Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.

(October 8, 1920 February 11, 1986) was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful American science fiction author. Though also a short story author, he is best known for his novels, most notably Dune and its five sequels. The Dune saga, set in the distant future and taking place over millennia, deals with themes such as human survival and evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics and power. Dune itself is the "bestselling science fiction novel of all time," and the series is widely considered to be among the classics in the genre. After his novel The Dragon in the Sea was published in 1957, Herbert took an airplane to Florence, Oregon, at the north edge of the Oregon Dunes where the United States Department of Agriculture was experimenting using poverty grasses to stabilize the damaging sand dunes, that could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways." Herbert's article on the dunes, "They Stopped the Moving Sands", was never completed (and only published decades later in The Road to Dune), but its research sparked Herbert's interest in ecology. Herbert spent the next five years researching, writing, and revising what would eventually become the novel Dune, which was serialized in Analog magazine from 1963 to 1965 as two shorter works, Dune World and The Prophet of Dune. Dune tells the story of young Paul Atreides as he and his family accept control of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the "spice" melange, the most important and valuable substance in the universe. The story explores the complex and multi-layered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, as the forces of the empire confront each other for control of Arrakis and its "spice".