Looking back, I wish I had read Destination: Void first. This book is the sequel but can be read alone. My nature will demand the first book before I can read the third, however. There is a lot of material that takes a lot of thought within these books.

To expect less is to sell Frank Herbert short. It sounds lame to say, but being a scientist Herbert is thorough if he's anything. His books do not read like fluff, even when they are more watered down or abstract than hard science (i.e. Dune, etc). By the time I got to the end of this, it was a kick in the gut.

I loved it. I would reccomend it.

If you can digest a mix of religion, sci-fi, fantasy, philosophy, weird sex, algae, poetry and a weird sense of humor then this book might be for you, or in Frank Herbert's words: "eminently couch-able".

Quite enjoyed it, straight onto the next!

It seems clear to me this book must have been a major inspiration for the movie Avatar, as there are too many similarities to be coincidence:

1. A wild alien planet called Pandora filled with dangerous wildlife, including at least one form that's thought to be intelligent.
2. It turns out there's a single mass consciousness at the center of all this biomass, that even calls itself “Avatar” when it communicates.
3. A single messiah-hero who makes contact with the intelligence, “goes native,” and attempts to bring the “gospel” back to the others.
4. It culminates in a battle between those who want to live in harmony with Avatar and those who want to subjugate and destroy it.
5. There's even a scene where the power of Avatar is used to heal a grievously wounded human – successfully, unlike the movie.

A quick Google search shows I'm not the only person to notice all these uncanny similarities.

I was shocked to realize this book was published in 1979, over ten years after Herbert's masterwork, Dune. It has the feel of an early work, where Herbert is clumsily trying to explore some of the ideas that he refined and did with more sophistication in later years. I feel it tries to be too many things at once and fails at all of them.

n  Is it a story about first contactn with a powerful and strange alien intelligence, with the attendant messages about aggressive humans who try to destroy anything they don't understand and mow down all native culture as they expand?

n  Is it a story about a homegrown religious cultn created by a generation ship run by an AI that has styled itself as a god? This is the aspect of the story that's played up in the official blurbs, and the entire first-contact storyline is occurring in the context of the crew's need to find a way to appease Ship before Ship punishes them. The religion story and the first-contact story are somewhat tied together by the miraculous birth of the new messiah, who will carry the mass consciousness into the future and save them all. Call me dumb, but I never did understand how the eponymous "Jesus Incident" (Ship's term for the crucifixion of Christ, which Ship shows to one of the characters via a form of time travel) fit in at all, considering no one living in this story has ever heard of this Jesus dude.

n  Is it a story about clonesn and the tension between their fundamental personhood and the attempts of the people who run this place to use them as expendable slave labor?

I love first-contact stories, but I've read so many that take the easy way out and make the aliens telepathic so the protagonists can skip all the hard work of learning to communicate with them, that I yawned when it became evident this is another one of those. (Although I have to admit it probably pre-dates most of the other ones I've vread, so maybe Herbert did it first.) Two counter-examples that come to mind are A Deepness in the Sky and Damocles, and while I didn't love either of those stories, I really admired that they didn't skip that nuts-and-bolts stage. In fact, Damocles was entirely about that stage of alien contact.

I also have trouble seeing how anyone who genuinely wanted to tell a story set either on an alien planet or on an orbiting spaceship could come up with scenery this blank and uninspiring. Talk about opportunity lost! Here we have a whole new planet and no idea what it looks like. We're told a few basics – there are two suns and at least two moons, and two large continents surrounded by a massive ocean that's filled with kelp. There are a few sketchy descriptions like “plain” and “cliffs” and “beach” but that's about it as far as the physical scenery. The wonder and awe and creativity you might expect to find associated with a new planet is totally absent, not to mention any exploration of life with two suns and two moons and how it would affect the ecology.
There's wildlife, and it's uniformly dangerous, but aside from the floating highlighters and the nerve runners, there's no attempt at all to really bring them to life. There's a whole slew of deadly animals that kill multiple characters, and they have evocative names like “demons” and “hooded dashers” and “spinnerets,” but we have no idea what they look like, sound like, smell like, or how they move, other than being fast. And apparently there's not a single xenobiologist anywhere in this expedition, because no one seems at all interested in understanding their morphology, their basic biology, or their habits. As a former biology student, I had so many unanswered questions, like:

"What do nerve runners eat when they're not chowing down on human nerve tissue?"
"Are nerve runners a plague on the local wildlife like they are on humans?"
"How do other local animals defend against them?"
"What do all these legions of other predators eat when they're not feasting on colonists? Whatever they are, there must be loads of them around to support all these predators."
"If the local predators can eat human flesh with no ill effects, does the inverse follow that humans can also eat the local fauna, and maybe some of the flora too?
"Speaking of flora, are there any land plant analogs on this planet? What color are they? What are they like?"
"If highlighters use ballast rocks to control their altitude, how do baby highlighters learn this skill?" (BTW, the descriptions of the highlighters remind me quite a lot of Morrowind's netches.)

Shipboard life suffers from all the same problems. We're told this ship is many kilometers long and so complex that no one person has ever even seen all of it, and yet we get nothing about the many wonders that must be contained within it. Remember Rendezvous with Rama and Eon and all the amazing things in those ships? Yeah, not so much. Suffice it to say, this book definitely did not “take me there.” These are the kinds of amazing things that draw me to science fiction, so I feel deeply resentful that I've been robbed of one of the really fun aspects of SF.

On a nice note, a bunch of the characters are people of color (one of them is literally various colors). Shout out to the Black Power 70s. I'm not sure how I feel about writing about black and brown people and putting them in a distant future where today's racial labels have no meaning. On the one hand, a tiny little yay for a white author imagining a future that's not all white people. But on the other hand, isn't that literally the cheapest possible way to tell a story with racial diversity in it? Throw in a few skin and hair descriptions and then airily wave off the idea that any of that matters 3,000 years in the future?

Of course I have to talk about the women and the sexism: The whole sexual vibe of the book is quite skeevy. A full half of the male characters are disgusting pervs who are constantly plotting how to turn the women into their personal sex slaves, and we're treated to titillating details of how great the women's bodies are. And some of the women are trying to get the pants off some of the men (not the same men). Meanwhile, other women are apparently goal-oriented enough to sleep their way to their goals with those same pervy men I mentioned. The whole thing is so 70s it's pretty gross, in a “we lived through the free-love 60s so now we're totally jaded about sex and recognize it's just a tool and doing it is just a transaction,” kind of way. And for chrissake Frank, actual women do not hang around naked in front of mirrors congratulating themselves on how stacked they are. Another small but telling fact: Everyone has two names, but all the men are referred to by last name throughout the story, while the women are almost entirely referred to by the more familiar first name – a small but symbolic form of personal space invasion that women still live with daily to this day. I note that despite all this, it passes the Bechdel test, solely because late in the story, there's a fair amount of interaction between a pregnant woman and her female medical attendant, who are both major characters.

Random gripe: I got so tired of the word “side.” Page after page, shipside, groundside, dayside, nightside, topside, and of course on dangerous Pandora there's also heavy obsession with safe inside and deadly outside. I wanted to turn my backside on all this.

Hmmmmm..........

The story is ok, there aren't too many characters to remember, but the way it's written is heavy going.

To fully appreciate (and possibly understand) Frank Herbert's "The Jesus Incident", one should probably read his novel "Destination: Void", which I actually think is a better novel.

Herbert wrote "D:V" in 1965, and he wrote "TJI" (along with Bill Ransom) in 1979. A semi-sequel to "D:V", "TJI" takes place literally thousands of years after the events of "D:V".

Raja Flattery, one of the four characters from the first novel, is awakened from his hyper-sleep on board the ship Earthling, now simply called Ship, which is run by the human-like conscious computer that Flattery helped create.

Ship is basically God to the inhabitants of the ship, cloned humans who have, until recently, been in stasis. They have discovered an inhabitable world, which Ship has called Pandora, but their attempts at colonization have been failures due to the carnivorous and violent life-forms that inhabit the world, especially the electrokelp that lives in the oceans that make up a majority of Pandora's surface.

A faction of colonists are bent on wiping out the kelp, but Ship believes that the kelp is sentient and trying to communicate, so he enlists Thomas, with the help of a poet and several other clones, to lead an expedition to the planet's surface in order to communicate with the kelp.

There is a lot of stuff going on in this novel, much of it fascinating and entertaining. Some of it, however, seems extraneous and superfluous. My guess is that Herbert and Ransom took turns writing the chapters. It has that choppy, disjointed feel that happens when two very different writers with two different styles of writing collaborate. It can be fun, much like a Saturday morning serial in which each chapter ends with a cliff-hanger, but it also has the tendency to feel like neither writer knew where the other writer was going, so they decided to take it in many different directions.

Not that the novel isn't readable. It is, and it is enjoyable. Just don't expect it to go anywhere you expected it to, and don't expect sufficient closure for some of the tangential storylines, some of which end abruptly and one seems to have been dropped completely.

Interesting note: Director James Cameron clearly "borrowed" many of the ideas from this novel for his film "Avatar". The name of the planet, for one, as well as the discovery that the entire planet and its many life-forms are connected via a "neural network", a sentience that calls itself Avata.

While I loved "Avatar", I'm thinking Cameron probably should have thrown in some acknowledgments to Herbert and Ransom's novel in his film credits. Maybe he did, but I don't remember seeing them. (And I am the type to actually read credits.) Cameron kind of has a track record for plagiarizing other, better, works of science fiction. (See "The Terminator" and Harlan Ellison, 1984 lawsuit---settled out of court.)

This was an interesting book, I didn't quite realize while I was reading it that it has inspired Cameron's Avatar movie, since it has in my opinion a totally different world description.
The challenge that the plot raises for the characters in this book is what is the right way to adore the Creator ( in this case the Ship). And the answer that it leads to is about using the human potential to overcome barriers such as the communication with alien species or between humans and clones. So, in a way, also becoming a creator. At least this is how i got the message.
Beyond that i appreciated a lot the the way the intelligent sentient kelp was described as well as the power plays between the characters.
What i did not understood too well were the references to the Jesus incident: i really did not find the key of the book in the Gologota story, maybe this is just me... i thought the story could have been just as good without that part.
Another thing that i didn't really enjoyed was the pace of the book: although i like reading stories with a slow pace i thought in this case it was not that, it was more an inconsistency of the style across the chapters.
Overall, a great story for 1979, a good reading for 2017, but a bit too much of Christian references...

A book from my teenagehood, didn't realise it's part of a trilogy. I originally read it as a recommendation by the creators of one my favourite PC games of all time – Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. There are seeds of some really good ideas here, and you can see the motifs carried over from Herbert's "Dune" days, featuring god-like beings and sciency mysticism. It is a book with many, many characters and Herbert does a good job of getting us acquainted with them and keep it all in sync. Overall however, I was left disappointed and quit the book.

First of all, the gold-like central character was very unbelieveable, but I had this problem with God Emperor of Dune as well. The timeline was very confusing and not clear. The characters act unreasonably and enter unnecessary conflict. I could go on.

What was most grating was realising why my teenage mind would love this book. There is disproportionate attention being paid to every sensual physical details of female characters, while male characters are usually introduced by name only, or by a brief summary. This was especially jarring as it undermines the raison d'etre of most of the characters, since they are all meant to be part of a scientific/military expedition/colonisation effort, and reducing them to walking sex dolls

I guess I'm just jaded at using genre writing to cover up for missing characterisation and a meaningful story. I can't believe I just wrote that in a review for a Frank Herbert novel...

For we have created god in our image and then forgotten that we were an essential part of that process. Here is the essence of this story, epic in scope, profound in thought and inspiring in its portrayal of the inherent spiritual focus in humanity. We act out our impulses without any knowledge of where they come from and then ascribe an external power due to our ignorance, all along it is the humanity behind the human, the force behind the form that we tap into in every creative genius. There are many ideas Herbert covers here that is also done, to a greater or lesser degree in Dune, but these are not themes that ever get old and they are most assuredly worthy of contemplation.

In 1965, Herbert wrote Destination: Void. Then, in 1979 he picked up the story and, assisted by poet Bill Ransom, wrote three sequel novels, of which The Jesus Incident is the first. With a crew composed of beings born during its long flight as well as those picked up from planets visited along the way, the artificial consciousness known as 'Ship' has brought their vessel to Pandora, which it claims will be the last chance for humanity to successfully develop a viable civilization. Part of the challenge is to see if they can develop a manner of true WorShip with which to relate to this artificial, godlike consciousness. A chaplain/psychiatrist, a chief administrator,a poet and a biological engineer try to help the on-world colony, known as the Redoubt, to prosper, given the fact that the planet is 80% water, is the home of many predatory lifeforms, and possesses a sentient form of kelp.

Not really remembered except for a generally positive lasting impression.

This is probably the worst book I’ve ever read. It’s only my stubborn determination and respect for Frank Herbert that kept me going to the end. Destiination void it was OK, but I still struggle to accept that a computer acquired the ability to manipulate space and time as it crossed into consciousness, much less than its first thought would be to foment worship. However, I excepted the premise and was looking forward to this next trilogy.

I literally could not be more disappointed.

The story and characters were confusing, the scene setting was incomplete, ships motivations and the concept of worship were infused but to such a light degree it baffled me as a reader as to why I was even involved in the story. World building was nil, plot developments arbitrary, and in the end I’m just glad that it’s done I can put it behind me and never think about this again.

This is actually the first book I've read from the "Destination: Void" series, but the fact that it has a prequel doesn't cause that many problems. The new conditions (new planet, different environment, new characters etc) make this readable even if you skip the first book.

If you've read "Dune" you'll probably recognize some of the grand themes in these series, from the religious aspect to tyrants and manipulations. But don't worry, this is not an alternative "Dune"; it's a whole new universe with its new (forms of old) problems and its new solutions.

I already said while reviewing Destination: Void that I did not like the direction the story was going in the end, so it should be no surprise that I didn't like The Jesus Incident. A book filled with religious allegory and heavy philosophy about the definition of being human and the essence of religious worship and violence, it was so heavy that I had to make a lot of effort to finish it. I am going to go ahead and assume I didn't really understand it, but the important thing is that I didn't enjoy it. It was like all of the pretentious stuff from Dune got concentrated in Pandora and expanded upon by the contribution of Bill Ransom.

It's funny that as I was preparing to read the series again, my memories of it from my early teens were corrupted by my own desires, mixed up with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, muddled by all I have read since. I know feel betrayed, because I really liked the Pandora series when I was a child and now I wonder if I have gotten dumb with age or if I just didn't get what I was reading back then to the point that I hallucinated a whole new narrative and feel.

So in the previous book a crew of clones on a generation ship construct an artificial consciousness. Because it is fully aware, it is also God-like, controlling space, time and reality. From the book it's not clear how exactly it did it, but, thus equipped, Ship accomplishes its mission to bring its human clone cargo to a habitable planet in the Alpha Centauri system by switching/constructing different realities until a habitable planet exists there. This leads to many histories, many Earths, many types of humans. Or it could have just created the planet out of nothing, then ran some extra realities for fun, although this doesn't explain why the planet was so hostile to a typical human population and makes the existing lifeforms its direct invention and responsibility. Anyway, once there, Ship acts like an omnipotent god, interfering when it feels like it, demanding WorShip and declining to interfere when it suits it, by invoking vague snobby principles that it makes up on the spot or it derives from histories that it otherwise keeps hidden from the human population. Somehow Jesus is involved in all of this, although for the life of me I couldn't see what the connection was.

Bottom line: I almost hated this book. And it has so many of Herbert's obsessive ideas in it: religion, politics, ecology, evolution of humanity. As much as I respect Frank Herbert as a writer (so much that I am in the middle of rereading all of his books) I have to subjectively review this book alone, and for that I will probably rate it under average.