Born in Tacoma, Washington, Frank Herbert is best known as the author of the Dune series. He worked for many years as a journalist for West Coast newspapers from San Francisco to Seattle and at a wide range of other jobs, of which his experiences in the U.S. Navy during World War II and as a lay analyst have had the greatest effect on his fiction. His first science-fiction story was published in 1952 and his first novel in 1956. The enormous success of Dune (1965) enabled him to write full time, and he has published fifteen novels to date (including one nonscience fiction) and three collections of short stories. An active member of the World Without War Council, Herbert has been a consultant on social and ecological problems to the Lincoln Foundation and to the governments of Vietnam and Pakistan and has developed a six-acre ecological demonstration project in...