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and my name is Ellen swaco and I'm the director of the campus event speakers program and I have just one announcement for you and that's that on Thursday May 9th at the Wadsworth theater campus events and public lectures and the
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undergraduate English Department we'll be bringing you Tom Wolf who um wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from our house to B from bow house to our house and the right stuff so you want to look
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for information about that in the Brewin now I'd like to introduce you to lean Sharp who is the i e president and member of the engineering
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[Applause] Society hello um as she said I'm lean sharp and I'm here to introduce Frank Herbert but before we do that we have a
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couple of announcements we have to do in conjunction for engineers week one tomorrow at noon in the court of Sciences we'll be having the egg drop off the top of Bolter Hall and the car races so if you'd like to come out and
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see that we'd all appreciate it and then Friday we'll be having the 16th annual paper airplane contest we'll fly those off of Bolter hall and then we'll also have a talent show that night and then
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tomorrow we're going to be also having um Brian Tilly talking about fiber optics on the third floor of acrian and Friday we'll be having a speaker on the space shuttle which will be in the second floor Lounge of
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acrian and then thirdly we'd like like to announce the winners in our drawing we had yesterday at the micro computer fair and the winner for the the computer
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is Ruth Yun y n she's computer science graduate and for the HP calculator is Fernando Bravo and then we have two winners for the um Intel puzzles which
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is Geral or excuse me Gerald lionelli and Todd selbo so if they're here or you know them tell them to come by 4,800 Bolter Hall to come claim their prizes and um that's it for the
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announcements for engineers week and I'd like to introduce Frank Herbert he's written many books 27 in all um probably most familiar with the Dune series he's also written things like the eyes of
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Heisenberg the white plague worlds of Frank Herbert and his newest book chapter house one it's another book in the Dune series when it was shipped three days later it was on the bestseller list of New York and it's
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number two in the Dalton and Walden books their bestseller lists um he currently resides in the Olympian peninsula in Washington and has a winter home in Hawaii and today what he'll be
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talking about is mythology of futurism and so afterwards we have microphones on either side if you have questions you like to ask him just use those and then after that we'll be having a book signing in the back and if
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you don't have the book you'd like to purchase it it's back there and and now I'd like to introduce Frank Herbert hi [Applause] gang this is water not
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gin how's that you hear me okay yeah okay I thought I would talk about the mythology of futurism because this is one of the things I've addressed for a great many years longer
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than I care to tell you about and I'd like to begin by telling you what got me started on it in 1933 Franklin Roosevelt appointed a
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group that you may have heard about it's called The Brain Trust the brain trust was supposed to lay out the course of hard science and
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social uh development for the next 25 years through 1958 right the interesting thing to me was to look at what they did not
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mention no transistors no atomic energy no antibiotics no faster than sound travel no space
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probes I mean the U2 preceded that you see and no World War II now it struck me that those things
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had some sort of influence on those 25 years so I started looking at prediction and I've been following it very carefully ever
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since Herman Khan the late Herman Khan fascinated me because he was another one of these absolutist as Rosevelt was because by appointing the Brain Trust he was playing along with this mythology
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that you can lay out the future the whole idea of the future struck me as rather interesting because that's almost a presbyterian statement
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if it's the future it's already there and we're just approaching it it nothing's going to change it'll just unfold suddenly and there it'll
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be so the future is one of these great mythological statements that's buried in the language what I'm addressing is this whole idea of absolutes
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and your helplessness in the face of such overwhelming movements in mankind now we get overwhelmed occasionally but I think each of us has a
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future and lots of times individuals can have a tremendous influence on the futures of all of us I don't have to list the people from Michelangelo on just from that time to
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make this an important statement to you Einstein these people said they were almost on a one track they said hey this is this is fascinating and I'm going to
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study it and see what I can discover and this is the door I would like to open to you especially it's one of the reasons one of the major reasons I came here today because you are in
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engineering students now you're movers you take the substance of our universe and you do things with it now I've been playing that game for years because when I'm not
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writing books I'm experimenting with a dedicated word processor that we've been working on For Five Years I'm building uh with my own hands
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uh things to reduce the energy load of my house in the Northwest making uh solar collectors out of grab bag materials seconds in uh thermopane and
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beer cans was fun getting the materials together and these things work I made a methane collector out of uh uh truck inner tubes which wasn't well it was
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successful it uh allowed me to use the methane from poultry manure to singe them when we slaughtered them and put them down in the freezer which I called using everything about the pig including
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the squeal when I wrote dragon in the sea my preferred title was under pressure about uh submersible carriers for Liquid
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Cargo I experimented and made uh models found out how to how to get a hydrostatic balance with different cargos with oil and
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whatnot so that when I wrote the book I was speaking from personal knowledge I went down in a submarine at the dock they took me down they couldn't
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take it out in pitan but they could bet the duck side with ring ties submerge it to show me how it worked so I went down in a submarine I did all of these things
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because how we influence our surroundings the impact of human effort on the world around us is the most fascinating thing about our world to
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me I wrote The Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead may be dangerous to your
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health I mean I think the most dangerous president we've had or one of the most dangerous at least not because he was a bad guy but because people didn't question him one of the most dangerous presidents that we've had in this century was Jack
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Kennedy because people said yes sir Mr charismatic leader what will we do next and we wound up in Vietnam people don't realize that he was one of the major moving forces getting us into
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Vietnam because he locked us into a commitment there and I think probably the most valuable president of this
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century was Richard Nixon because he taught us to distrust government and he did it by example which is the best kind of teaching well anyway I wanted to do this
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thing about Messiah and charismatic leaders I mean why do 900 people go to Guyana and drink poison Kool-Aid why do the citizens of an entire nation most
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of the citizens anyway say seile and murder some million Jews and gypsies why do they not question their leaders okay I was going to do this book
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and I started researching a lot of things the research is oh boy that's the fun part anthropology comparative religions geology I spent six
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years preparing and in the middle of all of that I went down to a place on the coast of Oregon called Florence Oregon because I was supporting a very expensive writing habit by being a
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journalist I was going to do an article about the US Department of agriculture's project at Florence Oregon to control sandunes now sandunes are like slow motion waves they'll move across roads across
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highways they'll inundate whole plantations of forest but they do it slowly and I was flying an airplane over this experimental project this test
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station on the coast of Oregon leaning out the window taking P the desert of course is the Wilderness of the Bible and these and the desert the Wilderness is where a great many religions have
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originated and I started researching ecology how we inflict ourselves upon the planet well after 6 years of this marvelously interesting research I had
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the system loaded and I sat down to do a book the book as I conceived of it was the first three books there were one book in my head and I told my agent this
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and after he recovered from his heart attack he said do you think you could split it into three at least maybe four well I split it into three and I thought I was through with it
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except that I had created a character in the third one who would not leave my head now authors have a solution to that we can write them into a having done that I had opened Pandora's
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Box and I was having so much fun with it and I told people I would continue to write Dune books as long as they interested me and as long as they interested the readers and that's what I've been been
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doing I have been having fun with what I do which if I give you nothing else about what you do with your lives and these interesting things that you've
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learned in this excellent educational institution institution is a marvelous word find something that you like to do and even if you're supporting your
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habit by something that you don't like as well two together that's what I did by becoming a journalist remember that there's nothing at all
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wrong with saying that the Protestant ethic is full of it that it's all right to enjoy your work you don't have to fight your way
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out of bed every morning you can get up every morning eager to go do whatever it is you do have a love affair with your with your world and remember that you're not going
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to be able to predict every consequence of what you do there is so much what I do on that experimental Farm in the Northwest that what I'm doing the farm in the country where you
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go and become Absolut version of the homebuilt catch that you get into and sail off to a South Sea Island where Brown skinn Masons pour coconut juice in
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your mouth not to mention the sand crabs and the Flies and the other things that are down there mythology is a great beckoner it
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says come on come on it's great in here come on examine your mythologies examine your absolutist criteria question things I have the most
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fun when I'm writing questioning things that people do not question the assumptions that everybody knows are true I'm going to declare a
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heresy for you all science if you go back into its roots saying why do I believe this well I believe this because of these tests and
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this this proof well why do I believe this why did I set up this test why did I believe that proof all science goes back to something that we believe
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because we believe it we believe it because we believe it and we have no proof for it it's like a religion so when you dig into the roots of
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science a gray area at the bottom but it's like a balloon and the surface of word the computer science has given us I love this language the surface of the balloon is
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the interface with what we do not know inside the balloon as we blow into it is what we have proved okay but as we increase what we think we know we
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increase our exposure to what we do not know this is one of the inevitable laws of our universe but isn't it more interesting to live in a
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universe where there are unknowns to discover new lands to explore than to live in an absolute box where when you find the edge that's it
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baby no place to go from there I like the the fact that we cannot predict every I like the fact that we live in a universe where anything may
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happen because the alternative to me is a constricting dead end in my original conception of the first dune book those first three
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books I had Paul blind in the second book because to my way of thinking that was was the ultimate exploration of absolute
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prediction he did not need to see he knew what was going to happen he knew who was all around him without eyes now you think about that a minute I won't give you a full minute to think
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about it you'd start squirming in your seats but think you right now an absolute unvaried inen to you from this
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moment here in this room to the moment of your death I can't predict be an absolute utter bore your life would be instant replay you'd be sitting there now saying oh next he's going to say oh
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my God he's saying it and you would not be able to change a thing now this really States the fallacy that Herman Khan wanting to set our
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future in concrete I'm sorry about that and Roosevelt and others find it so difficult to face it is the unexpected the
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surprises that make the important differences in our lives even some of the nasty surprises now I said that I was going to give you about
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a half hour to ask questions because as far as I'm concerned this is not communication now I'm up here playing lecturer and you're down there playing
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audience and we each know the role don't we we've played it before we learned this very young we learn how to find out what that
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figure up there wants and then we regurgitate that for them I came on the fallacy of this before I get into the q&as I came on the fallacy of this one time when I was in the fourth grade 10
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years old I had a teacher who had been a teacher for a long time she was a large woman you know any know any women who have wear tight
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sleeves and and their flesh bulges out she was one of those and she wore these glasses that looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles and her class just bored the hell out of
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me I would read the book and I'd know the answers and so I'd come to class to throw spit wads and do other disruptive things and I was
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continually being asked to stay after school and she was one of these ruler users you know hold out your palm Wham she could have been a nun without any trouble at all
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anyway I had done something terrible in my class I don't know what it was but she brought me up finally to sit beside her desk and she had a chair beside her desk now toquam Ma I think designed this
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setup the chair sat so that my knees were exposed Beyond the Edge of her desk and she sat right there correcting papers
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forever now an imaginative 10 I don't know what to do to you and your imagination can construct a lot of things that she will do to you including the Boston a I was
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terrified and I sat there and I sat there sweating it out not able to utter a word and finally she was had a platform in her chair swiveled wheels on it and she wheeled over right in front
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of me and she was right there and she said I don't know what to do with you well I made an ultimate mistake right then
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because teachers go to special courses to learn how to deal with problem children and how not to lose their
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cool so I saidh are you mad at me I was practically crying she got all red in the face reached forward and grabbed my shoulders and she was shaking me pulling me up to those pop bottles and back saying I'm
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not mad I'm not mad I mean it doesn't take a genius to say that she's mad but what's coming out of her mouth disagrees with that so what I learned right there I
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didn't put it all together but I learned to Be watchful I learned that you don't pay as much attention to what people say as to what they
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do what they do is the real jungle Telegraph that tells you what they're really up to now it is that jungle Telegraph that
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is a main Le motif of my writing what's underground where does the word Yogen come from it means a disease or other
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difficulty created by the doctor or what is done to you in the name of the doctor why is it that we keep approaching the problem
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of hard drugs the same way even though we know the system doesn't work it never has and we know that at least 75% of the new users we have good good solid
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information on this from studies that have been made by SRI and others that at least 75% of the new users are not Joy Riders they're people turned on to the hard drugs by the
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existing addicts to build a market to support their own habits so why don't we look at it and say hey we're not going to really eliminate
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the problem but we may be able to reduce the impact on our society by taking the profit out of it only about 11 and a half% of the new users are Joy Riders the rest are
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created by medicine and other factors more than 75% are created by the system but we have a big bureaucracy and a big criminal system that supports itself on it with a
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lot of money it supports a big bureaucracy it has enough money on the criminal side to buy FBI agents I hope you all read the news and know this is true to buy whole strings of Border guards to
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buy the uh briefcases of envoys from foreign countries to buy the key to the police store
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room in New York City do you know what happened to the heroin in The French Connection it disappeared from the police stor room in New York City it just
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vanished isn't that amazing so if we take the profit out of it and turn it over to the public health service and say okay we know we're not going to solve the problem this way but we will at at least reduce the arena in
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which it occurs if we make it available at 50 cents a crack at a public health Serv right out of
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it then we have because most of the theft in New York City and other major cities right now supports the heroin and other hard drug the rug out from under the criminal Syndicate or a major
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element of the criminal criminal Syndicate but we have also done something else we have and who's not who's guilty and who's innocent in a different way and a lot of people have trouble with
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that we want to know who the goats are the sacrificial goats are but I'm suggesting to you that we could do this practically overnight when they did it in
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England what happened immediately was fascinating well the first thing was that the criminal Syndicate turned to Major robberies that's when that big train hold up occurred in
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England because we had taken a large part of their income away from them okay enough of these crazy ideas from a crazy science fiction writer Grand Canyon between us I wish
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we're not there I wish we were sitting in a room with a few beers and wrapping but we can't do that okay what's on your minds and ask me a question show me a hand what's this guy
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down here the Benny J in the book Dune yeah well we do it with cattle and dogs and the uh Aristocrats of our world have done it for
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centuries the question is do I think it's wrong to uh um meddle in the randomity of genetic selection I was making a point that
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unexpected things can happen I've made that point several times in different books uh that was that was what I was doing I know we're going to do these things we have done them in the past and
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we're going to do them again so I was just saying what happens what if which is the beautiful door that's open in science fiction why I write it there's lots of Elbow
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Room I was saying that the Benny Jester had been doing this for a long time they had this end in mind and they got something they did not expect do you see what I'm saying yeah
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okay any more questions there's another question right over here speak up so I can hear you well the mics are oh the the hold on this guy with the mic over here hi my name is Paul Twi I would like to know what inspired you to write the
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book Doom what what what inspired you to write Doom what inspir uh I wanted to treat with a treat an idea about how and how much do we contribute to the power
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they hold over us and as it is today the rest is history I decided I was going to write by the way when I was age eight how many of you in here want to write hey good
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come on in water's fine and the competition really don't forget about competition we're not in competition the more of us who are writing well the more people are going to read and the better it is for all of
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us Mr Herbert I'm on your right okay over there okay yeah as a major author of great creativity and insight you have gained the respect of millions yet gee watch out for my head
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it's coming up like a balloon I think it's going to go down in a sec yet you have chosen to cast token gay characters in a negative light the images that you present in your popular work Dune and
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its movie specifically can only I didn't do the movie you understand that can only promote bigotry and violence against lesbians and gay men and what what I was doing with the with the with
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the gay population there I was only saying one thing I was saying that that homosexuality is a natural occurrence in our society uh in your teens you're
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naturally this way and some people are Beyond and primitive societies have dealt with it in a different way than our society deals with it and lots of times we create the aberant gay and there are aberant gays just as there
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aberant other individuals by our social reactions to them and I just gave you an aberant gay in the in the Dune books but what I was
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also saying to you was that satom masochism sometimes is a part of this I can give you chapter and verse on that and that gays have a hard a much
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harder problem coming out of the social pressures than the rest of us do in many instances but I didn't have anything else in mind with this that that was what I was doing well I hope that in the
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fure that you portray in any books that you do write in the future do in fact responsibly represent lesbians and gays in a manner consistent with your non-lesbian non-gay characters well
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that's another thing I was saying is that gays have opted to not continue the species that's is [Applause] true
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now um yeah what it's a choice anybody can make I've made that choice with my new lady because there are enough of us already I mean I didn't uh I had three
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children uh and a 35- year marriage and my wife died I thought that was the end of it excuse me but haven't opted for anything sexual orientation is a natural part of our I didn't choose to be gay I
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just am gay of course that's what I'm saying a person doesn't a person doesn't choose it happens but it happens for a lot of reasons sometimes it happens for psychological reasons the way we are and
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secondly ien to know many gay people being openly gay gay people are not afraid to be open with me and most gay people have nothing against children most gay people even want their own children so what you just said well um
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it's a lot more difficult that is going to be a sensation hello Mr Herbert yeah on your left I'd like to thank you for the enjoyment you've given me through your books you're a really good author I
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enjoy it and I was wondering in your book Dune series the Benny gazer it seemed like parallel honored modre what would they're a kind of a wild offshoot
00:33:50
yeah but but much more rambunctious always but most of the time willing to take a back seat and be the king makers rather than to get up front and be the
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king which can have its bad points you know because we tend to treat uh people with power uh rather badly occasionally you see I think that there
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is a bad idea around in our world and that idea is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely I think what really happens is that
00:34:31
power attracts the corruptible and been reading the news out of Bon called the Kremlin the Pentagon I would make it a criminal
00:34:42
offense for any military officer to accept after retirement in fact to accept uh giving the fox the key to the chicken Coupe and of course we get
00:34:58
goldplated weapons and whatnot that are absolutely useless I can document I was a correspondent in Vietnam and risk my neck over there to learn it
00:35:09
firsthand um I can document that trying to gold plate the M16 cost us about 10 to 15,000 Li 10,000 to 15,000 lives in Vietnam of course Vietnam was a disaster
00:35:22
from word one but the military made all all kinds of egregious errors over there I was fascinated by the thing around West Morland because I hoped against hope
00:35:35
that he would never win that case not because I thought he was a liar but I know we were lied to over there I can document that and if West Morland didn't know it
00:35:47
that's I know the difficulties in adapting literature to the screen but I really felt cheated in the way they changed the ending for to okay let me give you a caps history of how that happened there's about 5 hours of Dune
00:36:01
on film The Distributors want a film of about 2 hours so they can show it more than once in a day and get their money and they put the arm on universal to cut it that much but now there's a
00:36:14
kind of a little underground movement to uh put all that film back in there and create a miniseries and if they do I will try again I tried before and failed I will try again to change the ending and get
00:36:30
that damn rainstorm out of there because this is Engineers week and we've had I'm sorry I'm having trouble hearing you um okay I just this is horse pucky as that's as I want to know what you thought about that because there's so much that we do that it's interesting
00:36:44
and useful things with the knowledge you have gained here and that's why I trying if you can elaborate on your um your experiments with a self-sufficient environment or as part of our social
00:36:56
glue I think it is dangerous everybody to go off and become their own little thing okay well um I think when I read your uh read your books you have a little they had a little um um note on
00:37:11
you in the back it said you're dealing with an energy selfic I mean soci that's right okay I was wondering if you could elaborate on that oh you want me to elaborate on what I did up there yeah exactly okay well we played with a
00:37:24
panamon gee I don't have to explain a panamon to this audience do we played with a panamon wind machine um and uh well I'm a pilot and
00:37:36
so we went back to what we've learned from aircraft design and redesigned the blades keeping in mind that we wanted something to be Stamped Out rather quickly the way they're stamping them
00:37:49
out over here right 10ft tall model uh on the roof of a uh uh Shop in atoria Oregon produces uh 7 1/2 horsepower in a 50 knot wind but the important thing is
00:38:02
it works in a 50 knot wind how many of you have seen this uh uh windmill Orchard over on the way to the desert yeah horizontal aess wind
00:38:14
machines they're a deadend street they have to be feathered out when you wind gets around 35 knots we need something that can be used in high winds ours is designed to operate in a 90 knot
00:38:26
wind and we patented it nobody seems to be interested in it yet but uh we're back redesigning it and improving it a
00:38:35
wrecked truck U Van for $150 our uh 10 to 20 times streets on a on a Backcountry Road all I had to do was phone down to the
00:38:51
Sheriff's the bureaucracy has taken over well that was one of the reasons I chose this small town to do this sort of thing we experimented with a duck pond duck manure is a great sealant for the bottom of
00:39:06
ponds and we created a culture in the pond that would grow lots of algae and it fed the Ducks about half their food so we raised ducks with about half the input
00:39:19
of purchased foods and they were quite healthy Ducks they tasted nice too canardo lauran from your own Pond well if you don't have fun doing
00:39:31
these things why do them that's what we did up there and we did it just before oil started to Skyrock that's what we did and that's what you can do that answer your
00:39:49
question yeah great okay yes I have a question about your career choices I think I read somewhere that you had once considered a career marine biology is this as a marine well no i' I'd been a
00:40:01
um I had an uncle who was one of the first aquaculturists in the Pacific Northwest he brought in oysters in a place called Henderson Cove
00:40:12
and he also used some Japanese exchange students from the University of Washington Fisheries Department during the summer to work for him and I went over there and they taught me what they knew about oyster
00:40:25
culture and I didn't think of this as a career to follow it was an interesting thing I did for a time uh what I almost became was a professional historian I debated that one
00:40:38
time that was a a possible career choice yes you are I don't know any beyond that probably not and is is Duncan I the noble savage of course in this on
00:40:55
this continent was the American Indian who did everything right not quite once the horse got in here things were very very different and
00:41:07
even without the horse the Indians probably would have wiped out the Buffalo before long because they had developed a system of of driving them off cliffs and taking what they
00:41:20
could so even primitive societies do not always make the best choices they operate without any real awareness
00:41:32
of how they wipe out their substance the sustenance that they depend on just the way are tied to each other Canadian links will kill off enough rabbits that the population drops dramatically the
00:41:46
lynx population drops the rabbit population comes up the lynx population comes up and it's just a sign curve so that's the kind of game I'm playing two questions okay over here
00:42:00
where I can see you uh hi Mr Herbert I'd like to start out by saying I've enjoyed your books very much uh you're supposed to if you don't if you don't enjoy them
00:42:12
I'm cheating you okay some books are not designed for pleasure though so uh in you got a lot of those here I would imagine in Dune uh there are some aspects of that book such as the
00:42:25
butlerian jihar and uh some of the conditions on Dune itself which uh prevents a kind of free reign of scientific knowledge and the
00:42:38
use of science uh most most science fiction has kind of a negative view of Science and Views it as kind of a a potential
00:42:50
monster anti- nature Force no it's a natural force I wanted I we're natural know your opinion on that yeah we're natural we're part of nature what we produce is part of nature it is the
00:43:03
interpretation of consequences that interest me anyway what happens when you do this uh you see I think that one of the most serious errors that we made as a
00:43:16
democracy was the creation of a civil service and it was sold to us on the basis of a lie the lie was that that was the only way to correct the excess of of the spoil system it was not the only way
00:43:30
but what it did was it took a greater and greater element of power out of the control of the voter it watered down your vote and every bureaucracy of this kind
00:43:48
in history and I have read my history carefully every such bureaucracy eventually becomes an aristocracy just as it has in the Soviet Union they have demonstrated the truth of what I'm telling
00:44:00
you they have developed an aristocratic bureaucracy over there what are the what are the tests of an aristocracy the aristocrats get all the perks H they don't have to stand in
00:44:13
lines to get their meat they have cars they have servants they have special dhas for their vacations but the ultimate test is do they pass the power along to their
00:44:26
children yeah they do it quite openly now and it's announced in Pravda we're a long way down that road in the United States we don't have to go down that road and I hope we
00:44:44
don't because I believe I really believe in power to the people I think if you put responsibility on people we rise to the occasion and I know a lot of closet
00:44:55
Aristocrats in our Society some calling themelves liberal and some calling themselves conservative who are fostering this bureaucratic
00:45:10
growth and it doesn't make a damn bitter difference whether it's a fascist bureaucracy a so-called capitalist or oligarchic bureaucracy or a communist or socialist
00:45:21
bureaucracy to the people looking up at the bottom of it they're identical when was the last time you were treated courteously by a bureaucrat they don't have to treat you
00:45:37
courteously you can't fire them you can't vote them out of office okay have I have I kind of skirted around and answered some of your question at least uh well I basically wanted to know
00:45:56
what your view on science itself on science itself okay on science uh I I speak to a lot of um political science audiences and I love to get in front of
00:46:09
them and ask them how many of you believe politics is a science this is a mythology of science science fiction really what most of us write is technological
00:46:24
fiction we say what will happen if this Tech technological Development coming out of science admittedly runs this course what happens to the society to individuals in the society my view of science is that it is
00:46:41
a natural outgrowth of man's curiosity and therefore it is natural it is the consequences of what we bring up that we have to deal with and it's very important extremely
00:46:56
important increasingly important that we start looking into how we interact as societies on one planet that's all we
00:47:09
have now I am not a hot gospel ecologist we got into these problems together we've got to get out of them together I don't believe in trying to find the guilty and saying get them and
00:47:23
put in a new gang if I had been born in my grandfather's time I would have made my grandfather's mistakes I just think it's nonsense
00:47:35
stupidity to make my grandfather's mistakes today that's my view of science thank [Applause] you uh in your book she stress
00:47:53
individual responsibility I'm I'm have difficulty hearing you can you get up in your book she stress individual responsibility and I was wondering what
00:48:04
you think we as a society can do to promote this since it doesn't exist really I don't think a society can do it I think individuals have to do it what do you think we as individuals can do
00:48:16
well you all can make choices you know we all have to make choices in what we perceive as good and evil I had to speak at a Jesuit university at their commen exercises not long ago I'll I'll give you the
00:48:30
speech I got up and I said you're all graduating today and you expect me to tell you what you will face out there in that big real world the only thing I'm going to tell
00:48:42
you is that if only one of you chooses to live by the golden rule this will be a better world and I sat down the Applause lasted longer than the speech I think they were applauding the shortness of the
00:48:59
speech but but you see if you do look at your fellow human beings as individuals with
00:49:10
feelings and Hangups the way you have some and say well if I can help you I will I'll try not to exacerbate your problems I won't always
00:49:29
succeed but that's my main goal then this is a better world but you have to make the choice individually and you have to make it all the time you can't make it once for the rest of your life you can be like some people are and
00:49:45
you say um uh well if I don't George Will I mean all that just makes two of you you see and you can each lean on each other and say I'm doing it because George does it George can say I'm doing it because you're doing
00:49:57
it so don't fall into that trap and yeah people will take advantage of you of you if you try to live this way but they hurt themselves more than they hurt
00:50:10
you they really do I'm happy with my life I have no trouble at all looking in the mirror every day most days anyway I make mistakes
00:50:24
but and shaving every morning I do shave so no beard now um it's just an ongoing commitment that you have to make and you have to do it individually and Society cannot do it
00:50:40
for you hi um concerning the I have two questions uh first concerning the 7eventh Dune book you're planning do you have uh plan to have it like go back in the history of the The Saga to you know
00:50:58
kind of explore the rise of the guild to do a prequel you mean yeah yeah that's it yeah I'm going to I'm going to do a short story or novet on this in the next year okay great and my second question is did uh Lucas ever pay off on that
00:51:11
dinner he owes you no Lucas has never admitted that uh they copied a lot of dun I'm not saying they did I'm just saying that there are 16 points of identity between the book Dune and Star
00:51:24
Wars now you've had stat what what is it it's 16 * 16 16 time over one the odds against that being coincidence there aren't that many
00:51:36
stars in the universe thank you very much I think he at least ow us at dinner if only out of coincidence hi Mr Herbert I just wanted to announce that we only have time for two or three more questions and also
00:51:51
remind people that there will be a book signing afterwards uh why don't we why don't we knock it off with uh question here and a question there okay um with the widespread use of the
00:52:02
computer and dependency on it being such a recent phenomenon I find it fascinating that destination void was written when it was and my question is when you wrote that did you have the
00:52:15
Jesus incident in mind or was that a later idea no that was a later idea the Jesus incident was uh destination void was uh an exploration of our
00:52:28
unconscious commitment to the idea that the only thing wrong with the universe is that we Haven invented the right machine yet yes okay my question concerns um your creative process when you write
00:52:43
when you have a book when when you write your books it's a whole new world ecology etc etc and then there's characters interacting in it what comes first how does it develop as you write the chicken or the egg okay what comes
00:52:55
first uh an idea often and then I people it I say this is has to happen to somebody and then it has to happen somewhere now science fiction gives you
00:53:08
the option of having an enormous open Universe out there where you can have it happen anywhere you can invent that's why I write science fiction and I have to close it down now
00:53:22
because there are a lot of other things going on today I've enjoyed this being with you and I wish we could wrap together in smaller groups [Music] [Applause]
00:53:37
sometimes
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