Destination Void
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About this ebook
The starship Earthling, filled with thousands of hybernating colonists en route to a new world at Tau Ceti, is stranded beyond the solar system when the ship’s three Organic Mental Cores—disembodied human brains that control the vessel’s functions—go insane. An emergency skeleton crew sees only one chance for survival: to create an artificial consciousness in the Earthling’s primary computer, which could guide them to their destination . . . or could destroy the human race.
Frank Herbert’s classic novel that begins the epic Pandora Sequence (written with Bill Ransom), which also includes The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.
Prequel to Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.
Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune. He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind. His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre. Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy. It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies. As a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading. He loved Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs. On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be a author." His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child's body. In grade school he was the acknowledged authority on everything. If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. He'll know." His curiosity and independent spirit got him into trouble more than once when he was growing up, and caused him difficulties as an adult as well. He did not graduate from college because he refused to take the required courses for a major; he only wanted to study what interested him. For years he had a hard time making a living, bouncing from job to job and from town to town. He was so independent that he refused to write for a particular market; he wrote what he felt like writing. It took him six years of research and writing to complete Dune, and after all that struggle and sacrifice, 23 publishers rejected it in book form before it was finally accepted. He received an advance of only $7,500. His loving wife of 37 years, Beverly, was the breadwinner much of the time, as an underpaid advertising writer for department stores. Having been divorced from his first wife, Flora Parkinson, Frank Herbert met Beverly Stuart at a University of Washington creative writing class in 1946. At the time, they were the only students in the class who had sold their work for publication. Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, one to Esquire and the other to Doc Savage. Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. These genres reflected the interests of the two young lovers; he the adventurer, the strong, machismo man, and she the romantic, exceedingly feminine and soft-spoken. Their marriage would produce two sons, Brian, born in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951. Frank also had a daughter, Penny, born in 1942 from his first marriage. For more than two decades Frank and Beverly would struggle to make ends meet, and there were many hard times. In order to pay the bills and to allow her husband the freedom he needed in order to create, Beverly gave up her own creative writing career in order to support his. They were in fact a writing team, as he discussed every aspect of his stories with her, and she edited his work. Theirs was a remarkable, though tragic, love story-which Brian would poignantly describe one day in Dreamer of Dune (Tor Books; April 2003). After Beverly passed away, Frank married Theresa Shackelford. In all, Frank Herbert wrote nearly 30 popular books and collections of short stories, including six novels set in the Dune universe: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune. All were international bestsellers, as were a number of his other science fiction novels, which include The White Plague and The Dosadi Experiment. His major novels included The Dragon in the Sea, Soul Catcher (his only non-science fiction novel), Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier, The Green Brain, Hellstorm's Hive, Whipping Star, The Eyes of Heisenberg, The Godmakers, Direct Descent, and The Heaven Makers. He also collaborated with Bill Ransom to write The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor. Frank Herbert's last published novel, Man of Two Worlds, was a collaboration with his son, Brian.
Read more from Frank Herbert
The Godmakers Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Pandora Sequence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Frank Herbert: Unpublished Stories Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Lazarus Effect Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDestination: Void Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Direct Descent Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Heaven Makers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Jesus Incident Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSoul Catcher Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Man of Two Worlds: 30th Anniversary Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Ascension Factor Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHigh-Opp Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Game of Authors Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Operation Haystack Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Thorn in the Bush Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Four Unpublished Novels: High-Opp, Angel's Fall, A Game of Authors, A Thorn in the Bush Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Science Fiction Omnibus #2 (Serapis Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFive Fantastic Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Missing Link Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Science Fiction Collection #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Reviews for Destination Void
187 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book was frustrating. I felt like chunks of it were flying right over my head. There's a ton of dialog, which bogs it down and leaves a bit to be desired in terms of world building, as it were. There's precious little set up to help you understand what is going on with the characters, which makes the lofty concepts it's lobbing up that much more difficult to sort through. The jumping perspectives were confusing until you got used to it (it felt like a more frustrating third person Omniscient POV).
And yet. When I did feel like I was following the concepts lobbed at me, they were incredibly interesting and exciting. The way the story plays out in dialog makes it very unique, and lends a certain sense of immediacy, like you are there with it. The characters were interesting, each with their own agendas that frequently didn't mesh. I want to follow this universe more. The ending was incredibly intriguing. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Frank Herbert is author of one of the most outstanding science fiction works in history, Dune. Many people are unaware, however, that there were five sequels to Dune. The reason that most people are not familiar with these sequels is because they became so increasingly dense and philosophically difficult to read, that readership steadily declined as the series progressed. While Dune is not without its philosophical nuances, Herbert “jumped the shark” in the later installments.Herbert also wrote The Dosadi Experiment which despite owning a graduate level degree and being quite widely read, I found to be so far over my head as to be virtually unreadable. Which brings us to this relatively short work, which I selected for its compact size and brevity, for consumption on a four day hunting trip.There is enough underlying story and action to make this science fiction work readable, but barely. It follows a ship load of clones that are ostensibly making the four hundred year journey to Ceti Alpha. However, the official justification for the journey is really a ruse to hide the real mission; development of a “conscious” artificial intelligence at a safe distance from the inhabited universe, with built in “fail safes” in the event of disaster. This is the sixth such mission, the previous five having “disappeared”.Herbert fleshes out the underlying story with page after page of not only philosophical musings over the moral and ethical components of such development, but actual biological and technical steps required to achieve the goal. Of course, I’m sure most of the big words and highly technical language is largely BS, or else such an artificial intelligence would be present. However, there is not one in 100,000 that could make heads or tails of this endless stream of blather. I have to wonder exactly what audience Herbert is actually writing for. Either Herbert is one of the most intelligent people to have ever lived, or he wanted us to consider him such. In any event, he would have been better served to write at the Dune level as opposed to the God Emperor of Dune level.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I last read this book in my teens. I question how I got through it now, as much of it was likely well over my pathetically thick head back then, and the rest reads like a text book.
Still...it's Frank Herbert, the author I once read described (very appropriately) as, "I think, therefore I write." In other words, he doesn't necessarily filter for his audience. That's both a curse and a blessing when it comes to reading him.
And in this case, when the bulk of the book is a discussion on what it means to be conscious, mixed in with a little religion, it's a fascinating--if dense--read. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book crushed my skull and made my brain meats ooze out of my nose hole. The plot hinges, ostensibly, on a project to create artificial consciousness, but what it really becomes is a discussion and deconstruction of what IS consciousness. Really enjoyable and thought provoking, both as a science fiction adventure and as a novel of ideas.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5At the age of fourteen, Destination: Void (the revised edition published in 1978) was mystifying to me -- at least that's the way I'd of probably described it then. I knew as much about computers or artificial intelligence as whatever I'd seen in either the "cutting-edge" computer flick of the time, War Games (1983), or in the older, but what still seems cutting-edge to me even today, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).The second time I read Destination: Void, soon after The Matrix (1999) had come out, I thought Herbert was ahead of his time (especially considering the original version was published in 1966) as so much of what I saw on the screen in The Matrix seemed so familiar from the world Frank Herbert built in Destination: Void; namely, the physical connections and intertwining he envisioned between hi-tech, futuristic computer gadgetry and human flesh. Herbert's novel inhabited a cold detached world where expendable clones explored space in a rigged experiment, "Project Consciousness," aboard a spacecraft, the Earthling, automated by shutdown-prone, highly problematic OMCs ("organic mental cores"): Euphemism for "baby brains" that had been extracted, allegedly, from only "terminal cases." Potential bioethics snafus and the moral complications of cloning were being conceptualized in depth by Herbert and other science fictionists of his day a good thirty years before Dolly made cloned sheep international news.Today, having recently encountered the book at a second hand shop, I grabbed it and read it with great interest again, curious to see how the dense novel of ideas had evolved in my perception the third time around, almost three decades since first reading it, and nearly a half-century since it's publication.My appreciation for the book's title has never waned, steeped as it is in nihilism. At fourteen, I didn't have enough life experience, certainly not enough crushing disappointment, to feel the weight of that desperate word, "nihilism," but I knew it loomed mysterious, possibly romantic and definitely dark, in my imagination. Despite the book's title, Herbert was rarely a nihilist in his philosophy or writing (excepting his story, "The Nothing," and bitter novel, The White Plague) or eclectic life experiences, be it journalist, photographer, author, ecologist. Several of his book's titles, in fact, were suggestive of deeper, spiritual leanings, denoting as they did some vast Ineffable that might exist out there, somewhere, in the Cosmos, be it with his sci-fi novels, The Godmakers and The Heaven Makers, or in his lone but no less speculative novel that wasn't sci-fi, the heart wrenching, Soul Catcher**.The OMCs, those fragile organic mental cores, the literal brains of the Earthling, hardwired into the ship's computer, soon shorted out and died, as they were designed to die, poor babies. Could the Earthling's computer, then, first help its crew create an artificial OMC to monitor and maintain vital drives it wasn't plugged into, and do so in time before those deactivated drives made the Earthling go kaput? Maybe, but probably not. Because the mission's managers (none of whom were clones) who'd hatched their draconian, A.I. enterprise, as the suspect "Project Consciousness" for no doubt nefarious designs that exceeded the expressed for outcome of some supposed artificial consciousness, knew damn well that the crew lacked the skills, resources, and most importantly time necessary for success in such an impromptu, crash-course in creating an A.I. aboard a spaceship swiftly hurtling toward oblivion. Failure was their only option. Their destination? Destruction. And yet a fate hardly as bad as occupying some nebulous sounding locale known only as "Void".But (and there's always a big "but" in what appears at first blush to be hopeless, sci-fi crisis-scenarios in hard sci-fi), what the scientists back on Earth couldn't have possibly foreseen, was the full extent and range of the Earthling's computer's intuitive capacity. Yes, the reader needs to suspend disbelief, but this reader doesn't mind. For no one could have hypothesized that the Earthling's computer, in the process of assisting the crew as they attempted to create an artificial intelligence, an OMC, to salvage their mission and save their lives, would so completely identify with the Earthling's chaplain/psychiatrist, Raja Flattery, it would create for itself instead an artificial faith -- and in so doing become a self-styled Roman Catholic hellbent on ultimately "converting" the crew (most of them in deep hibernation), who'd be awakened, theoretically, should the crew on deck discover a new planetary Eden (or maybe an unearthly Hell) to colonize.Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's computer, Hal, the iconic IBM 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey infamy (published two years after Destination: Void), was a pussycat-computer next to the megalomaniacal nut job the Earthling's computer became. A devout computer-of-the-cloth that founded its own hybrid cult based on Raja Flattery's Catholicism, and enmeshed its own strange circuitry with stranger icons it misunderstood, per its idiosyncratic, literal divining of Raja Flattery's prayers and expressive faith, so that by the end of the story it demanded of the unbelieving, apostate crew, that they do something preposterous, something dreadful, something insane ... or else!Destination: Void was originally published in 1965 as "Do I Sleep or Wake" in Galaxy magazine. The novel would later serve as the prequel for Herbert's lesser known series, "The Pandora Trilogy," co-authored with Bill Ransom, in which they explored the long lasting consequences of a rogue computer that almost, but not quite, went Jim Jones on the crew of the ship it was supposed to protect and serve. Comprising the trilogy were The Jesus Incident (1979, in which Jesus Christ Himself makes a cameo appearance on a planet not named Earth), The Lazarus Effect (1983), and The Ascension Factor (1988), the latter published posthumously, two years after Frank Herbert's death. I recommend them all, especially to those interested in science fiction that's fascinatingly infused with spiritual themes and religious imagery.~~~~~** Prior to Soul Catcher's publication, several of its readers pleaded with Frank Herbert to change its devastating ending. But Herbert refused.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5At the age of fourteen, Destination: Void (the revised edition published in 1978) was mystifying to me -- at least that's the way I'd of probably described it then. I knew as much about computers or artificial intelligence as whatever I'd seen in either the "cutting-edge" computer flick of the time, War Games (1983), or in the older, but what still seems cutting-edge to me even today, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).The second time I read Destination: Void, soon after The Matrix (1999) had come out, I thought Herbert was ahead of his time (especially considering the original version was published in 1966) as so much of what I saw on the screen in The Matrix seemed so familiar from the world Frank Herbert built in Destination: Void; namely, the physical connections and intertwining he envisioned between hi-tech, futuristic computer gadgetry and human flesh. Herbert's novel inhabited a cold detached world where expendable clones explored space in a rigged experiment, "Project Consciousness," aboard a spacecraft, the Earthling, automated by shutdown-prone, highly problematic OMCs ("organic mental cores"): Euphemism for "baby brains" that had been extracted, allegedly, from only "terminal cases." Potential bioethics snafus and the moral complications of cloning were being conceptualized in depth by Herbert and other science fictionists of his day a good thirty years before Dolly made cloned sheep international news.Today, having recently encountered the book at a second hand shop, I grabbed it and read it with great interest again, curious to see how the dense novel of ideas had evolved in my perception the third time around, almost three decades since first reading it, and nearly a half-century since it's publication.My appreciation for the book's title has never waned, steeped as it is in nihilism. At fourteen, I didn't have enough life experience, certainly not enough crushing disappointment, to feel the weight of that desperate word, "nihilism," but I knew it loomed mysterious, possibly romantic and definitely dark, in my imagination. Despite the book's title, Herbert was rarely a nihilist in his philosophy or writing (excepting his story, "The Nothing," and bitter novel, The White Plague) or eclectic life experiences, be it journalist, photographer, author, ecologist. Several of his book's titles, in fact, were suggestive of deeper, spiritual leanings, denoting as they did some vast Ineffable that might exist out there, somewhere, in the Cosmos, be it with his sci-fi novels, The Godmakers and The Heaven Makers, or in his lone but no less speculative novel that wasn't sci-fi, the heart wrenching, Soul Catcher**.The OMCs, those fragile organic mental cores, the literal brains of the Earthling, hardwired into the ship's computer, soon shorted out and died, as they were designed to die, poor babies. Could the Earthling's computer, then, first help its crew create an artificial OMC to monitor and maintain vital drives it wasn't plugged into, and do so in time before those deactivated drives made the Earthling go kaput? Maybe, but probably not. Because the mission's managers (none of whom were clones) who'd hatched their draconian, A.I. enterprise, as the suspect "Project Consciousness" for no doubt nefarious designs that exceeded the expressed for outcome of some supposed artificial consciousness, knew damn well that the crew lacked the skills, resources, and most importantly time necessary for success in such an impromptu, crash-course in creating an A.I. aboard a spaceship swiftly hurtling toward oblivion. Failure was their only option. Their destination? Destruction. And yet a fate hardly as bad as occupying some nebulous sounding locale known only as "Void".But (and there's always a big "but" in what appears at first blush to be hopeless, sci-fi crisis-scenarios in hard sci-fi), what the scientists back on Earth couldn't have possibly foreseen, was the full extent and range of the Earthling's computer's intuitive capacity. Yes, the reader needs to suspend disbelief, but this reader doesn't mind. For no one could have hypothesized that the Earthling's computer, in the process of assisting the crew as they attempted to create an artificial intelligence, an OMC, to salvage their mission and save their lives, would so completely identify with the Earthling's chaplain/psychiatrist, Raja Flattery, it would create for itself instead an artificial faith -- and in so doing become a self-styled Roman Catholic hellbent on ultimately "converting" the crew (most of them in deep hibernation), who'd be awakened, theoretically, should the crew on deck discover a new planetary Eden (or maybe an unearthly Hell) to colonize.Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's computer, Hal, the iconic IBM 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey infamy (published two years after Destination: Void), was a pussycat-computer next to the megalomaniacal nut job the Earthling's computer became. A devout computer-of-the-cloth that founded its own hybrid cult based on Raja Flattery's Catholicism, and enmeshed its own strange circuitry with stranger icons it misunderstood, per its idiosyncratic, literal divining of Raja Flattery's prayers and expressive faith, so that by the end of the story it demanded of the unbelieving, apostate crew, that they do something preposterous, something dreadful, something insane ... or else!Destination: Void was originally published in 1965 as "Do I Sleep or Wake" in Galaxy magazine. The novel would later serve as the prequel for Herbert's lesser known series, "The Pandora Trilogy," co-authored with Bill Ransom, in which they explored the long lasting consequences of a rogue computer that almost, but not quite, went Jim Jones on the crew of the ship it was supposed to protect and serve. Comprising the trilogy were The Jesus Incident (1979, in which Jesus Christ Himself makes a cameo appearance on a planet not named Earth), The Lazarus Effect (1983), and The Ascension Factor (1988), the latter published posthumously, two years after Frank Herbert's death. I recommend them all, especially to those interested in science fiction that's fascinatingly infused with spiritual themes and religious imagery.~~~~~** Prior to Soul Catcher's publication, several of its readers pleaded with Frank Herbert to change its devastating ending. But Herbert refused.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A 1966 novel about colonists on their way to the star Tau Ceti. For reasons that I'm still not remotely clear on (despite the fact that it's the main focus of the book), their ship needs to be controlled directly by a conscious mind, so it's equipped with disembodied human brains trained since birth to do the job. As the story begins, though, all three brains have apparently gone insane and died, and the crew realize that if their mission is to continue they must do the supposedly impossible and create a conscious computer.Despite the hefty dose of suspension-of-disbelief all this requires, there is a lot of potential in this premise. If the mystery of what drove the brains crazy and the suspense of whether the mission will succeed or fail isn't enough, there's also the fact that some of the crewmembers are clearly keeping secrets from the others, not to mention the distinct possibility that the people behind the mission have some hidden agenda and that all is not as it seems. Unfortunately, rather than anything that takes advantage of those pretty good plot hooks, we mostly get lots of tedious technobabble and pretentious discussions about the nature of consciousness.... which, actually, I would have found interesting, if they weren't completely incoherent and nonsensical. In the end, the whole thing gives the distinct impression of having been inspired by a bunch of ill-informed dorm room stoners deep in the heart of the sixties sitting around talking about, like, really cosmic things, man!I already have the sequels to this novel. I think I might just ditch them.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Difficult read. A shocking ending saves the poor writing style.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Based on the publication date, this book was published after Dunewas serialized. For anyone who appreciates Dune, this is a disappointing, shockingly bad book. The plot concerns an interstellar ship designed to transport several thousand hibernating clones to a planet of Tau Ceti. Problem: the organic brains that control the ship have died. The few crew who are awake tackle the problem of turning the ship's computer into an artificial intelligence capable of running the ship.The general problem with science fiction is that the author is necessarily writing about matters about which he knows nothing. If the author knew how to make warp drive or a time machine, why would he merely write science fiction?Skillful writers gloss over this difficulty by just positing the advanced tech needed for the plot, or having characters take it for granted, or disposing of the issues with a few paragraphs of technobabble. Here, Herbert fills the book with more than 50% technobabble, thereby revealing that he is clueless regarding AI, as was everybody else in 1966. The result is a mess, no matter how much it is decorated with profound-seeming metaphysical speculation.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book really kept my attention for the first half as I was very interested to fully understand the underlying plan for the ship and its characters. This development was well laid out and layered which is something I always enjoy about Herbert's writing. Once the primary purpose of the journey and its obstacles was revealed however, I was much less enthused about the rest of the plot. In fact, the last third of the book was quite a slog. I hung on hoping for a big revelation that never came. I'm glad to have read this, but I'm just as glad to be done with it.