I approached the book "Destination: Void" by Frank Hebert only because its sequel (The Jesus Incident) was highly praised, and because of its vague connection to the plot of the game Marathon. To be blunt, it wasn't a good book. Not terrible, but not good either.
Its synopsis is intellectually interesting: With what kind of environment and tools can you develop a (hard) artificial intelligence? So you have clones sent in a colony ship to a planet 400 light-years from here, and it is controlled by a human "brain in a jar". The brain failed (went insane), and so were the two other backups. As a result, four colonists are awaken from hibernation to manually control the ship's near-infinite controls, which leads to the realization than an AI is required.
And the the book spends way too much time about how this AI is built, with maddening sci-fi pseudo-science. The dangers of manually controlling the ship aren't well described, the tension between the characters turn into clichés, there are conspiracies on top of conspiracies, and the end is jarring, begging for a sequel that will be written 13 years later.
I'm not too bitter, and I shouldn't be too much of an "armchair critic" for an award-winning book of such an esteemed author. But I sense that I prefer good storytelling over plot and cleverness. As an example, I still prefer the beautiful meanderings of David Copperfield (by Charles Dickens) than the episodic twisting plots of A Song of Ice and Fire. As odd as it sounds, the former is more difficult to write than the latter, as it relies more on talent than planning or inspiration.
All that to say, I need to read a whole lot more. For now though, I'll have to go back to a bunch of non-fictional books.
Published on October 19, 2012 at 21:58 EDT
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