I came across this book by accident. I had been browsing for computer games to play and ended up in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Wikipedia page. There I read that Brian Reynolds (Alpha Centauri lead designer) had gained inspiration by reading Frank Herbert’s The Jesus Incident and Hellstrom’s Hive. I later found out that the former was the second book of Herbert’s WorShip series – Destination: Void being the official “prequel” (Book 1) to the books in the Pandora Sequence (made up of The Jesus Incident and all the others that came after). I decided to give Destination: Void a read in order to get into this universe.
Destination: Void is not the typical Herbert book by any means. Fans of Dune will not feel at home, mainly because Destination: Void is the polar opposite of what Dune tried to be. In Dune Herbert purposely suppressed technology in order to focus on the future of humanity, not the future of humanity’s technology. Because of this Dune has been able to endure. However, with Destination: Void, Herbert ventured into the the realm of hard sci-fi and in doing so made some daring steps into domains that are not his forte – cybernetics, hardware and AI.
In a nutshell the book deals with the trials and tribulations of a crew of 4 as they manually operate a ship en-route to Tau Ceti carrying thousands of hibernating colonists. In the opening scene the crew is faced with a problem – each of their 3 on-board AIs, called Organic Mental Cores (OMCs) either committed suicide or had to be disconnected due to rampancy. Due to this the crew is forced to manage ship functions and operations manually – a repetitive and stressful task impossible to perform throughout the while to Tau Ceti. Following this the crew receive clear orders from project management based on the moon: “Build a conscious AI that can automatically manage the ship and go into hibernation for the 400-year trip to Tau Ceti”.
Following this order from the project director, the narrative breaks into a series of philosophical, moral and religious discussions between the 4 crew members surrounding the main question of “what is consciousness?”. The novel is actually a 200+ page-long Socratic dialogue (and by Socratic I mean that in each of the conversations between the crew members there’s always someone trying to be a smart-ass) on the definition of consciousness masqueraded as a sci-fi paperback. The narrative follows this basic framework:
- Crew members have philosophical/moral/technical/whatever debate on the definition or origin of consciousness
- Crew members disagree with each other
- Crew members develop paranoia and become distrustful of each other or distrustful of project management motives
- Something malfunctions in the ship and the crew has to repair it
- One of the crew members explains the technology behind building a self-aware AI and builds a piece of aforementioned AI using 1960s computer hardware – note: some of the components are actual 1960s hardware and others are blatanly made up by Herbert (for example ENG MULTIPLIERS). These sections are basically the most brutal and unreadable portions of the book. Herbert here is purposely trying to confuse the common paperback reader who has absolutely no idea about hardware or cybernetics. Actually, something very upsetting about the book is that by Herbert coming up with his own pseudo-technology (yes, ENG MULTIPLIERS), he is basically making himself impervious to criticism and scientific scrutiny. Since only he knows what the hell an ENG MULTIPLER is, nobody can tell him what it’s not or how it should function. Had Herbert tried applying actual 1960s hardware technology he would have been scolded for his lack of scientific rigor
- Crew members receive a message from project management and react to it
- Go to #1
While some might find the philosophical discussions intriguing, these discussions mainly detract from the tension that this novel could have had, and the actual moments of tension are restricted to situations when crew members develop various paranoias or question the motives of project management when they receive orders from the moon. The other moments where tension can be found are when things break in the ship that need to be fixed – mainly because you never know if these are actual malfunctions or if they were pre-programmed by project management as some sort of morbid prank or if they were caused by the AI-in-the-making (called “The Ox” in the book), which is running in “TEST MODE”. All in all these moments of tension amount to perhaps 10% of the book.
If you ignore the numerous philosophical debates and skim over Herbert’s techno-jargon there is some room left to enjoy the moments of tension. The techno-babble can be easily ignored since it doesn’t add any value to the story whatsoever – in fact the quasi-science depicted here is less offensive than most Golden Age sci-fi descriptions of “coal-powered space ships”. Since so little background information is revealed about the project’s mission, the reader is left to put together the missing pieces and figure out what the project goals really are. Parts of the novel remind me vividly of J. G. Ballard’s short story Thirteen to Centaurus. In this story crew members are made to believe they are on a journey to Alpha Centauri when in reality they are on Earth playing the role of guinea pigs in a experiment to test the psychological effects of deep space travel.
I won’t recommend this book to the casual sci-fi fan looking for an easy read. If you can make it half-way through the book you will be rewarded with some fine moments of tension and anticipation – these are mostly confined to the second half of the book. Also, I believe the book’s ending was entertaining and gave me some moments of contemplation. In terms of the science, like I mentioned previously, most of it can be ignored but if you are a purist and need to read everything line by line you will find some gems scattered here and there that cover AI topics that are very relevant today. For example, Herbert mentions the idea of creating an AI from scratch and producing the equivalent of a dumb infant with 0 experience and 0 instincts. He then mentions the challenges faced with “training” an infant and providing a superset of past experience data points to serve as the AI’s experience. If you are familiar with the training of Machine Learning models, it’s amazing that rudimentary machine learning concepts are present in Herbert’s 1960s writings – considering his lack of formal technical or computer science education.
I will most likely continue exploring with the WorShip universe, but mostly because I read that the storyline of Bungie’s Marathon Trilogy was heavily influenced by the rampancy concepts presented in The Jesus Incident.