--Michele Rosen
How much of the prequel is based on your father's notes?
It's such a mixture. The plot was not laid out--what we had were clues. We also found notes on some of the scenes of the first meeting of Jessica and Leto, and we were able to incorporate them. We also had the appendix to Dune, which is pretty comprehensive.
Why do you think your father put his notes (for Dune 7) in a safe deposit box and didn't tell anyone?
He was just being careful. I used to tell Dad to be very careful with his manuscripts. I told him to always keep backup copies and I got him to use a fire safe.
Do you plan to work with Kevin to write Dune 7?
We may do one more novel after this trilogy, maybe Paul's youth. Then we'd go back to the Butlerian Jihad, then build up to the grand finale.
How did your father come up with the idea of Dune?
Back in the 1950s, Dad had published one novel, The Dragon and the Sea (which was republished as Under Pressure and again as 21st Century Sub). Aside from that one novel and a few short stories back in the 50s, he really didn't have much success.
He tried to write mainstream stories for magazines. But he would write things that just didn't fit at all for Readers Digest or the Saturday Evening Post.
He intended to do an article about Florence, Oregon where there are impressive dunes. There was an experiment to plant grasses on the dunes to prevent them from encroaching on the highway. The article was going to be called 'They Stopped the Moving Sands.'
While in a small plane flying over the dunes, he had a vision of a messianic leader like Lawrence of Arabia, and he started taking notes. Very quickly, he realized he had something that was too big for a magazine article. It took him five years (from 1958 to 1963) to write the novel.
More than 20 publishers turned it down. One publisher said, "I may be making the biggest mistake in my career in turning this novel down."
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