Destination: Void

I really hate to do this, but I have to.

Life really is too short.

This is the second time around I’m trying to make my way through Destination: Void. The first time, maybe two summers ago, I got about thirty, thirty-five pages in, then lost interest. This time around, I got up to page 95, or jes’ ’bout halfway through.

But I have to put it down.

I really, really, really wanted to get through it. I remember listening to an audio book about the history and social meaning etc etc etc about the genre of science fiction (I think it was this one), and the author spent a whole CD on Frank Herbert. You know, Dune. The first great “world-builder,” I believe he called Herbert, and I tend to agree. Dune was Herbert’s second novel, his break-out masterpiece, written in the early-60s. The author of this audio book spent half the CD on that novel, then focused his remaining time on a trilogy released just after Dune, of which Void is one of them. It sounded truly fascinating: the premises, the setups, the plots, the conflicts, the head-scratching, thought-provoking dilemmas. I even found Void’s sequel at a used book store (The Jesus Incident) and bought it, and the third novel of the trilogy is on my finder’s list.

But I’m so sorry; I just can’t get through it.

Why not?

A couple of things struck me the second attempt with this novel, early on. First, and this is really just a pet peeve, not a deal-breaker: the punctuation is atrocious. Misplaced commas and quotation marks, misspelled words, spaces where there shouldn’t be spaces and no spaces between punctuation marks that traditionally get the right to a space. Okay. I might be a little too picky (I always thought I’d make a great editor, or at least a great proof-reader). One or two typos I can forgive. But one or two on every single page starts getting distracting, taking you out of the story. You start hunting for the anticipated mistakes and not concentrating on the characters. Obviously printed and bound long before the days of computers, this copy had to have been proofed by a guy who was either seriously drunk on the job or didn’t understand English.

Which brings me to the second thing. The way the novel flows made me think that it was originally written in another language and translated into English. Do you know what I mean? Ever read something translated and get the feel that it’s somewhat disjointed, illogical, irrational? You know, technically the sentences are constructed properly, but something about the words chosen doesn’t add up? The dialogue didn’t sound like real people talking; even when a character’s thoughts were being presented to me, I was like, is this the way other people really think?

Stylistically, the novel has a kind of “roving omniscience”, which means we’re privy to the point of view of multiple characters. Well, there are only four characters, so we get the innermost thoughts and feelings of each in turn. Sometimes the POV changes one paragraph after another. It’s a legitimate literary technique, I suppose, though I can’t recall many books which have utilized it. Just another thing I felt distracting, adding to the overall confusion of the novel.

Finally, the novel relies on that old Star Trek: The Next Generation gimmick, a gimmick which only reveals either plain lazy writing or poor pre-planning. What happens when the Enterprise is trapped in, oh, I don’t know, let’s say an alien force field and is in danger of being immanently crushed? Picard yells at Geordie in Engineering to get them out of there, and our blind hero comes up with “Captain, we just need to adjust the quantum phase fluctuations on the Heisenberg laterators and hope to reach Q point before the Dirac vectors go critical!” Voila! Data hits a couple of buttons on the console and the Enterprise escapes unscathed.

But – Nothing really happened! It’s a cheat, and my ST:TNG BS detectors were going critical long before I was a couple of pages into the novel.

So, sadly, I am placing Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void into cardboard storage with my other used books. The only way it will stand out in the box is that it will be, along with its orphaned sister, The Jesus Incident, unread.