Destination: Void

Whoa. Fuckin'....whoa.

Don't know how many times I have let Frank Herbert absolutely fuck my mind, but I keep coming back for it. The author of Dune and, perhaps more importantly, mastermind/creator of the Dune universe, wrote Destination: Void, which kicked off the WorShip series that included 3 others (all other 3 co-authored with Bill Ransom).

In an undated near-future scenario, astronauts are sent to the Tau Ceti galaxy to begin colonising a habitable planet. Sounds like a simple enough plot, until Herbert tosses in that 6 prior missions have all ended in disaster, the technology for such a journey is either in its infancy or does not exist, the astronauts are genetically (strategically) placed clones (with clone colonists in hybernation tanks on-board) and have dozens of replacements for each of the four full-time positions out of the thousands of bodies inside said tanks...and biggest of all...semi-self-aware-computers.

It actually is a very short book and a very short read, but many of the paragraphs and Herbertian tirades are in regards to something I just cannot wrap my brain around: the logic of creating a self-aware computer. I'm sure that if I were a computer nerd and made wiring up computers and trying to gain them a consciousness a hobby of mine, plus had a firm understanding of human psychology and the biology of the brain, that I could follow along no problem. Let me just throw a few phrases out there that sound like Chinese to me:

nerve-net simulators; electroform inputs of nerve impulse groups; flux impulses in four dimensions; inhibitory roulette cycles; black box – white box transfer;

Why? Why can't I understand any of this? Maybe it is just me being an idiot and I will shut up about it.

The good news is, however, that this takes nothing away from the book. As I did not fully understand what was going on with the wiring of this system, I appreciated it as an effort, a means to an end, to get a self-aware computer constructed. And that is exactly what all this is, so it is not imperative to the plot. But once shit starts getting constructed and happening...whoa man, hold on!

The first brains, the organic mental cores, which are crude versions of humans' early attempts at constructing self-aware computers, have human brains acting as the emotional/reactionary/survivalist side of the ship's computer. They all go mad, and are destroyed. The astronauts are then completely on their own save for the others in hibernation. When I had this much of the book in my brain's grasp I told myself this is basically what 2001:A Space Odyssey would have been if it were fucking great.

Instead, Herbert spends the next 180 or so pages (of 200, mind you) fucking with the reader on what it means to be conscious. Just soak that in for a second. What does it mean to you? This discussion could go on for years, and has. It has evolved since the first philosophers. Even before Diogenes the Cynic helped us bridge the gap between man and animal.

To me it has always been signified by goals. Seeking more than survival and reproduction, but setting up goals for ourselves. Aspirations. Shit like that.

But this book does not stop there. Not only is the question a constant issue amongst the crew and constant theme throughout the book, but there are other, brilliant, typical Frank Herbert ideas thrown in there to help get your brain motivated and thinking of new, novel, ideologically challenging concepts.

It was interesting to me that the ship's Psychologist is also the ship's Chaplain, for example. Why? Because psychology is not much for an exact science, and has assumptions associated with it and diagnoses that are based on historical symptoms and behaviour of the human. Religion is not so different from that, now is it? He also comments later on that both Religion and Psychology are methods of healing, specifically healing people's brain or intellect. I can attest to this. Because when one feels uncomfortable with an anxiety brought on by substance abuse there are two overwhelmingly popular choices people make to seek treatment: Religion (e.g. Jesus, e.g. Being born again) and medical (e.g. psychological) treatment. It happens like that, not just limited to those two but much more often than not. Honestly, it does!

Another great moment is when men are trying to teach the computer life and death by teaching it what it means to preserve a life dependent upon its systems – in this case a farm animal in gestation/fetus phase that the colonists could use if they land at their destination – and the computer decides to kill it, just to learn its limits, learn of its own behaviour and maybe even test its own powers. Well one of the most hopeful men on the crew for this test working out is the Life Systems Engineer. And of the people on this crew, of the four awake, of course the Life Systems Engineer is going to have the most trouble seeing past this self-aware-computer initiated abortion. And it shows.

source: http://www.voodish.co.uk/articles/human-brain-simulated-on-super-computer/ 

Moments like this happen in a Frank Herbert novel within a sentence or two, and it is all thanks to his amazing ability to develop characters. You see more of what is going on inside their heads than with any other story-teller. The female working in the group of four has a much different but equally as interesting role. She is a clone placed on board because of her natural ability to lead, care for others, and juggle several responsibilities at once. As such, her independence is driven by certain chemicals and offset by others that showcase her caring side, and whatever it takes to match these Herbert explains that it inadvertently forces her to be extremely sexually active by nature. She takes chemicals to reduce her sex drive, but she also experiments, due to the pressure of the situation, with chemicals that enhance her awareness and help her ponder as the crew tries to wrap their minds around  consciousness. The taking of these drugs displaces those that reduce her sex drive, and soon enough she is conflicted by constant sexual thoughts, fantasies and desires.

Seriously, for such a short book the character development is incredible. I could go on, but I won't. Instead, I'll just say that everyone should be reading plenty of Frank Herbert, and once you get accustomed to his style, then you can delve into this one, because it is complex and difficult to follow but extremely brilliant.

White Plague - Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert is one of the best authors of all time, not just science fiction. And if you need any proof of this, I’d recommend a fairly non-sci-fi book like this. It covers a massive range of issues, from morality and religion to violence and war, science and politics and of course, the ever interesting “what-if” doomsday scenarios.

There’s also a range of characters, predominantly American, Brits and fucked up Irish. And not the great, St. Patrick’s Day everyone wearing green and listening to U2 or Dropkick Murphy’s Irish, I’m talking about the real Irish. The ones who are violent, hateful dickbags with a penchant for getting under people’s skin and holding grudges with them until the end of the world looms near.

But through all the violence and hatred, Frank Herbert has a way of conveying the heart of the issue without actually writing anything of the violence. You just hear about it after it has already happened, it is really quite brilliant. The very beginning is the only time in which violence is described in detail, and that is what sets off the entire plague.

An American (of Irish descent) in Dublin loses his family courtesy the IRA and basically goes batshit. He spends the next stage of his life retracting into a home-made basement laboratory creating a disease that will kill women. All women. So that Ireland (the place he lost his family), the source of their extremists’ weapons (Libya), and the source of their pain (Great Britain) will know his despair when their women parish. Scientists and politicians from around the world unite to find a cure, or even just to know what is happening with this disease. Women in quarantine are held in captivity against their wills, and are unsurprisingly targeted by the lonely, mad male population. But of course, being raped by a man who is a carrier (with no way of knowing if he is a carrier or not at this point) will only kill you later on anyway. Eventually the same united scientists/politicians begin to suspect who may find the cure first and use it as leverage to become a superpower, or who may use it to protect their women and call for others as there is about a 10,000:1 ratio of male to female on the planet.

So there is unrest globally and within the groups fighting for a cure. There is also a new pope because the previous one had a heart attack as the Catholic Church is blamed by so many for their ties to the Irish and the violence in that country. This loose end is tied just enough to talk about how the new pope is assassinated because he’s fucking crazy. But in typical Herbert fashion, this isn’t a failure of religion, it is a failure of bad politics. The religion is actually a huge part of the antagonist’s soul-searching, as he is teamed with a Priest and a devastated boy to a firsthand viewing of all his damage. Then there is the asshole Irishman, starting shit and beating the Priest on occasion, coming on way too strong and making himself an opponent of not only religion, but the quest everyone is on to make it to the labs and work towards a cure (which, also in typical Herbert fashion, isn’t really what’s happening).

I also freaked out, healthwise, when I read this book…seriously. I jotted down the following passage as I crossed the quarter mark of the book:

I did realise in the early goings of reading this, though it is very terrifying and well written, I am possibly too much of a hypochondriac to read about plagues, outbreaks of disease and biological warfare. There's a couple chapters; one in which Herbert explains the creator of the disease's reaction to it, catching a stray from the lab I believe he calls it, and is overcome by less-than life threatening but still serious symptoms. In the next chapter we learn the symptons first hand from a lady intent on explaining to scientists/doctors exactly what is happening to her as she loses everything. The symptoms begin to make me nervous, and all of a sudden I'm consciously aware that, on some minor scale, I share some of these symptons with her. For example, as she's lying on her deathbed recalling everything that she has noticed lately that was even slightly different, she mentions she woke up horny, very horny. Hey, I was really horny this morning, I thought. And she follows this up by explaining how hungry she was in the morning, ate two breakfasts. Hey I could have eaten two breakfasts, I was that hungy! She goes on to mention the headache, which was no doubt similar to the one I had (and I forgot as I was reading at the time that mine was due to dehydration and alcohol consumption the prior night). Then it's the current symptoms, elevated heartrate (Oh no, my heart is beating faster than normal too), sweating and feeling cold (I think I just got the chills myself!) and dizziness (Wait for it...this is the feeling I usually get before a wave of dizziness comes. Holy Mother of God, he got me! John Roe O'Neill got me! The sonnovabitch!). But like a crazy person with a message to send as the world ends and fades to black, I hear my conscience, the voice of reason inside my head, running against the current of destruction and trudging through the rubble, arms waving and screaming to get my attention. Shouting all the while "It's not real! It's all in your head, you actually feel quite fine." And when I hear this I realise I do actually feel quite fine, and I'm not going to die of a disease Frank Herbert made up in a basement in Seattle....though, suspiciously enough, I was reading this book the same time I was in Seattle, and about the same time I'd had medium-rare pork for the first time.

So yeah, hypochondria, it'll ruin anything I'm reading about human health, disease and illness you can think of.

Anyway, if you have time to read a doomsday book, or like Sci-Fi authors bridging the gap into more of a thriller role of fiction, or just hate the lousy Irish (I am very Irish for those of you who don’t know me, so I feel fine talking this way), then I recommend this as one of the best late-Herbert books out there.