Introduction
SANDS AND STORIES
Frank Herbert’s original Dune is one of the first truly epic science fiction novels ever published in scope, theme, cast of characters—and in its sheer length.
He originally published the novel in three separate parts—Book I “Dune,” Book II “Muad’Dib,” and Book III “The Prophet”—and at around two hundred thousand words it was a massive novel for the time, significantly longer than the average SF book, and considered unmarketable by Frank Herbert’s agent and every publisher with the exception of one, Chilton Books.
Fortunately, that mindset has changed over time.
In the quarter century that we have been working together in the Dune universe, each Brian Herbert–Kevin J. Anderson novel has also been substantial in length, ranging from 130,000 to 240,000 words.
Over the course of building these complex epics with huge casts of characters, we’ve occasionally been intrigued by smaller ideas, interesting spotlights on tangential events, or vignettes that did not find a place inside the core novels. Sometimes we wanted to explore an interesting peripheral character or a loose story thread that would help flesh out the larger epic that now spans more than twenty novels.
The smaller stories are grains of sand, rather than towering dunes. But they still remain important elements in the Dune universe.
The first Dune short story we ever wrote together, in the late 1990s, was inspired by a close reading of a brief account in Dune about the battle of Arrakeen. During the violent overthrow of House Atreides, Baron Harkonnen uses archaic artillery weapons to blast at caves in the Shield Wall, where a group of Atreides soldiers had holed up. “The guns nibbled at the caves where the Duke’s fighting men had retreated for a last-ditch stand. Slowly measured bites of orange glare, showers of rock and dust in the brief illumination—and the Duke’s men were being sealed off to die by starvation, caught like animals in their burrows.”
Our story “A Whisper of Caladan Seas” explores what happened to those doomed soldiers entombed in caves on a desert world far from their beloved oceans. What did they think about in their last moments? How did they hold themselves together while their air and water slowly ran out? That story was published in Amazing Stories magazine and is included in the collection Tales of Dune.
In our numerous rereads of the original novel, we kept finding intriguing side trips, questions that deserved to be answered in individual stories of their own.
For instance: ancient Shadout Mapes, the quiet, observant, and ultimately rebellious housekeeper in the Arrakeen Residency, who endured years and years of Harkonnen rule. Her long and eventful life is only briefly hinted at in her scenes in Dune, before she is murdered. We decided to tell part of her backstory, the origin of this brave Fremen woman and how she resisted Harkonnen rule through both violent and subtle means. We begin this new collection of stories with “The Edge of a Crysknife.”
During the Battle of Arrakeen, after the Harkonnens have effectively conquered the city, Duke Leto has been captured and the Baron gloats over what he will do to his archenemy. One grim Sardaukar colonel bashar comes to the Baron and insists on the Emperor’s orders that Duke Leto is to be treated with honor. “My Emperor has charged me to make certain his royal cousin dies cleanly without agony.… I’m to report to my Emperor what I see with my own eyes.” This Sardaukar is quite determined to ensure that the Duke does not suffer any more than necessary.
We wondered about that Sardaukar officer’s connection to Leto, his possible past experience with House Atreides. We also wanted to tell, for the first time ever, the background of the fearsome Sardaukar in a story of a young refugee boy inducted into the Sardaukar corps and trained to become a ruthless killer. Our tale about that, “Blood of the Sardaukar,” is the second story in this book.
As the seeds of our story after that, a couple of years pass in Dune after Paul falls in among the Fremen and gradually becomes the legendary Muad’Dib. During that time, the troubadour-warrior Gurney Halleck is off stage—making his home, joining a band of smugglers, working with them in small guerilla operations against the hated Harkonnens. What adventures a man like Gurney Halleck must have had! We decided to explore those “lost years” in “The Waters of Kanly,” the third story in this collection.
Finally, traveling to a different period ten thousand years earlier for our fourth story, we visited the tumultuous events not long after the end of the Butlerian Jihad, when the thinking machines had been overthrown and the Imperium was just being formed. The Corrino dynasty began to establish itself as the rulers of all humanity. In that time, the ruthless blood feud between House Atreides and House Harkonnen had already worked its way into the fabric of the Landsraad.
The wounds between Harkonnen and Atreides grow ever deeper. The last story in this collection, “Imperial Court”—set a few years after the end of Navigators of Dune—shows one more twist of that knife, and clears the way for an entirely new part of Dune history.
Sands of Dune collects these four tales, spanning Frank Herbert’s Dune universe of thousands of years and a million worlds. This vast canvas has given us plenty of room and the creative freedom to tell a wide range of stories.
—Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
I
Blood covered her hands, and when it dried in the hot desert air, Mapes regretted the waste of water. But that couldn’t be helped—these men needed to die. They were Harkonnens.
In the heat of the deep desert, a huge spice harvester throbbed and thrummed as enormous treads crawled along the crest of a dune. Intake machinery chewed up the sand and digested the powder through a complex interplay of centrifuges and electromagnetic separators. The harvester vomited out a cloud of exhaust dust, sand, and debris that settled onto the disturbed dunes behind the moving machine, while the bins filled up with the rare spice melange.
The droning operation sent pulsing vibrations beneath the desert, sure to call a sandworm … and very soon. The noise also drowned out the sounds of Fremen violence inside the great machine.
In the operations bridge of the moving factory, another Harkonnen worker tried to flee, but a Fremen death-commando, a Fedaykin, ran after him. Disguised in a grimy shipsuit, the attacker had predatory and sure movements, not at all like the morose sand crew the Harkonnens had hired.
Though small and brown-skinned, young Mapes had fit in among the regular workers, as had her companions, but she didn’t laugh or joke with the sand crew, didn’t try to make friends with people she knew she would have to kill. Nevertheless, she and her companions were hired by uninquisitive company bosses. Too many crews had been lost as it was, some through desertion, others through accidents and catastrophic loss in the field. Mapes knew that part of those losses were intentional—thanks to freedom fighters like herself.
Her companion Ahar, a muscular man of few words but great dedication, slammed the doomed worker against a metal bulkhead and raised his crysknife—a milky crystalline blade ground from the discarded tooth of a giant worm—and drove the point deep into the man’s throat. The victim gurgled, but did not scream as he slid to the deck. Ahar had used an instinctive Fremen killing blow, one that brought quick and silent death, but wasted no more blood than was necessary.
Alas, today the commandos would not reclaim the water of these victims for the tribe. They had to kill the crew, destroy the spice harvester, and escape like dust devils in the wind. There was no time.
Mapes gripped her own knife, a razor-sharp weapon made of simple plasteel. Possessing a crysknife was a sacred honor, and her comrades in the sietch had not yet deemed her worthy of one, though she had already participated in more than a dozen raids.
Mapes was a firebrand, but Fremen women did not usually join the Fedaykin, the special death commando squads that were historically formed to avenge particular wrongs—and the very existence of these offworld oppressors on Dune was wrong. The Fedaykin had accepted Mapes in part because of her skill and tenacity, but primarily due to her legendary mother. Some saw Mapes as a new Safia, and they were willing to let her prove herself.
Now, the young woman pursued her second victim inside the noisy operations bridge. Five workers lay dead already, smearing the dusty metal of the deck with their blood. Although she was smaller than her target, the spice worker was afraid. She collided with him and knocked him against the bank of controls. He defended himself like one who had never been in a fight before. He flailed his hands to drive her off, and she slashed open his palm with the edge of her knife. He gasped and doubled over, more in horror than in pain.
“Why? Why are you doing this?” he bleated. “We paid your wages! We just harvest the spice.”
“You are Harkonnens,” she said. “All Harkonnens must die.”
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