Brian Herbert

Brian Herbert, the author of numerous novels and short stories, has been critically acclaimed by leading reviewers in the United States and around the world. The eldest son of science fiction superstar Frank Herbert, Brian moved his home twenty-three times before graduating from high school.

Finances were tight in those days, as his father (with success still years away) worked on and off as a newspaperman and sometimes solely as a writer, neither of which brought in enough money to support a family of three children, including Brian, his younger brother, Bruce, and their older sister, Penny.

Life was never dull, however. An impulsive, restless man, Frank Herbert constantly sought out new opportunities and fresh adventures. This included two writing sojourns with his family to Mexico, including one with fantasy author Jack Vance, and another in an old Cadillac LaSalle hearse—the family car.

An honor student, Brian was skipped ahead, so that he graduated from high school at the age of 16. He married at a young age as well, and while a full-time student at UC Berkeley (where he received a BA in Sociology), he worked in order to support his wife, Jan, and their first daughter, Julie. The marriage has been going strong for more than three decades and has produced three daughters.

Brian has been involved in a wide variety of professions and endeavors, including work as an author, an editor, a business manager, an inventor of board games, and a creative consultant for both television and collectible card games. He did not begin his writing career until he was nearly thirty years old; prior to that he worked as an insurance underwriter and agent, an award-winning encyclopedia salesman, a waiter, a busboy, a maid (not a typo), and a printer. He and his wife once owned a double-decker London bus, which they converted into an unusual gift shop. Brian also operated a mail-order record and tape business, in which he sold "golden oldies" music to remote regions of the world, including the Australian outback.

Brian Herbert's first two books were humor collections, Incredible Insurance Claims and Classic Comebacks. After that, a steady stream of novels ensued, including Sidney's Comet; The Garbage Chronicles; Sudanna, Sudanna; Man of Two Worlds, with Frank Herbert; Prisoners of Arionn; The Race for God, a preliminary Nebula nominee in 1990; Memorymakers, with Marie Landis; and Blood on the Sun, also with Marie Landis. He has also edited The Notebooks of Frank Herbert's Dune and Songs of Muad'Dib.

When Brian was in his late twenties and early thirties he began to grow closer to his father, who was a complex, enigmatic man. Brian's efforts to unravel the intriguing mysteries of his father began with a detailed journal that Brian maintained for years, chronicling the fascinating events of the Herbert family—a document which ultimately included the tragic deaths of his mother and father, and which he expanded into a comprehensive biography of Frank Herbert. Tor Books published this work, entitled DREAMER OF DUNE in April 2003. The quest to understand one's father—which Joseph Campbell has described as one of the epic hero journeys of mankind—continued as Brian studied the entire six-volume Dune series and created a massive Dune Concordance. This would prove to be an invaluable reference book during the writing of additional Dune books in the three-volume Prelude to Dune series, which Brian undertook with Kevin J. Anderson in 1998, and with the publication of the new Legends of Dune series books, DUNE: THE BUTLERIAN JIHAD (Tor; September 2002), DUNE: THE MACHINE CRUSADE (Tor, September 2003), and DUNE: THE BATTLE OF CORRIN (Tor, on-sale: August 17, 2004).