Hunting Harkonnens
Introduction
By the time we turned in the Legends of Dune trilogy, which chronicles the epic Butlerian Jihad, we were introducing Dune fans to history ten thousand years prior to the events in the novel Dune. We felt this deserved an appetizer that would ease readers into an epoch that would span more than two centuries, establishing the origins of much of the Dune universe.
“Hunting Harkonnens” is our short story introduction to the world of the Butlerian Jihad. During one of our book-signing tours, we found ourselves stuck for several hours in the Los Angeles train station. There, while sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench larger than a church pew, we brainstormed all of “Hunting Harkonnens.” In this preliminary tale, which lays the foundations of the holy war between humans and thinking machines, we introduced readers to the ancestors of the Atreides and the Harkonnens, and to the evil machines with human minds that Frank Herbert mentioned in Dune.
Passing a laptop computer back and forth, the two of us blocked out the story in detail, scene by scene. Then, like team managers picking baseball players during a draft, we each chose the scenes that interested us. Shortly after returning home from the tour, we wrote our parts of the story, swapped computer disks (yes, that’s how long ago it was), and rewrote each other’s work, sending the changes to each other by mail until we were satisfied with the end result.