The Dragon in the Sea.

Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,, 1956. His first novel, inscribed to the editor of Children of Dune First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, "for David, Frank Herbert", his printed name struck through. The recipient was David Hartwell (1941-2016), Herbert's editor at Berkeley/Putnam in the 1970s and "perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American science fiction publishing world" (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). Over the course of his long career, Hartwell edited works by Philip K. Dick and George R. R. Martin, compiled a number of science fiction anthologies, and established the New York Review of Science Fiction in 1988. He was nominated for 41 Hugo Awards, and won 3. Hartwell edited Herbert's Collected Stories in 2014 and wrote an account of his friendship with the author to coincide with the book's publication: "by the time I got a job as science fiction editor at Berkeley Books (then a division of G. P. Putnams) I had been reading Frank's work for more than twenty years, having admired it since high school... The contract I inherited was for the third Dune book, Children of Dune, and that was the first one I worked on with him. I went to his house in Port Townsend, Washington, a couple of times, and we got to know one another better. Frank was in those days kind of a big blond-bearded Santa Claus figure who had immense enthusiasms, often about new technologies, but always about ideas, and about stories. He was clever and inventive. I could tell stories about publishing Children of Dune, and more about publishing his book on using home computers, and how no one really believed that they would sell well. But some of my favorite moments were visiting Seattle in the 1970s and 1980s when Frank was in town and having dinner at sunset on the water, sometimes also with my friend Vonda McIntyre, long friendly evenings of gossip and ideas. By that time Frank was a public figure, a bestselling writer, and there was a film adaptation of Dune coming out." In the same piece, Hartwell describes The Dragon in the Sea as "one of my early favorite science fiction novels... a prescient story about international oil theft from undersea wells in an oil-starved future". The novel was originally serialized in Astounding as "Under Pressure" in 1955-6. Octavo. Original black boards, spine lettered in green. With dust jacket. Boards lightly rubbed at extremities; jacket spine lightly sunned as often, a few tiny nicks and creases to extremities, minimal rubbing, overall bright and unclipped: a near-fine copy in near-fine jacket. David G. Hartwell, "Frank Herbert, His Fiction, and Me", Tor/Forge Blog, 1 December 2014.