I tell anyone willing to listen that I'm a fan of Dune and all, but for my money, Herbert's Pandora Sequence is the winner. Love that trilogy and reread it every 5 or so years.
But I haven't read the prequel (Pandora book 0.5?) that often, maybe only once before?
Spoilers:
What you've got here is a semi-long novel, all set on a spaceship. For that matter, set in the Tin Egg, a control room (bridge) and a couple other rooms. That's about it. A scene or two outside the ship or with the hibernating humans, but not much more.
And that's ok. The point of this book is not the destination in a location sense, but in a discovery sense. Humans back on the moon have sent out many ships to Tau Ceti to supposedly set up a colony. What they really are doing is creating an artificial consciousness. These ships are run by human brains (organic mental cores) but guess what? They all fail. And the only way to make the 200-400 year journey is to either decide by lots which hibernating human to dig a brain out of, or create an artificial consciousness. Skip to the end: they succeed.
But not without a lot of stress and conflict. Each one of the four crew mates awake all have secret missions, from watching one of the others to blowing the ship if certain things happen. But in the end, the ship (soon to be Ship) wakes and has its own designs.
Spoilers complete.
Not sure when I'm going to read the trilogy. I have a hankering. I read it about 3-4 years ago. Maybe I'll wait a bit longer? I think I like the trilogy more than this book because the trilogy falls into that "virgin planet with dangerous native life and humans want or need to live here" sub-sub-genre. One of my favorites!
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