The Plowboy Interview: Frank Herbert

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So I do try to express my concerns about family, social, and environmental values in my life, as well as in my writing.

PLOWBOY: I couldn't agree more that it's important to be consistent in one's actions and words. But when you talk about expressing such values in your writing, you're referring to your later work as a science fiction writer and not to your earlier, purely reportorial work, right?

HERBERT: Oh, you'd be surprised how many of my views I was able to get across in my newspaper days. I was known as a strange rebel who wrote very outspoken stuff, but people would read what I wrote . . . and that sold newspapers.

I'll give you an example. I was a war correspondent in Vietnam for a while. I became utterly disgusted with our military command there because it was quite obvious, to anyone in the field, that our "leaders" were lying to correspondents and to the American public.

So one of my stories documented the profound corruption, in the Thieu government, that was costing the American taxpayers millions of dollars. In one instance, the military ordered enormous lots of steel to repair our river barges. The steel just happened to turn out to be the wrong gauge for our barges, but—surprise! was exactly right for use on the boats being built at the nearby Thieu family barge factory. And gosh, before long that steel just vanished without a trace. That chain of events could never have happened unless people in our military were profiting along the way.

I got my facts on this and other instances of corruption, flew off to Copenhagen—in those days, you didn't want to be in Vietnam when you filed a story denigrating the powers that be, for fear that you might fall victim to a war zone "accident"—and sent in a complete story on this conspiracy of lies and greed. It was a "big blast" type of article and was banner headlined in every Sunday edition of the Hearst newspapers all around the country.

It so happens that Bill Hearst, Jr—who does a regular column for the Sunday editions—was also writing about the Vietnam war that day, only he presented a much rosier picture of our war effort than the one I had developed while being there. Yet Bill thought it was a great idea to run our opposing views, together, on the front page . . . because the resulting controversy sold lots of papers.

PLOWBOY: So you were often able to get away with such "brazen" journalism?

HERBERT: Yes, primarily because I could write well—allowing people to understand what I was saying—and I wrote sincerely, presenting my outward bias honestly and then, reporting what I saw.

PLOWBOY: How did you become interested in writing science fiction?

HERBERT: I started out doing adventure stories, and actually tried my hand at quite a number of fiction types. Still, science fiction ultimately attracted me. The genre has unlimited elbowroom, which permits me to create any kind of setting I want for whatever story I want to tell. Most important, in science fiction I can work with entertaining and dramatic stories that have analogues to the present situation. That way I can get past people's guard and really talk to the basic human beings within.

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