I spent 9th grade in a boarding school in Beaverdam, Wisconsin. I had gotten straight As in 8th grade by the very unpopular method of acing all my tests and turning in all homework. This turned the grading curve most kids counted on into a straight line, and several of my classmates resented their resultant summer school assignments and put their ire on me directly. I had not been trying to ruin their lives. I was just trying to prove to my mother that I could do what she wanted me to do that year. (In 7th grade I received a couple of Bs, and she had disappointed-mom-face all that summer).
It’s not like they had been nice to me all year, anyway. I was bumped into regularly, stuffed in my locker once, and tripped so many times I actually became quite adept at staying upright with my feet swept out from under me. But after final grades were handed out, I received death threats. Not the assassin-grade moody speeches about the how or when, just the angry teenage “If I see you again, I’m gonna kill you” kind of thing. But that was said in front of a teacher, which meant they were taken to the office, and my mother was called.
So I spent that summer looking through Boy’s Life magazine classifieds for a different school. There were military academies, boys-only schools, but I found Wayland Academy in there. Those As had a much different effect with that school than my previous one. They offered me a scholarship.
That school was a prep school in the grand tradition. It operated much like a college, preparing students socially as well as academically. You didn’t fill every hour with a class. As a scholarship recipient, I was automatically in the Honors program, so I had five classes to schedule in the seven-hour day. Halfway through the first semester, I dropped my bio class. It was just too much on my plate. I went down to four classes but had to attend a study session in the time block biology had occupied.
In the study session, I had to be doing something “productive” in regard to school. So yo-yo was not allowed, or hacky sack, or even banjo practice. I could study with textbooks or library books, do homework, or even write letters home. After a few days, I discovered that I could also just read a book of just about any type if I wanted.
I’m not sure how I ended up with Dune, by Frank Herbert. It might have been my roommates, or some girl I knew (meaning I had a crush on her) who said something about it, or even a teacher who recommended it. But that was the book I chose to read then. A massive paperback book with an orangey binding and what looked like a picture of a sun rising halfway over the horizon, a cliff, and folks dwarfed by the cliff, all in white.
This was not a book a 14-year-old should be starting his science fiction journey with. It’s huge, like 400-plus pages, a good 50 of which were a glossary explaining all the terms used in the book, and it was so very confusing. I was turning to the glossary every single page, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and it took me months to finish it.
That could have turned me off science fiction forever, but it didn’t. That world was so rich and so well described that it lived inside me and made me seek out other stories that could evoke that immersion again.
I didn’t move on through the series very far. In 1980, there were three novels in the series that I knew of.
- Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert
- Dune Messiah (1969) by Frank Herbert
- Children of Dune (1976) by Frank Herbert
I did read Dune Messiah, but it was beginning to pall on me. All the politics, backstabbing, poisoning. It was just too heavy. I think that’s when I decided I disliked anything to do with politics, and since those books were so full of it, it was easy to put them down and move on.
Years later, I had decided to get back into them. The new movie version of Dune had been announced, and it brought back good memories of those early days with that novel. So I looked into it and was amazed at how deep that bench had gotten. Frank himself wrote two more novels. Then his son, Brian Herbert, took up the mantle and teamed up with Kevin J. Anderson and wrote a lot more, prequels and sequels.
I had thought, “Hey, I could start with the prequels, and that’d be fun.” But I’m a traditional kind of guy with book series, so I decided to start with the original again, both to reacquaint myself with the world and to see if I could survive reading it without constantly referring to the glossary. (I couldn’t.)
But something nagged me in the reread. Where was the heart plug, or cork as my brain keeps calling it, thing? Baron Harkonnen had these things installed in all his staff, his nephews, and even himself to control them and bind their loyalty in a very visceral way. (Why he did it to himself, I can only assume it was to convince them it was an “all of us” thing.) But I didn’t see it.
I read the book a third time, this time focused on that missing detail, and did not find it. I was perplexed. Did Frank face enough feedback that he excised it from his book after decades? Did I find an early edition, by happenstance, that had the cork, and all versions after that were edited without it? I got several versions of the book from various sources. They were thinner than the one I held in memory, barely 350 pages in one of them. But none of them said “condensed” or “edited” or anything like that. Yet still, nothing about a heart cork.
What occurred to me is that the media landscape had changed a lot since I was a kid.
Way back, I had loved Star Wars, long before “A New Hope” was tacked on. So much that I saw it seven and a half times in the theater when it came out. (The half time was when I was convinced to take a neighbor kid along with the very parent-reasonable argument of “You can go again if you take Scottie along,” but this kid had to use the bathroom a lot, so I missed, easily, half the movie.) Soon after that, I was haranguing my small-town bookstore for more of “From The Adventures of Luke Skywalker,” which was a subtitle in the novelization.
This guy was game, and he used his sources to order what he could find. Turns out it was just several more copies of that same book. One was a hardcover with a golden dust jacket, and I did buy that because why not. But there weren’t any more in those “adventures.” That was basically a promise, not a historical archive notice.
Then things changed. On the Death Star, the captain shouting at the Stormtroopers inspecting the Millennium Falcon after it had been captured said, “THX-1138, why aren’t you at your post?” (Or at least that’s how I remember it. It might have been the novelization infecting the movie in my head.) But when we upgraded to the DVD, I heard “TK-421, why aren’t you at your post?” and my brain broke. Plus now Greedo shot first. Heresy!
In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the government agents who had guns now had walkie-talkies, and then later went back to guns. Digital technology allowed directors to ignore that old adage that you had to release your babies eventually. Now they could basically gene-edit a teenager between theatrical release and home release, or from one format to another.
And this happened in books too. I had basically devoured The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and moved on to The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In an author’s note, Stephen R. Donaldson said there was a story about Seahome his editors had made him remove before publishing it, but that he would include it in Daughter of Regals & Other Stories.
I then learned how very useful editors can be. I’m sorry, Stephen, but they were right. That story would have pulled focus, slowed everything down, and taken several chapters to get a reader back.
He got his revenge, though. His success with the first Chronicles made him able to get whatever he wanted in the Second, but that sucker dragged. Just sayin’.
And the new digital landscape allows books to be edited basically on the fly. I have one that I read through, a reference book about Moonlighting, and when I opened it recently there was new content. That’s only one example I know of for sure, but I had suspected it was happening for years and never really could verify it.
So, in my head, folks could now kill their darlings after they published them. Historical volumes change between editions all the time. Fiction could too. Only they don’t stamp “Revised” on the cover. They bury it in printing numbers that look like a secret code.
So obviously Big Publishing had edited Dune and took that uber-gross cork out of it, changing whole swaths of text and all references to something more benign. Yeah, that made more sense than I was wrong, right?
But I’m nothing if not thorough, so I looked on the internet. Google searches, Reddit threads, Yahoo Answers, everything. And you know what I found? Not a single whisper that there was editing shenanigans with Dune. And my brain could not contain for long the thought that there was a massive conspiracy to keep such an edit secret.
But it still was firmly in my memory. I was sure I had read it. So I interrogated my memory more thoroughly and you know what I discovered? I could picture the corks completely. Like the old rubber stoppers for bathtubs: sloping sides, a rim ring, a looped hole in the top where you ran a chain through. But I could not, for the life of me, think of the text that gave me such a clear image.
So I googled some more and guess what I found? There was this movie from 1984, Dune, directed by David Lynch, and I can assure you I saw it when it came out. I can also assure you that I have very little memory of watching it. I can’t even say I thought it was odd or not Frank’s vision, though that seems to be the popular view of it.
But that version was full of body horror, long before that became a genre of its own. And one of those concepts was the heart plug, or cork, and though my memory told me that was how the Baron died, his own cork getting pulled out, that was not true. An underling is killed by the Baron, and there is a deleted scene where Thufir Hawat pulls out his own.
I guess what I had done is read a book at fourteen, then saw the movie a few years later, and mixed them into a single memory locker. Not exactly conflating, but close. I just attributed the cork as if it had been written there and then chased the facts into a different reality. I guess I did the same thing in reverse with the Star Wars memory.
Yes, immediate editing is a fact. People can edit things now in ways that go beyond the old model of fire and forget. I don’t think it’s always justified, but it’s not always bad. One of the movies I own digitally had features added long after I bought it: a new trailer for a sequel and a behind-the-scenes feature for that new movie. So not really a content addition, but not offensive either.
It’s kind of my thing now to have the digital copies and the physical media as well. One provides easy access and maybe extra content sometimes, and the other provides archival status. (Seriously, did you know the DVD of Barb Wire has a strip scene with Pamela Anderson that is not in the digital version or the Blu-ray? I have all three now.)
And now it’s not a roadblock in my head. I can read Dune and the rest of the oeuvre without the cork that never was. I just have to face the dense story structure and all those glossary references.
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