Frank Herbert's 1963 Dune is to science fiction what The Lord of The Rings is to fantasy: the most popular, most influential and most critically-acclaimed novel in the genre. Herbert's novel was a revelation: before Dune, even the most well-written science fiction had been mostly "wonderful gadget" stories, or political commentary expressed through exaggeration. It had never occurred to anyone that science fiction could offer the literary depth of Dostoevsky, the intricate "wheels within wheels" intrigues of Shakespeare or so deeply fulfill the heroic epic form behind Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Le Morte D'Arthur, The Mahabharata, and Beowulf.
In the fall of 1977, when I was a couple of years out of college, I received an unexpected call from a friend, Dick Riley. He'd just landed a new job at a small publisher called Frederick Ungar, as the editor of a series of short critical monographs on detective and science-fiction writers. He was looking for authors, and as he knew I was fond of science fiction, he thought of me. Would I write a book about Frank Herbert, he wanted to know.