Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

KJA: ... and, an amazing thing happened right after Brian and I started talking about the project, because nobody knew where Frank Herbert was going with it, um, we discovered Frank's final outline for Dune 7.

SB: Hmm.

KJA: So, we did get the road map. Brian, you wanna talk a little bit more on that ...

BH: Yeah, it's just a three-page, er, maybe two-and-a-half page outline, but it's er ... it's... it's concise, we've, um ... we've ... we've added a lot, a lot to it, I mean, it was, it was more of a ... an inspiration for us in kind of a general concept, than a detailed scene-by-scene outline, so Kevin and I have, have fleshed out the characters and the scenes and, ... um, and I think, er, oh a few weeks later, I started rummaging around in my storage and I ... and I found additional general er, Dune ... Dune notes of my father's that have really helped us too. So, it was kind of amazing to have these things appear right after Kevin and I met.

[Some comments from BH about his mother looking out for them, then ... ]

SB: So, you all had started making plans and then, essentially you found, a roadmap?

[KJA and BH talk over each other, then ...]

BH: Well, I wouldn't say we found a roadmap, I'd say we found ... clues.

SB: Okay.

BH: It's been more clues than ... than precise roadmaps.

SB: I was curious, because you had written about this in The Road to Dune, about having found this. I was always curious how detailed an outline it was, and how much room it gave you for improvisation, shall we say?

[KJA takes a breath, but BH answers ahead of him]

BH: No, it wasn't that detailed, it was more general.

SB: Got it.

KJA: But it answered the questions that we needed to have answered, I mean, there's ... there's some big mysteries that's [sic] left at the end of Chapter House Dune and Frank Herbert could say more in a sentence than some people can say in chapters, so we were able to find ... what we had to do in order to write the rest of the story, and in fact it's ... it was such a huge story that was kind of sketched out in this outline, that it took us, er, either one 1500-page book to tell it, or two much smaller, 700-page books. So that's why Hunters of Dune is the first half of the grand climax.

SB: Right.

Hunchback Jack wrote:

Frank Herbert could say more in a sentence than some people can say in chapters

HBJ wrote:

it was such a huge story that was kind of sketched out in this outline, that it took us, er, either one 1500-page book to tell it, or two much smaller, 700-page books. So that's why Hunters of Dune is the first half of the grand climax.

[BH:]Frank Herbert was a teacher to me. Both Bill Ransom and I are the only two writers who have actually sat side-by-side with Frank Herbert as, - basically Bill and I were students - as we worked on books with him. But, Kevin and I have evolved into - in fact, we did this pretty early, we recognized what our different strengths were - our writing style, our syntax and all that, is fairly similar, which is helpful, but our strengths are different. And so for all the books except for one - and I'll just leave that one to the fans to guess - um, Kevin and I actually played to our strengths on the first draft. So I would write the Bene Gesserit chapters and Kevin would write more action- and science-oriented chapters.

SB: (paraphrasing; it's a long question) At what point did you realize that the old man and woman from CH:D were Omnius and Erasmus?

BH: Well, this is where ... Omnius and Erasmus are actually ... characters that Kevin and I created. They were not based on any notes that we found of Frank Herbert's at all. But we combined those two characters that we created, that we ... and, these are concepts, it was a story concept that we threaded in, knowing we were heading for Hunters of Dune and Sandworms. And we combined what we added ... our own concept to Frank Herbert's overview. And Frank Herbert's overview, then, is where we immersed these two characters.

KJA: Well, and Frank Herbert's ... the outline, and the .. the roadmap ... or the clues that he gave us ... told us basically the origin of the old man and the old woman, and where ... that it did tie all the way back to the Butlerian Jihad and that it did ... connect this whole vast story arc and epic history that he had come up with. Which is kind of one of the reasons why we had to do the Butlerian Jihad books before we could go all the way to Hunters and Sandworms, because we needed to lay this whole foundation. Now, that's one of the differences between our writing style and Frank Herbert's writing style is, he often left a lot of things ... unsaid, he put them kind of in the background, between the lines, and in fact, in Heretics of Dune, the planet Earth - I mean, the planet Arrakis is, is charred and basically destroyed, and all the life on it is supposedly killed. And he does that in-between chapters. He doesn't show it. And Brian and I, our writing style is kind of a more ... we want to show you things and do it onstage instead of offstage, and so, whereas Frank Herbert, if he had been around to write Dune 7, which, frankly, Brian and I would rather he had stayed around to write it so that we could read it like new fans instead of writing it. But he would have left a lot of the details in the background, and up to his readers to put together. And ... we kind of like to show everything instead. And that's why we wanted to build this whole history, always knowing where it was going.

Lisan Al-Gaib wrote:I think two pages of Frank's outline will tell us more than 700 pages from them.

SB: When I read Chapter House 20 years ago, and especially when I read Hunters, I was reminded that your parents were a team, they were a partnership and they'd fashioned this universe together. And on the page you have an elderly couple, and they're seemingly omnipotent at times, they're watching over this universe from a remote vantage point. I couldn't help thinking of your parents doing the same thing - watching events in the Dune universe unfold.

BH: Well, I'll just add one more element to that, that they both loved to work in the garden. And I guess you could say that their stories were ... were the plants and flowers that they were nurturing, but ... I think that my Dad, when he created characters, he always took elements of various people and put them into it. But, that ... that could have been part of it, but I would say that would be a subconscious element to it. That's an interesting observation, I like that.

BH jokes with KJA about stealing the idea from SB. SB laughs.

KJA: I hadn't noticed that myself. I kind of had a chill when Scott just mentioned it, I thought, "Oh, that's so obvious, how come I didn't see that before?"