Frank Herbert Books in Order

About Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert spent six years writing Dune, and the novel was rejected by more than twenty publishers before Chilton Books — a publisher known primarily for car manuals — accepted it in 1965. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and became the best-selling science fiction novel ever written. Herbert was an amateur ecologist, a student of the occult, a journalist, and a systems thinker, and Dune is less a space opera than a meditation on power, religion, ecology, and how prophets are manufactured. The planet Arrakis — where the Fremen have adapted to a desert world that produces the universe's most valuable substance — is one of the most completely realised secondary worlds in fiction.

Herbert spent the rest of his writing life expanding and complicating the Dune universe, and the sequels become progressively stranger, more philosophical, and more willing to challenge the heroic mythology he constructed in the first book. Dune Messiah (1969) actively deconstructs Paul Atreides as a hero; God Emperor of Dune (1981) skips 3,500 years forward in time and is narrated by a man who is 90% sandworm. Herbert himself cautioned readers that Dune is not about admiring Paul Atreides — it is about the dangers of charismatic leadership. His son Brian Herbert and co-author Kevin J. Anderson have since written numerous prequels and sequels, which are generally enjoyed by fans but are not considered canon by most readers.