This book appeared on my radar as a result of a book club that some old friends and I recently formed. I was quite excited, because I usually find it interesting to tread into the waters of other works written by an author whose name is so heavily associated with one specific work/series like Dune. This book was published the year after the first Dune was published.
Right off the bat, I was reminded of one hallmark aspect of reading Herbert that I had forgotten about since the first time I read the first Dune. He, like many other sci-fi authors, really likes to throw the readers head first into a world where it feels like we should already have far more existing knowledge/understanding of how things work than is possible to have so early in a story. This was actually a major hurdle for me in Dune which nearly resulted in a DNF. But as I read Dune I told myself to power through and see if that feeling goes away as I stick with the story/characters, and it absolutely did. The same exact thing happened here with Destination: Void.
The Plot
The basic premise of this book is a colonization mission of a faraway planet several hundred earth years away with 3,000 travelers cryogenically frozen, to be woken up upon arrival at the destination planet. The ship's navigation is handled by what is effectively an AI known as an Organic Mental Core or OMC, and there is a crew of 6 people who are awake for the start of the journey whose job is to ensure that the ship safely exits the solar system, whereupon they would enter their own frozen sleep for the remainder of the trip. Unfortunately, the OMC fails before that happens, and three of those six crewmembers die in the process, leaving the remaining 3 to deal with solving the problem of how to get the ship to complete its journey.
It spoils nothing to say that the solution they land on is to create and integrate a new piece of hardware into the ship's computer system, replacing the OMC, which will make the computer not only intelligent, but conscious.
The remaining crew (and one more they wake up from frozen sleep to replace one of their fallen crewmembers) with their various backgrounds and specialties ranging from medicine to engineering to religion have to work together to collectively attempt to define consciousness, and each individual crewmember has their own specific (and secret) instructions from their training for how to get under each other's skin, to push each other in ways that may (or may not) result in the highest probability for success.
My Thoughts
In true Frank Herbert fashion, there is a gradual and expansive building of tension and ideas which takes a long time to get fully off the ground. You know those giant buckets at the top of water park playgrounds which take forever to fill up, then finally tip over spilling tons of water all over everything in a flurry of excitement that lasts a fraction of the time that it took for the bucket to fill? That's kind of what it feels like for me when I read a Herbert book, and this one is absolutely no different.
This novel was published in 1966, and while it's not exclusively hard sci-fi, it definitely has a lot of elements which make it read like hard sci-fi. Depending on your own personal technological expertise, you may find it hard to read some of the clearly outdated technobabble associated with this kind of sci-fi which was SO INTANGIBLE from a technological perspective in 1966, but is not as intangible from today's perspective. This specific aspect of the novel does not really hold up well, but I personally give it a lot of leniency simply because it's not really the point of the novel, and was more just part of the futuresque imagery conceivable from its time.
As somebody who has done a lot of personal reflection on my own consciousness, this book was fascinating on so many different levels, and really evoked a similar reading experience to Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception as it related to its thoughts and explanations of human consciousness. If you've ever had an intense psychedelic trip (that didn't scar you), I think this book is an absolute must-read. Towards the end, a couple of characters have experiences which deeply resonated with a lot of my own experiences that were either directly from, or indirectly influenced by, psychedelics.
Just in case this needs to be said, I want to be clear that I don't mean to imply that thoughts/realizations about human consciousness while under the influence of psychedelics are explicitly correct. I'm sure many of us know (or have been) that person who took LSD or mushrooms once and got all high and mighty afterwards, thinking they knew something that other people do not. All I'm intending to say is that this book channels emotions and thoughts which are known to occur under the influence of psychedelics, which I think is really freaking cool.
Overall
This book likely won't be for everybody, but I thought it was an incredibly engaging and thought-provoking read, and I'm extremely glad to have given a different version of Frank Herbert a chance to impress me. This gets an 8.5/10 in my book, and now I'm absolutely interested in giving the other books in the Pandora series a shot.
by PsyferRL