belief for a long time that man inflicts himself on his environment … that is, Western man.

WM: I think we can see that just looking around us: the simple thing of beer used to be packed in bottles, which eventually disintegrated, then it was packed in cans, and that took at a fifty-year half-life, and now it’s packed in aluminium cans, and that, you know, lives for ever, and we’re gradually corrupting…

FH: Unless it’s in salt water…

WM: …Yes, well, all right, but we’re gradually corrupting our environment as a result of that kind of thing.

FH: Plastic is the thing that we…you know, Bev and I were up on the Washington coast last year and an area unspoiled, originally very primitive area where the Mawka tribes lived, and so on, and even there, down among the driftwood logs on that primitive beach, that almost unspoiled beach, you frequently, much too frequently, come on these blue, orange, green, white plastic containers … Purex, Ivory Soap … and they’re virtually indestructible There they are … they float …

WM: Well, man is then, as you view him, a creature who ecologically is a destructive force, a divisive force.

FH: Well, we tend to think in Western culture … I’m talking about Western man, you realize that.

WM: Yes.

FH: We tend to think that we can overcome nature by a mathematical means; we accumulate enough data and we subdue it.

WM: And establish parameters of that data and subdue it.

FH: Yes. We subdue nature. This is a one-pointed vision of man, because if you really start looking at man, Western man, you’ll see that you could cut him right down the middle and he’s blind on that backside, you see.

WM: This is the point you made earlier, Bev, in talking around about the death of the planetary ecologist in “Dune” being a very touching spot, I think you said…a very moving…

BH: Well, I felt also it was a very significant point. A lot of the story swung around this: how the ecologist died. I thought it was very important that the planet killed the ecologist.

WM: Even though the planet … I mean, even though the ecologist was technically able to subdue anything within that…

BH: Well, there he lay dying…

WM: Dying, and…

BH: And understanding everything that was happening to him.

WM: Exactly.

BH: Much more than someone else dying in the desert would have. Complete understanding … I think it made it more horrible, the fact that he completely understood…

WM: That he knew what was happening to him and understood it and was technically capable of controlling it.

BH: He knew it had gotten him.

WM: Yes.

FH: This of course was done deliberately for that purpose … to turn … it’s a turning point of the whole book, but … a pivot, you might say … and the very fact that Kynes, who is the Western man, in my original construction of the book, sees all of these things happening to him as mechanical things doesn’t subtract from the fact that he is still a part of this system because it is observing him. He’s lived out of rhythm with it and he got in the through of the wave and it tumbled on him.

WM: And we’re polluting our atmosphere, we’re polluting our rivers, we’re polluting our beaches because we don’t understand the principles of ecology, among other things.

FH: Well, ecology, as somebody said…and I use this…I don’t recall…I’d like to contribute this, but I don’t recall where I encountered it … I did read over two hundred books as background for this novel … somebody said that ecology is the science of understanding consequences.

WM: I remember that.

FH: Lovely expression! And of course we’re … each of us, individually, is the product of everything that has happen to us, and this happened to me and hit me, and so I used it, because, as far as I was concerned, one of the purposes of this story was to delineate consequences of inflicting yourself upon a planet, upon your environment.

WM: So you have a number of forces, then, that are inflicting themselves upon the planet. You have the Fremen forces, you have the forces of the House of Atreides, do you pronounce it..?

FH: Atreides.

WM: Atreides. Parenthesis: I’d love to examine with you the possible implications of the House of Atreus in the Green legend there. End of parenthesis. And you have the off-planet forces of the Spacer’s Guild and the entire Imperium also as being forces inflicting themselves on this planet.

FH: The name of the game is power, you see.

WM: Yes.

FH: It…as it is today; we play the game today with counters called money and we talk about laws of supply and demand and so on. There is a law of supply and demand as long as you only have one form of exchange, but once you start getting other media of exchange, such as force, then the law of supply and demand gets different beats on it, different rhythms.

WM: It may interest you to know that on of the…in fact, the major question on my final examination for my science fiction course this last…two weeks ago was the…asking the class to examine the effects of power in its various forms, abuses and uses in two of the major works read during the semester, and…you’re mentioning power just now as being the name of the game as far as Arrakis is concerned…

FH: Yes. You see, Western man has assumed that if you have…that all you need for any problem is enough force, power, and that there is no problem which won’t submit to this approach, even the problem of our own ignorance.

WM: (Laughter)

FH: Which, you see, throws it out the window right there because it is an asinine assumption, and it is the basic fallacy of Western man’s approach to living. Now, I’m not saying that we immediately drop this and adopt a vendetta…

WM: Although that might not be a bad idea.

FH: No, we need what I would call a science of wisdom.

WM: I think among the things that we need…and this is indicated to a certain extent in the novel…but, we need a clear distinction in our minds…the minds of Western man…between the ethical norm and the moral life. The moral life is subject to change, it is the law, etc. etc. etc., but the ethical norm are those things which we must do because they are the proper thing to do regardless of the law.

FH: They’re an abstract.

WM: They’re abstract … they are an abstract, and this conflict between the moral and the ethical norms we see obtaining in certain situations within “Dune”, as I recall…at least I could extrapolate…

FH: Yes, that’s correct. But the moral norm, as I saw in “Dune”, was something that is imposed upon people by their environment.

WM: Yes.

FH: I man, it’s as fixed as how many wives a man in his culture might be might be able to support and thereby have, or what possessions he can carry from one stopping place to another, and how this would control the moral law, the … that we build up in society. We see it in our society, for example, out of our nomadic background and herdsman background…we see all kinds of moral injunctions which grew out of that and which we accept today logically … I’m not trying to denigrate them…

WM: Yes.

FH: But we can trace it this way. Now this is where moral law comes from. Ethical law takes a step in another direction, and it says that I, the thinking animal, see that the logical consequences of these moral actions are such and so and maybe I’d better modify the moral law slightly by a higher ethical law…

WM: I find this that in one of the … or some of the internal conflicts which are bothering Paul, that the ethical norm which he sees as being one of say absolute rightness as opposed with the law of moral necessity, and these are clashing in him … these are tensions that work within Paul which cause him, I think, to have a depth of characterisation that you don’t normally find within the normal science fiction novel.

FH: You hit on, of course, the way the character of Paul was constructed. It was the conflict between absolutes and the necessity of the moment.

WM: Yes.

FH: And…

WM: It’s almost an existential necessity, incidentally, as I caught it…as I read it.

FH: That’s right; that’s absolutely right. Absolutely.

WM: (Laughter) Gee, thanks!

FH: You see, this is an exercise in showing up, you might say, the fallacy of absolutism.

WM: Even to be absolute about being non absolute, because Paul is bothered with that very problem.

FH: That’s right.

WM: How absolute can he be and yet…in his relationships with his subordinates; with Stilgar, for example, if he’s too absolute, he loses…you know…he gains…how did you put it in the novel?.. he saw … he sees the loss of a friend and the gain of a worshipper, almost. I…

FH: He gains…he loses a friend and gains a worshipper.

WM: A worshipper. Yes; and this kind of conflict: if he’s too absolute here and non absolute there or in the necessity…when the tribe tries to force upon Paul the apparent necessity for killing Stilgar and he has to talk the tribe out of one of their tribal rules in order...

FH: A moral…

WM: Yes, right.

FH: A moral rule.

WM: A moral rule.

FH: And you see how the moral rule was developed out of the necessities of their background.

WM: Yes. Exactly.

FH: And he was given them, then, an ethical rule.

WM: Yes, and yet this conflict is continual, within Paul, I think, and it makes, I think, for certain added dimensions in the novel that again the normal science fiction novel doe not have. Well, you began this, then, in ’53, and you began doing research and filling file folders with facts and extrapolating to the sand dune planet. Tell me further about the writing process itself.

FH: Well, this was the first book where I really started carefully applying these ideas about the building of a rhythm within a story.

WM: Would you define this a little bit more for me, please?

FH: I will. I’ll be specific about it and I can use an analogy, which is familiar to both of us, in poetry, but it is used only as an analogy…

WM: Ok.

FH: You know how you choose the word in a given poem to control the beat of a poem?

WM: Are you…

FH: The way…

WM: …familiar with Hopkins’ poem, “The Windhover?” If not, I’ll get it out for you later and show you how there is one word in there which absolutely controls the total poem.

FH: Yes; this happens in many poems.

WM: Many poems…

FH: Yes, and the poem that develops a certain fixed rhythm. Now by changing the phraseology, placement of words, you can change that rhythm; you can slow it down, you can speed it up. Well, there is an analogous thing in prose. I think this is quite easily defensible, that length of sentence, number one: modifying clauses…

WM: Variety of sentence structure, right.

FH: Variety of sentence structure…all these things control the pace of controlled reading or controlled…controlled…silent reading or oral…and I work orally, because I think that the language was spoken long before it was written, and I think that unconsciously we still accept it as an oral transmission.

WM: That’s something I’m going to have to try with my classes…reading parts of “Dune” aloud to them. I’ve done this … I do this as a standard device when I teach Joyce or Yeats or Eliot… I read great gobs of it aloud, in parts.

FH: Well, this was done deliberately to control that oral pace by the length of sentence, by the variety of sentence, by the words in the sentence, whether long convoluted words or short chopping words…

WM: Anglo-Saxon.

FH: Anglo-Saxon as against Latin.

WM: Latin.

FH: I controlled the pace, so I have several rhythms built into the story deliberately: one is a long-term rhythm…and we’ll get to the ending of the book in a minute. I…the ending is camp, high camp. Deliberately. And a number of people, interestingly, have seen it. I wanted to say…

WM: I found it sheer action, almost for the sake of action.

FH: Yes.

WM: And overly dramatic, maybe; and, you know, “in the future they will call us wives,” I said yeachch! almost. But you call it high camp. I hadn’t thought of it that way.

FH: Well, I wanted to turn the story around on itself, but in two very specific ways. And obviously you don’t limit the way it turns. If you do that…if you do one way that you know of..

WM: Sure…

FH: One, I was poking a little fun at the idea of the person who always sees things verbally and must write about them and record them, you know. The historicity of anything that happens, you see. You’re not living it, you’re recording it.

WM: Yes. This is what we’re doing right now.

FH: Yes. But we’re having a good…

WM

(to B): Say that again, please.

BH: The man who never sees anything except through his camera viewer. He sees the whole world, you see, in through that little square box.

FH: The view hunter.

WM: Right.

FH: Yes; so I wanted to kind of have a little snicker about this, you see, right at the end, and you deducted that sheer action treatment there. And you see how that this does what I’m describing…

WM: Yes. And that is a limited point of view, actually; the sheer action treatment…

FH: Yes. That’s right. And also by making it a man to man battle at that point between Paul, who is an extremely complex character, and this almost stick figure, black, you see…

WM: Who is sort of, in many ways, Paul’s counterpart.

FH: Exactly.

WM: He’s a foil, in the classic sense of the word.

FH: A foil in the classic sense, in other places.

WM: Yes. Right.

FH: But at this point he becomes that…that impossible thing, that non-existent thing, the absolute evil.

WM: Yes.

FH: You see, and so we turn the whole thing whirling backward through the story. There was another thing there, in the pacing of the story, very slow at the beginning. It’s a coital rhythm all the way through the story.

WM: It’s a what?

FH: Coital rhythm.

WM: OK.

FH: Very slow pace, increasing all the way through, and when you get to the ending of it, I chopped it at a non breaking point, so that the person reading the story skids out of the story, trailing bits of it with him. On this I know I was successful, because people come to me and say they want more and…

WM: I have said this to my classes that, in many ways as satisfying as “Dune” is, I find it unsatisfying because there are so many unanswered questions; you don’t tie up the loose ends of, say, Paul’s sister, unless you read…what is it?.. a “Huntress of a Thousand Worlds” (Laughter)…that marvellous little…little footnote of Princess Alia. But… or several other things. The whole question of the Spacing Guild itself and how it got to be the way it was is handled very…you know…

FH: Well, let’s…let’s examine something, as far as fiction in general is concerned…

WM: All right.

FH: Now there are other reasons why stories are remembered, and I’m talking about story in the classic sense of the knights who goes from castle to castle to earn his meal.

WM: All right.

FH: Entertainment…

WM: Sure.

FH: The stories that are remembered are the ones that strike sparks from your mind, one way or another. It’s like a grinding wheel. They touch you and sparks fly.

WM: Would this be something like the Miller’s tale of Chaucer or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, if you please?

FH: Yes, indeed.

WM: Or, well, we could adduce thousands of other examples up to, say, Treasure Island or what you will. There’s sparks there.

FH: OK.

WM: I understand your term.

FH: Now we all have stories that we go on with after we finish reading them. As children, we can remember playing Treasure Island…

WM: Or playing Tom Sawyer…

FH: Or Tom Sawyer…any of these. We remember playing these. The story stayed with us…the characters and their conflicts, their joys, their play all stayed with us.

WM: And it enkindled sparks in our own imagination, so that we were then active in creative play.

FH: That’s exactly right! We went on and told the story ourself…

WM: Yes.

FH: Now, I deliberately did this in “Dune” for that purpose. I want the person to go on and construct for himself all of these marvellous flights of fantasy and imagination. I want him to…you see, you haven’t had the Spacing Guild explained completely…just enough so that you know its existence. Now with lots of people, they’ve got to complete this.

WM: Yes.

FH: So they build it up in their own minds. Now this is right out of the story, though, you see…

WM: Yes. Or the whole…

FH: The sparks have flown.

WM: Bene (Bené) Gesserit, you pronounce it?

FH: Bene (Benny) Gesserit, yes.

WM: Bene Gesserit. The...their whole mystique and so on is relatively unexplained. Why do they want the Kwisatz Haderach in the first place? You see, is relatively, at the time…

FH: The name of the game is power.

WM: Yes, and they want power. That…that explains it to a certain extent but…

FH: They want power in a specific way. You know, I’ve always been amazed by the statement or by the label of psychological warfare. There can be no such thing as psychological warfare…if you develop a psychological weapon sufficiently that it is destructive to any potential enemy, it will destroy you with the enemy…it’s a two-edged sword without a handle, and if you grab it hard enough to wield it, you’re going to…

WM: It’s self destructive.

FH: Yes.

WM: So we could have a variation of the Lord Acton notion: power corrupts both the user and the receiver of the power, both absolutely...

FH: Right. Acton saw it.

WM: How interesting. I hadn’t thought of the…who power corrupts…

FH: Now the Bene Gesserit see this. You see how they keep themselves in the background.

WM: Yes, that’s true.

FH: They want a user of power they can control.

WM: I see…with safety to them.

FH: That’s right. It’s a safety device, you see, and I say this in several ways, not in this way, not in this blatant, you know, way, but implying it with all of its permutations, because there’s much more to this. We could go on for several hours discussing this aspect of it.

WM: Yes. The whole attitude of Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam, for example…Helen Gaius Mohiam...yes, I see how we could…various aspects of it…well, I-I’d like to…I’d like to examine this a little bit further in some of the religious constructs.

FH: Before we got into that…

WM: OK.

FH: Let me tell you something. I was up at Sonoma State last month, talked to a class up there, and the question that seemed to attract the most attention from the class…somebody asked back there, what’s all this nonsense about controlling people with voice?

WM: (Laughter)

FH: There seemed to be a lot of agreement with this point of view, that it’s impossible to do this. And so I said, we do it all the time.

WM: Of course we do!

FH: And it’s amazing to me that anybody could even begin to question this as a fact of our existence. And they couldn’t see it, so I said, well, I’ll give you an example. I’m going to describe a man to you. You know this man. And I’m going to give you a task of controlling him by voice after I’ve described him and after you recognise him. I said, this is a man who was in World War I as sergeant, came home from World War I to his small town in the mid-west, married his childhood sweetheart and went into his father’s business, raised two children, who he didn’t understand…and they don’t understand him…He joined the VFW and the legion, went on every picnic, every convention, lived by the double standard (he thought). Now on the phone, strictly by voice, I want you to make him mad.

ALL: (Laughter)

WM: Oink! Oink! Oink!

FH: Any one of a hundred thousand variations.

WM: Yes, certainly, certainly.

FH: Simplest thing in the world. Now what we’re saying here is that…see, I-I’ve drawn a gross caricature.

WM: Of course!

FH: But, we’re saying that if you know the individual well enough, if you know the subtitles of his strengths and weaknesses, that merely by the way you cast your voice, by the words you select…

WM: By the intonations…

FH: Whatever…

WM: Whatever.

FH: Yes, right. You can control him. Now if you can do it in a gross way, obviously with refinement you can do it in much more subtle fashion, and it’s done all the time in politics.

WM: And this is one of the techniques, incidentally, that science fiction, I think, does. It takes a possibility or something that does actually exist today and extrapolates from that, perhaps refines it, makes it more specific.

FH: The science of control by voice.

WM: Yes. Exactly.

BH: Isn’t there a word in semantics where these messages that we get across…what was?..

FH: Metamessage.

BH: Metamessage.

WM: Metamessage.

FH: It’s a well recognised thing in semantics and you see it…Hayakawa uses the example: you’re talking, you’ve met somebody for the fist time, maybe at a business meeting in a convention, and you get acquainted and you’re speaking. You exchange views and at the end of it you say, “We must get together for lunch sometime.” Now, under one example of this, the fellow will call you the next week or you’ll call him and you will get together for lunch, and hen knows he’s supposed to call you and make this luncheon date. Under the other example of this same phrase, he knows that this luncheon date. Under the other example of this same phrase, he know that this is “Goodbye, I don’t care to talk to you any more.” But it’s the same phrase.

BH: And they’re both polite.

FH: They’re both polite.

WM: Oh, yes.

FH: And this is the metamessage.

WM: Yes…the hidden message underneath the message, and so on…

FH: Yes.

WM: Yes, I can understand that. Well, I had no trouble understanding the question of the voice, as I read the novel, because, among the other things which the novel gave to me, was the whole question of communication and how we communicate on multiple levels, whether it be Paul communicating by shedding a tear…that’s an act of communication on a very profound level…to the Fremen, whether communication of the voice or communication by sword or communication by a dozen different ways that we all do constantly as we’re doing in this room right now. See, you’re communicating by the …in one sense by the way you’re both watching me as I speak and watching Frank and watching the recorder and watching what you are doing with your hands. There are all sorts of communications, just as I’m communicating and you are in a dozen hundreds of hidden different ways. I had no problem with that in the novel and I thought that it was rather well done. Let me go off on another parenthesis here. Did you ever read the novel “Nostromo” by Conrad?

FH: No.

WM: I was reminded very much as I read “Dune” for the first time of the reaction that I had when I first read “Nostromo”. I think that “Nostromo” is one of…if probably Conrad’s greatest novel…it’s certainly his most artistic achievement as well as his most profound…and I found myself thinking about “Nostromo” as I read “Dune”.

FH: Now I’m going to have to read it. (Laughter)

WM: Well, I mean that’s very high praise, because “Nostromo” is ultimately the creation of an entire universe. It is the country of Casteguana in Central America. There is one thing in Central…in this country of Casteguana that influences everybody, and it is the presence of a gigantic silver mine. And the silver corrupts everybody in the country in one way or another. It corrupts the British people who are running the silver mine; it corrupts the incorruptible “Nostromo”, our man, who is the soft of a folk hero of the thing; it corrupts everybody; it totally controls the country; and in watching how these people interrelate to the problem of the silver mine and the parallels there, you see, between “Dune” and “Nostromo”, to me, as I read it as a Professor of English, were very strong. This is one of the things I object to in among my own compatriots…that they are unable to see that something like “Nostromo” is in a very real sense a type of science fiction. We have created a mythical country, based upon reality, where the people react in certain ways to things which we would react to in other ways. But it’s said over here, just as the Fremen react to…

FH: Oh, yes, it’s my contention that especially in “Dune”…and “Dune” is an exposition of this point that man himself is going to change. We have changed, but our changes…the actual basic change is a gradual climb. Now I don’t see this as progress, I see it as a sort of entropy and as a growth of complexity. But that this is such slow process…that in thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years we would still recognise the emotions, the reactions, all of these things and given any set of forces which you can delineate: the silver mine, the geriatric spice, the existence of certain hard lines of power control and communication…

WM: As perhaps oversimplified by, say, the Harkonnens versus the Atreides.

FH: Yes.