Dune 7

This article or section refers to elements from Original Dune

The Dune 7 disks, found by Brian Herbert.

Dune 7 was the working title for Frank Herbert's seventh Dune novel, which was to be the concluding chapter of the entire Dune series. He had hinted that he was planning to end the series; however, the work was never completed because of his untimely death in February 1986.

Hints of the direction he would have taken with Dune 7 are in Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune; however, many unanswered questions remained. He did, however, tell author Norman Spinrad that he "planned to end the series with a novel that would transition to a fictional universe of democratic rule."

Frank Herbert himself told in an interview

"Now I'll tell you something interesting in MY reading of history: Every time we have pulled the lid off the human desire to govern our own affairs, to be free of government, we've had a renaissance of some kind. We've had a social renaissance, we've had a political renaissance, an artistic renaissance. Every time in history we've unleashed this, we've gone forward by leaps and bounds. So I'm saying, "All right, this is what history says to me. So why don't we do it again?" That's what I'm playing with in the seventh Dune book: moving toward showing the kind of governments that finally evolve out of the situation I have created."

―Frank Herbert

Reinforcing Spinrad's claim. Neither accounts of Frank Herbert's plan for Dune 7 align particularly closely with Hunters of Dune or Sandworms of Dune so it is likely he changed his mind later on or Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson simply did not use this material.

In 1997, as they were searching through Herbert's belongings, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson discovered two 1980s floppy disks, labeled "Dune 7 Notes" and "Dune 7 Outline." Brian explained in an interview that these contained a three to two-and-a-half page outline of his father's thoughts on the seventh Dune novel. Brian and Kevin later completed Dune 7 as two separate novels set immediately after Chapterhouse: Dune. They were released in 2006 and 2007, titled Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, respectively. The books received a mixed critical response.