Destination: Void

EXTREMELY POOR - essentially unreadable. If you, like me, are one of those unfortunates who has squandered minutes and hours consuming this text - cleanse your "Frank Herbert" palate with one of his many other novels. There are many good ones, and "Dune" and "The White Plague" are both excellent.

Not very readable at all - one of Herbert's most impenetrable novels.

I wouldn't say that this late series by Frank Herbert (and subsequently, with Bill Ransom) are anywhere near his best, but the other 3 novels are at least reasonably readable. You could well read the latter 3 novels of the series and just skip this one with no loss whatsoever. In fact, you should!

There is a very considerable amount of turgid prose in Destination Void, followed by pointless repetition of that same prose. I kept reading on, assuming that the assorted mysteries presented so far would be explained - but what I got was more meaningless insolubles. If you have the impression that this was a very frustrating book - which it was - then I have achieved my goal with this review.

It is my impression, not based on not much more than a hunch, that the "co-author" Bill Ransom wrote a considerable proportion (perhaps most???) of books 2 and 3 of the series (The Jesus Incident and The Lazarus Effect). By the time we get to the last book, Ascension Factor, it was pretty well entirely Bill Ransom.