Destination Void by Frank Herbert

Overall Review: Destination Void is overly dense and filled with esoteric philosophy that doesn’t pay off. Nonetheless, it’s a fun book with interesting ideas for hardcore science fiction fans.

Synopsis: A group of clones onboard a ship bound for a distant star loses its human navigators in a malfunction. As they unexpectedly scramble to build an artificial consciousness in order to survive their journey, they learn that not everything is as it seems and must discover the truth about their mission.

Frank Herbert is famous for his critically acclaimed Space Opera Dune, set in a futuristic medieval society thousands of years in the future. An important theme of that book is the nature of the human mind. In particular, the Bene Gesserit and their ability to brainwash gives us a glimpse into Frank Herbert’s fascination with the human mind. These ideas also make up much of Destination Void.

However, where Dune was grounded in a plethora of politics and worldbuilding, Destination Void is bogged down by an over-reliance on themes of consciousness without really fleshing them out. Instead, they feel like material from an introductory philosophy textbook.

Even if not fleshed out enough, I did find some of Herbert’s ideas thought-provoking. Here are a few I liked:

  1. Much of the book is about the characters tinkering with the ship’s computer to build an artificial consciousness to assist with their goal of reaching Tau Ceti. However, the mission isn’t really about going to Tau Ceti as the clones are led to believe. Instead, each clone is a component of a “human computer” built and remotely operated by Mission Control. The real goal all along was to create an artificial consciousness within the safe enclosure of the ship. Frank Herbert does a good job of showing us the internals of this “human computer” via the interactions of the clones, such as seamlessly switching points of view mid-paragraphs. This technique allows Herbert to show how one of the characters is attempting to manipulate the others and then quickly switches to the other character to see their reaction - much like components of a computer sending signals between one another.
  2. The book spends a significant amount of time questioning what it means to be conscious and at what point a machine goes from being merely an intelligent machine to having its’ own consciousness. The reader follows the evolution of the machine growing from a simple automaton performing dumb operations into a thinking machine that could reasonably be seen as conscious. We also see the Bickel character work directly with the machine’s circuitry but are left to wonder at what point in time the circuitry (regardless of how complicated) becomes a real thinking being, if ever.
  3. Frank brings up the question of whether clones are the same as their human counterparts and the morality of treating clones as expendable. In the book, the clones are presented as having agency and deserving of freedom, and Mission Control (who views them as expendable components of some machine) is presented as the villain. At the same time though, the machine the clones are manipulating is presented as not having agency nor deserving freedom, while sharing a lot of the same characteristics as the clones. This cognitive dissonance forces the reader to re-evaluate the nature of not just the machine but the clones themselves. Another wrinkle is the cores, which are big CPUs built from a fetus’s brain and used to control the ship. In the book, there are three cores that all die before the story starts, but this is yet another example of a machine the clones treat as expendable. However, the cores are different - they are very clearly human (at least genetically), and the clones spend a bit of time second-guessing the nature of the cores’ existence. What does it mean to be human? The Prudence character also uses drugs to alter her body’s chemistry, and the reader is forced to question to what extent this changes her humanness.

However, like I said these ideas aren’t fleshed out enough nor tied together effectively. The concepts come across as esoteric and too surface-level, and I didn’t get the big payoff I was hoping for at the end.

Herbert’s focus on computers in the story was interesting to me, and especially impressive considering it was written in 1965 (and partially re-written in 1978). Herbert was clearly fascinated by computers since a good 1/3 of the book is computer techno-jargon. As a software engineer, I find Frank’s techno-jargon funny because it’s old-school computer talk. While reasonable for the era in which Herbert was writing, it doesn’t match to modern computers. His “computer engineer” character manually builds electrical circuits, and to activate the computer characters must manually send electrical charges through the system. What Frank describes as a hyper-complex computer in the far future is unbelievably low-level by modern standards. To me, this is an example of people imagining technology creating a faster horse rather than a car.

While the nerd in me found it interesting, I felt the computer jargon was overall a detriment to the story because it was very dense and bogged down the story. Unless you have a very solid grasp of low-level circuitry, most of the terminology comes across as gibberish. All it does is serve to demonstrate the skill of the clones at manipulating computers and show the reader the clones’ thought processes in building their artificial consciousness. This same effect could be reached with 90% less technobabble. I found myself struggling to make my way through the dense technical sections, particularly from the Bickel character – and I tend to like this sort of dialogue!

Overall, I’d only recommend Destination Void if you’re a big fan of Frank Herbert and are willing to stomach lots of computer jargon. If you’re willing to make you’re way through the dense writing, it’s fun pseudo-intellectual science fiction with interesting ideas and a fun premise.