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3.52 AVERAGE
3.52 AVERAGE
It seems clear to me this book must have been a major inspiration for the movie Avatar, as there are too many similarities to be coincidence:
1. A wild alien planet called Pandora filled with dangerous wildlife, including at least one form that's thought to be intelligent.
2.
3. A single messiah-hero who makes contact with the intelligence, “goes native,” and attempts to bring the “gospel” back to the others.
4. It culminates in.
5. There's even a scene where.
A quick Google search shows I'm not the only person to notice all these uncanny similarities.
I was shocked to realize this book was published in 1979, over ten years after Herbert's masterwork, Dune. It has the feel of an early work, where Herbert is clumsily trying to explore some of the ideas that he refined and did with more sophistication in later years. I feel it tries to be too many things at once and fails at all of them.
Is it a story about first contact with a powerful and strange alien intelligence, with the attendant messages about aggressive humans who try to destroy anything they don't understand and mow down all native culture as they expand?
Is it a story about a homegrown religious cult created by a generation ship run by an AI that has styled itself as a god? This is the aspect of the story that's played up in the official blurbs, and the entire first-contact storyline is occurring in the context of the crew's need to find a way to appease Ship before Ship punishes them. The religion story and the first-contact story are somewhat tied together by the miraculous. Call me dumb, but I never did understand how the eponymous "Jesus Incident" (Ship's term for the crucifixion of Christ, which Ship shows to one of the characters via a form of time travel) fit in at all, considering no one living in this story has ever heard of this Jesus dude.
Is it a story about clones and the tension between their fundamental personhood and the attempts of the people who run this place to use them as expendable slave labor?
I love first-contact stories, but I've read so many that take the easy way out and make the aliens telepathic so the protagonists can skip all the hard work of learning to communicate with them, that I yawned when it became evident this is another one of those. (Although I have to admit it probably pre-dates most of the other ones I've vread, so maybe Herbert did it first.) Two counter-examples that come to mind are [b:A Deepness in the Sky|226004|A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2)|Vernor Vinge|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1217218691l/226004._SY75_.jpg|1270006] and [b:Damocles|17325775|Damocles|S.G. Redling|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1365632972l/17325775._SY75_.jpg|24023293], and while I didn't love either of those stories, I really admired that they didn't skip that nuts-and-bolts stage. In fact, Damocles was entirely about that stage of alien contact.
I also have trouble seeing how anyone who genuinely wanted to tell a story set either on an alien planet or on an orbiting spaceship could come up with scenery this blank and uninspiring. Talk about opportunity lost! Here we have a whole new planet and no idea what it looks like. We're told a few basics – there are two suns and at least two moons, and two large continents surrounded by a massive ocean that's filled with kelp. There are a few sketchy descriptions like “plain” and “cliffs” and “beach” but that's about it as far as the physical scenery. The wonder and awe and creativity you might expect to find associated with a new planet is totally absent, not to mention any exploration of life with two suns and two moons and how it would affect the ecology.
There's wildlife, and it's uniformly dangerous, but aside from the floating highlighters and the nerve runners, there's no attempt at all to really bring them to life. There's a whole slew of deadly animals that kill multiple characters, and they have evocative names like “demons” and “hooded dashers” and “spinnerets,” but we have no idea what they look like, sound like, smell like, or how they move, other than being fast. And apparently there's not a single xenobiologist anywhere in this expedition, because no one seems at all interested in understanding their morphology, their basic biology, or their habits. As a former biology student, I had so many unanswered questions, like:
"What do nerve runners eat when they're not chowing down on human nerve tissue?"
"Are nerve runners a plague on the local wildlife like they are on humans?"
"How do other local animals defend against them?"
"What do all these legions of other predators eat when they're not feasting on colonists? Whatever they are, there must be loads of them around to support all these predators."
"If the local predators can eat human flesh with no ill effects, does the inverse follow that humans can also eat the local fauna, and maybe some of the flora too?
"Speaking of flora, are there any land plant analogs on this planet? What color are they? What are they like?"
"If highlighters use ballast rocks to control their altitude, how do baby highlighters learn this skill?" (BTW, the descriptions of the highlighters remind me quite a lot of Morrowind's netches.)
Shipboard life suffers from all the same problems. We're told this ship is many kilometers long and so complex that no one person has ever even seen all of it, and yet we get nothing about the many wonders that must be contained within it. Remember [b:Rendezvous with Rama|112537|Rendezvous with Rama (Rama, #1)|Arthur C. Clarke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405456427l/112537._SY75_.jpg|1882772] and [b:Eon|840278|Eon (The Way, #1)|Greg Bear|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388288738l/840278._SY75_.jpg|4273] and all the amazing things in those ships? Yeah, not so much. Suffice it to say, this book definitely did not “take me there.” These are the kinds of amazing things that draw me to science fiction, so I feel deeply resentful that I've been robbed of one of the really fun aspects of SF.
On a nice note, a bunch of the characters are people of color (one of them is literally various colors). Shout out to the Black Power 70s. I'm not sure how I feel about writing about black and brown people and putting them in a distant future where today's racial labels have no meaning. On the one hand, a tiny little yay for a white author imagining a future that's not all white people. But on the other hand, isn't that literally the cheapest possible way to tell a story with racial diversity in it? Throw in a few skin and hair descriptions and then airily wave off the idea that any of that matters 3,000 years in the future?
Of course I have to talk about the women and the sexism: The whole sexual vibe of the book is quite skeevy. A full half of the male characters are disgusting pervs who are constantly plotting how to turn the women into their personal sex slaves, and we're treated to titillating details of how great the women's bodies are. And some of the women are trying to get the pants off some of the men (not the same men). Meanwhile, other women are apparently goal-oriented enough to sleep their way to their goals with those same pervy men I mentioned. The whole thing is so 70s it's pretty gross, in a “we lived through the free-love 60s so now we're totally jaded about sex and recognize it's just a tool and doing it is just a transaction,” kind of way. And for chrissake Frank, actual women do not hang around naked in front of mirrors congratulating themselves on how stacked they are. Another small but telling fact: Everyone has two names, but all the men are referred to by last name throughout the story, while the women are almost entirely referred to by the more familiar first name – a small but symbolic form of personal space invasion that women still live with daily to this day. I note that despite all this, it passes the Bechdel test, solely because late in the story, there's a fair amount of interaction between a pregnant woman and her female medical attendant, who are both major characters.
Random gripe: I got so tired of the word “side.” Page after page, shipside, groundside, dayside, nightside, topside, and of course on dangerous Pandora there's also heavy obsession with safe inside and deadly outside. I wanted to turn my backside on all this.
1. A wild alien planet called Pandora filled with dangerous wildlife, including at least one form that's thought to be intelligent.
2.
Spoiler
It turns out there's a single mass consciousness at the center of all this biomass, that even calls itself “Avatar” when it communicates.3. A single messiah-hero who makes contact with the intelligence, “goes native,” and attempts to bring the “gospel” back to the others.
4. It culminates in
Spoiler
a battle between those who want to live in harmony with Avatar and those who want to subjugate and destroy it5. There's even a scene where
Spoiler
the power of Avatar is used to heal a grievously wounded human – successfully, unlike the movieA quick Google search shows I'm not the only person to notice all these uncanny similarities.
I was shocked to realize this book was published in 1979, over ten years after Herbert's masterwork, Dune. It has the feel of an early work, where Herbert is clumsily trying to explore some of the ideas that he refined and did with more sophistication in later years. I feel it tries to be too many things at once and fails at all of them.
Is it a story about first contact with a powerful and strange alien intelligence, with the attendant messages about aggressive humans who try to destroy anything they don't understand and mow down all native culture as they expand?
Is it a story about a homegrown religious cult created by a generation ship run by an AI that has styled itself as a god? This is the aspect of the story that's played up in the official blurbs, and the entire first-contact storyline is occurring in the context of the crew's need to find a way to appease Ship before Ship punishes them. The religion story and the first-contact story are somewhat tied together by the miraculous
Spoiler
birth of the new messiah, who will carry the mass consciousness into the future and save them allIs it a story about clones and the tension between their fundamental personhood and the attempts of the people who run this place to use them as expendable slave labor?
I love first-contact stories, but I've read so many that take the easy way out and make the aliens telepathic so the protagonists can skip all the hard work of learning to communicate with them, that I yawned when it became evident this is another one of those. (Although I have to admit it probably pre-dates most of the other ones I've vread, so maybe Herbert did it first.) Two counter-examples that come to mind are [b:A Deepness in the Sky|226004|A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2)|Vernor Vinge|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1217218691l/226004._SY75_.jpg|1270006] and [b:Damocles|17325775|Damocles|S.G. Redling|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1365632972l/17325775._SY75_.jpg|24023293], and while I didn't love either of those stories, I really admired that they didn't skip that nuts-and-bolts stage. In fact, Damocles was entirely about that stage of alien contact.
I also have trouble seeing how anyone who genuinely wanted to tell a story set either on an alien planet or on an orbiting spaceship could come up with scenery this blank and uninspiring. Talk about opportunity lost! Here we have a whole new planet and no idea what it looks like. We're told a few basics – there are two suns and at least two moons, and two large continents surrounded by a massive ocean that's filled with kelp. There are a few sketchy descriptions like “plain” and “cliffs” and “beach” but that's about it as far as the physical scenery. The wonder and awe and creativity you might expect to find associated with a new planet is totally absent, not to mention any exploration of life with two suns and two moons and how it would affect the ecology.
There's wildlife, and it's uniformly dangerous, but aside from the floating highlighters and the nerve runners, there's no attempt at all to really bring them to life. There's a whole slew of deadly animals that kill multiple characters, and they have evocative names like “demons” and “hooded dashers” and “spinnerets,” but we have no idea what they look like, sound like, smell like, or how they move, other than being fast. And apparently there's not a single xenobiologist anywhere in this expedition, because no one seems at all interested in understanding their morphology, their basic biology, or their habits. As a former biology student, I had so many unanswered questions, like:
"What do nerve runners eat when they're not chowing down on human nerve tissue?"
"Are nerve runners a plague on the local wildlife like they are on humans?"
"How do other local animals defend against them?"
"What do all these legions of other predators eat when they're not feasting on colonists? Whatever they are, there must be loads of them around to support all these predators."
"If the local predators can eat human flesh with no ill effects, does the inverse follow that humans can also eat the local fauna, and maybe some of the flora too?
"Speaking of flora, are there any land plant analogs on this planet? What color are they? What are they like?"
"If highlighters use ballast rocks to control their altitude, how do baby highlighters learn this skill?" (BTW, the descriptions of the highlighters remind me quite a lot of Morrowind's netches.)
Shipboard life suffers from all the same problems. We're told this ship is many kilometers long and so complex that no one person has ever even seen all of it, and yet we get nothing about the many wonders that must be contained within it. Remember [b:Rendezvous with Rama|112537|Rendezvous with Rama (Rama, #1)|Arthur C. Clarke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405456427l/112537._SY75_.jpg|1882772] and [b:Eon|840278|Eon (The Way, #1)|Greg Bear|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388288738l/840278._SY75_.jpg|4273] and all the amazing things in those ships? Yeah, not so much. Suffice it to say, this book definitely did not “take me there.” These are the kinds of amazing things that draw me to science fiction, so I feel deeply resentful that I've been robbed of one of the really fun aspects of SF.
On a nice note, a bunch of the characters are people of color (one of them is literally various colors). Shout out to the Black Power 70s. I'm not sure how I feel about writing about black and brown people and putting them in a distant future where today's racial labels have no meaning. On the one hand, a tiny little yay for a white author imagining a future that's not all white people. But on the other hand, isn't that literally the cheapest possible way to tell a story with racial diversity in it? Throw in a few skin and hair descriptions and then airily wave off the idea that any of that matters 3,000 years in the future?
Of course I have to talk about the women and the sexism: The whole sexual vibe of the book is quite skeevy. A full half of the male characters are disgusting pervs who are constantly plotting how to turn the women into their personal sex slaves, and we're treated to titillating details of how great the women's bodies are. And some of the women are trying to get the pants off some of the men (not the same men). Meanwhile, other women are apparently goal-oriented enough to sleep their way to their goals with those same pervy men I mentioned. The whole thing is so 70s it's pretty gross, in a “we lived through the free-love 60s so now we're totally jaded about sex and recognize it's just a tool and doing it is just a transaction,” kind of way. And for chrissake Frank, actual women do not hang around naked in front of mirrors congratulating themselves on how stacked they are. Another small but telling fact: Everyone has two names, but all the men are referred to by last name throughout the story, while the women are almost entirely referred to by the more familiar first name – a small but symbolic form of personal space invasion that women still live with daily to this day. I note that despite all this, it passes the Bechdel test, solely because late in the story, there's a fair amount of interaction between a pregnant woman and her female medical attendant, who are both major characters.
Random gripe: I got so tired of the word “side.” Page after page, shipside, groundside, dayside, nightside, topside, and of course on dangerous Pandora there's also heavy obsession with safe inside and deadly outside. I wanted to turn my backside on all this.
A book from my teenagehood, didn't realise it's part of a trilogy. I originally read it as a recommendation by the creators of one my favourite PC games of all time – Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. There are seeds of some really good ideas here, and you can see the motifs carried over from Herbert's "Dune" days, featuring god-like beings and sciency mysticism. It is a book with many, many characters and Herbert does a good job of getting us acquainted with them and keep it all in sync. Overall however, I was left disappointed and quit the book.
First of all, the gold-like central character was very unbelieveable, but I had this problem with [book:God Emperor of Dune|42432] as well. The timeline was very confusing and not clear. The characters act unreasonably and enter unnecessary conflict. I could go on.
What was most grating was realising why my teenage mind would love this book. There is disproportionate attention being paid to every sensual physical details of female characters, while male characters are usually introduced by name only, or by a brief summary. This was especially jarring as it undermines the raison d'etre of most of the characters, since they are all meant to be part of a scientific/military expedition/colonisation effort, and reducing them to walking sex dolls
I guess I'm just jaded at using genre writing to cover up for missing characterisation and a meaningful story. I can't believe I just wrote that in a review for a Frank Herbert novel...
First of all, the gold-like central character was very unbelieveable, but I had this problem with [book:God Emperor of Dune|42432] as well. The timeline was very confusing and not clear. The characters act unreasonably and enter unnecessary conflict. I could go on.
What was most grating was realising why my teenage mind would love this book. There is disproportionate attention being paid to every sensual physical details of female characters, while male characters are usually introduced by name only, or by a brief summary. This was especially jarring as it undermines the raison d'etre of most of the characters, since they are all meant to be part of a scientific/military expedition/colonisation effort, and reducing them to walking sex dolls
I guess I'm just jaded at using genre writing to cover up for missing characterisation and a meaningful story. I can't believe I just wrote that in a review for a Frank Herbert novel...
Picked this book, and The Lazarus Effect up in a used bookstore off Baystreet in Port Orchard, WA. I used to spend hours there on the floor with a stack of books surrounding me. I loved this book and its sequel so much. The rich world created and the interesting characters. I tried reading Destination:Void years later... that didn't work out so well. Might give it another shot on Audiobook. Even if you didn't like Destination:Void, there's a good chance you will still like this one.
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Picked this book, and The Lazarus Effect up in a used bookstore off Baystreet in Port Orchard, WA. I used to spend hours there on the floor with a stack of books surrounding me. I loved this book and its sequel so much. The rich world created and the interesting characters. I tried reading Destination:Void years later... that didn't work out so well. Might give it another shot on Audiobook. Even if you didn't like Destination:Void, there's a good chance you will still like this one.
This book confused me. I was unable to follow portions of Destination: Void due to incoherent technobabble, but I feel like I was able to pick up the main discussion on consciousness. The Jesus Incident did not give me as much grace. I'm reading this series because I'm a Herbert fan, and this doesn't quite read like a Herbert novel. Where Dune's (or rather, the first three books') overarching exposition was on prescience and the future, the Jesus Incident had the same sort of monologues on godhood, consciousness, and 'the oneness of life'. It was much harder to grasp at what he was saying. One of the motifs that comes up often is the defining of something either by its opposite or against another background. Herbert does this with consciousness, life, and goodness. I found that a very interesting perspective.
Additionally, the end made nearly no sense. I am going to continue reading through the series with the hope that I will find some answers there, but I don't have high hopes. What is the purpose of the Scream Room? How was Jesus Ship's devil and Raja his own? What does the 'holy violence' have to do with the story? Was the scene in the gondola a tentacle-intercourse seen? What was the necessity/literary intent for including that?
In all I thought that there were excellent points made in the book and that the story was certainly something creative and unique. Thinking kelp! Herbert still has an amazing ability to wordsmith and that appears in this book as well.
In all I thought that there were excellent points made in the book and that the story was certainly something creative and unique. Thinking kelp! Herbert still has an amazing ability to wordsmith and that appears in this book as well.
"Does it matter [whether Jesus was God]? Is the lesson diminished because the history that moves you is fiction? The incident which you just shared is too important to be debated on the level of fact or fancy. [Jesus] lived. He was the ultimate essence of goodness. How could you learn such an essence without experiencing its opposite?"
-Ship
Not as predictable as I'd feared, but still not very good.