Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert was an American science fiction author best known for Dune, the 1965 novel widely regarded as one of the most influential works in the genre's history and the bestselling science fiction novel of all time. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune wove together ecology, religion, politics, and mysticism into a dense, richly imagined epic following Paul Atreides' rise amid interstellar feudal intrigue and the fight over the planet's only source of the universe's most valuable resource, the spice melange. Herbert, who had worked as a journalist and had a longstanding personal interest in ecology and desert environments, spent years researching before writing the novel, and its emphasis on environmental systems thinking was unusual for science fiction at the time. Herbert expanded Dune into a six-novel series, continuing the saga's political and religious themes across thousands of years of future history, including Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune. Dune was adapted into a 1984 David Lynch film, several television miniseries, and most recently a critically and commercially successful two-part film series directed by Denis Villeneuve beginning in 2021, which introduced the saga to a new generation. New readers should start with Dune itself. Herbert died in 1986; his son Brian Herbert has since continued the saga with numerous prequel and sequel novels co-written with Kevin J. Anderson.