Introduction
The Dune universe sprawls across countless planets and dozens of millennia. Frank Herbert’s original six Dune novels in addition to the fourteen other books we have added to the canon tell large parts of the story, but sometimes an idea only warrants a briefer exploration.
Considering the immensity of the Dune universe, we often have trouble keeping each novel from getting too big. There are so many potential storylines and intriguing ideas to explore. The wealth of material leaves many side stories that can be told, hors d’oeuvres to accompany the exotic main course.
Sometimes, a short story was exactly what we needed.
Even before the publication of our first new Dune novel, House Atreides, we delved into some of the missing pieces in the original classic. When we wrote “A Whisper of Caladan Seas” and published it in Amazing Stories in 1999, it was the first piece of new Dune fiction published since the death of Frank Herbert thirteen years earlier. The issue promptly sold out: even back issues are no longer available. And it whet the appetite of Dune fans for the release of the new novel by Bantam Books. House Atreides became a runaway bestseller, selling three times the publisher’s projections, and proving that Dune fans were alive and well and hungry for more.
As we wrote our novels, we looked for opportunities to write standalone stories, interesting tales that couldn’t fit into the larger novels. We wrote character studies, connective stories, side stories, pieces that would fill in the gaps. Some of these stories were published in magazines, in online venues, in anthologies, while others were released as special promotional booklets by our publisher, Tor Books.
Tales of Dune collects all of these stories in one place, eight tales that range from the earliest adventure in the Dune universe, to a story at the very end of Frank Herbert’s grand future history. The stories are standalone, and should be enjoyable as they are, but the chronology at the end of this book shows exactly how they fit into the overall epic.