W. M. Ransom

GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'll never know whether it was the homage as apology that prefaced this book which coloured my reaction to it. My suspicion, however, is that it played a minor role.

I dug out the two preceding books and rifled through each after I finished The Ascension Factor. Rather fearfully, in show more fact. I was hoping that my memory of both justified the five star ratings I'd given, simultaneously sad that the premise set up in the series should have come to such a dismal end, and worried that in actuality [b:The Jesus Incident|2013|The Jesus Incident (Destination Void, #2)|Frank Herbert|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1235006726s/2013.jpg|3634579] and [b:The Lazarus Effect|2014|The Lazarus Effect (Destination Void, #3)|Frank Herbert|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1224556610s/2014.jpg|3634580] were as poorly written and trite as The Ascension Factor.

One of the things which reportedly frustrates people about Herbert is his prose. He doesn't explain his meaning - the reader must sift through clues, piece together snippets, hold multiple abstract concepts simultaneously in sight. He does not elucidate beyond a chapter quote that teases a direction of thought. It was this brilliance that was most clearly, and quite painfully, missing from The Ascension Factor. The n-dimensional perspectives that Herbert brings to his work, the nuanced meaning and cryptic references to ideas that entice groping towards understanding, were wholly absent. This book was void (pardon the pun) of Herbert's ability to interweave themes through subtlety and inference.

So talking about the plot is a bit of a farce. It all went . . . nowhere. It didn't finish on a note of grand vision or even abstruse complexity. It was a let-down of quantum proportions.

To be fair to the real author of this work, which is not Frank Herbert but Bill Ransom, who in their right mind would want the thankless task of trying to put pen to the path blazed by Herbert? A brave soul, indeed, if a well-meaning and somewhat foolhardy one. show less

Centuries after the events of The Jesus Incident, the sentient kelp on Pandora was nearly driven to extinction, causing sea levels to rise and washing away all dry land. Humanity has evolved and split into two distinct factions: heavily mutated descendants of human clones who live on crowded, floating organic islands, and genetically standard pure humans who live in advanced, high-tech submarine cities and are secretly regrowing the sentient kelp.

The fragile balance of Pandora is threatened show more by a corrupt, power-hungry Merman named GeLaar Gallow. He wants to sink the organic islands to wipe out the Islanders, and plans to use those new landmasses to build continents. To fuel his totalitarian goals, Gallow plans to open orbiting hibernation tanks left behind by the AI, Ship, to recruit unmutated humans.

As conventional political and military factions clash, the sentient Avata kelp reaches a critical mass and begins actively responding to the chaos. The kelp's re-emergence forces the Islanders and the Mermen to address their disregard for the planetary consciousness. show less

A sentient voidship declares itself God and deposits desperate human colonists onto Pandora, a hostile planet teeming with deadly lifeforms. Humanity must learn how to worship the entity to survive.

Following the events of Destination: Void, the crew's rogue artificial intelligence, known simply as Ship, arrives at the Tau Ceti system. It abandons the survivors on Pandora, a world dominated by vicious organic life, including psychic kelp and deadly hylighters.

Claiming to be God, Ship refuses show more to help the colonists unless they discover a meaningful way to worship and prove themselves worthy of survival. To aid the floundering colonists, Ship awakens Raja Lon Flattery, a chaplain and psychiatrist, from hibernation. The survivors must unravel the mysteries of Avata, Pandora's planetary consciousness, and the true nature of their creator to avert total extinction. show less

This is a tough one for me. There's times this novel absolutely captured and engrossed me, and there were times when my eyes slid over the words without retaining anything, because it was just...dense? Boring? Overly confusing? All of the above?

There is so much going on in this novel, not all of it necessary. I truly believe the book could have been trimmed by half and it would have been much more impactful.

For me, when the authors (and by the way, having read a lot of Herbert, I do have to show more credit Ransom for making the writing both less annoying--because it's not quite as confounding as Herbert alone--and more annoying--because of the poetry) tackle the scenes with Ship and examine what it means to be an all-knowing, all-seeing omnipotent God and what it means to be aware of that God and Its power, well, then the narrative just sings.

But all the stuff around it? Ugh. It just plodded for the most part.

Not quite sure if I'm going to invest the time in reading the next one in the series The Lazarus Effect or not. We'll see in a few days. show less