Dreamer of Dune

The Biography of Frank Herbert

By: Brian Herbert

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Everyone knows Frank Herbert’s Dune.

This amazing and complex epic, combining politics, religion, human evolution, and ecology, has captured the imagination of generations of readers. One of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, winning awards, selling millions of copies around the world. In the prophetic year of 1984, Dune was made into a motion picture directed by David Lynch, and it has recently been produced as a three-part miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel. Though he is best remembered for Dune, Frank Herbert was the author of more than twenty books at the time of his tragic death in 1986, including such classic novels as The Green Brain, The Santaroga Barrier, The White Plague, and Dosadi Experiment.

Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s eldest son, tells the provocative story of his father’s extraordinary life in this honest and loving chronicle. He has also brought to light all the events in Herbert’s life that would find their way into speculative fiction’s greatest epic.

From his early years in Tacoma, Washington, and his education at the University of Washington, Seattle, and in the Navy, through the years of trying his hand as a TV cameraman, radio commentator, reporter, and editor of several West Coast newspaper, to the difficult years of poverty while struggling to become a published writer, Herbert worked long and hard before finding success after the publication of Dune in 1965. Brian Herbert writes about these years with a truthful intensity that brings every facet of his father’s brilliant—and sometimes troubled—genius to full light.

Insightful and provocative, this absorbing biography offers Brian Herbert’s unique personal perspective on one of the most enigmatic and creative talents of our time.

©2003 Brian Herbert (P)2022 Scott Brick Productions, Inc.

WOW

Great Biography of a wonderful author. His legacy lives on with his son. Enjoyed listening to Scott read all the Dune books.

Dreamer of Dune

This biography is an interesting and yet disappointing audiobook. There’s a lot of minute detail about Frank Herbert’s life, but sadly not a lot of insight into his novels. Perhaps, this is an inescapable flaw in having the son as biographer. Especially irritating was the obsessive and excessive focus on the father’s flaws as a parent, while the son as biographer skims over the relationship of the father to his other two children.

A deeply moving real-life story

There is a technical distraction in this recording—the alternating timbres of the reader’s voice between different sets of recordings. This is very weak, and should be entirely re-recorded with a single microphone location. Otherwise, this is a deeply moving biography, as much the author’s autobiography as his father’s story. I’ll be relistening at some point.

very insightful

for being my first biological audio book, I was very impressed with the telling and amount of detail.
Scott Brick's performance was stellar as always.

must read for all Herbert enjoyers

7/10
it's more of a memoir than an autobiography, but still it contains loads of interesting information on influences and inspirations for most of Herbert's work, DUNE and most other books