Jlawrence's Reviews > Destination: Void

This books manages, despite significant flaws, to engagingly mix a golden age of sci-fi "engineers solving a technical problem" kind of plot with wild philosophizing and thriller elements.

It rests on a somewhat wonky premise (I'm not spoiling anything btw - the following is all revealed early on). Apparently, in the future, the most effective and cost-efficient way to research artificial consciousness is to build a huge colonization ship and launch it towards Tau Ceti with its self-monitoring mechanisms (disembodied human brains hooked up to the ship's computers) programmed to fail, so that the crew has to create a artificial consciousness to guide and monitor the ship, or perish if they fail to do so. The experiment, complete with re-building and re-launching the ship, is repeated until breakthrough trumps death. Rationales are given for this set-up: the crew is comprised of clones whose lives are valued less than 'normal' humans; an earlier Earth-bound experiment in artificial consciousness created a "rogue consciousness" that destroyed itself and its makers; it's believed that crisis situations inspire conceptual breakthroughs -- and the crew themselves try to puzzle out why they've been set-up this way. But it still felt a bit off.

Nevertheless, this set-up allows "let's solve an immense engineering problem" to drive the plot, while the nature of the problem brings up many complex philosophical and moral issues that Herbert loves diving into. Something else that separates it from typical "engineer hero" sci-fi is the signficant amount of (sometimes heavy-handed) psychology Herbert injects into the crew's often manipulative interactions. Through the characters' stressed psyches Herbet explores the limits of human awareness and states of enlightenment -- strong themes in the Dune series that are interesting to see him pursuing here.

Surprisingly, the archaic computer technology utilized doesn't ruin things, as the differences with modern components seem mostly a matter of scale, and the interrelations between the various abstract systems seem more important than the components they use. However, there are many times the technical explanations get so dense and hard-to-parse that you wonder whether Herbert is being incredibly smart or simply indulging in technobabble.

The end is also pretty cheesy, but sets up this book's sequels well. Overall, the book is rough - Herbert doesn't manage to merge its various elements as well as he does with the early Dune books. On just its quality of writing and structure, the book probably deserves only three stars, but the subject matter was fascinating enough that I give it an extra star for personal enjoyment.