The Jesus Incident

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 [book:God Emperor of Dune 42432] 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...