The Jesus Incident

infobox Book |
name = The Jesus Incident
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = Frank Herbert and
Bill Ransom
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Science fiction novel
publisher = G. P. Putnam's Sons
release_date = 1979
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
pages =
isbn = ISBN 0-399-12268-0
preceded_by =
followed_by = The Lazarus Effect

"The Jesus Incident" (1979) is the second science fiction novel set in the by the American author Frank Herbert and poet Bill Ransom. It is a sequel to "", and has two sequels: "The Lazarus Effect" and "The Ascension Factor".

The book is notable for inspiring the Marathon Trilogy, which had an AI, known as Durandal, achieving rogue conciousness, as a colony ship is attacked by an alien race.

Plot introduction

The book takes place following the events in "Destination: Void". At the end of "Destination: Void" the crew of the ship succeeds in creating an artificial consciousness using the computing equipment of their ship. The new conscious being has a level of awareness that allows it to manipulate space and time and at the end of the book, the ship instantly transports itself to a planet which it has decided the crew will colonize. The book ends with a demand from the ship, now Ship, for the crew to learn how to WorShip or how to establish a relationship with Ship, a god like being.

"The Jesus Incident" begins some time after the ending of "Destination: Void" and though no specific amount of time is mentioned, a lengthy time after "Destination: Void" ends is implied. It appears that Ship has been disappointed by human beings as they have been unable to work out how to WorShip. In "The Jesus Incident" Ship creates an experiment using the planet Pandora as a setting for a final attempt to work with human beings to create a satisfying relationship between humans and Ship.

The action of the book is divided between two settings, the internal spaces of Ship which is orbiting Pandora and the settlements on the planet. While the original crew of Ship, as described in "Destination: Void", were cloned human beings from the planet Earth, by the time of "The Jesus Incident", the crew has become a mixed bag of peoples from various cultures that have been accepted as crew members by Ship when it visited their planet as well as people who have been conceived and born on the ship. Evidently Ship has shown up at a number of planets as the suns of those planets were going nova. Implied is that the various planets were other, failed experiments by Ship to establish a relationship with human beings.

The surface of the planet Pandora is 80% seas in which lives a type of kelp which appears to be sentient. The land is populated by a number of predators who are efficient killers requiring people on the planet surface to adapt to a highly stressful lifestyle living within a fortress. The main fortress is known as Colony, a small city that is predominately underground. When "The Jesus Incident" begins there has been one failed attempt at starting a second city and the leadership of the crew and colony are in the midst of a second attempt, known as The Redoubt.

There are several main characters driving the book. Morgan Oakes is the head administrator of both the crew and the colonists and the central provocateur whose actions drive the conflict in the book. Jesus Lewis is his main assistant as well as a biological engineer. Raja Flattery, who takes on the name Raja Thomas as part of his role as agent of Ship, is one of the original crew members of the ship and a member of the team which created the artificial consciousness of Ship. Kerro Panille is a poet who has a special relationship with Ship. Legata Hamill is an administrative assistant and data analyst for Morgan Oakes.

The planet Pandora itself with its non-human inhabitants is another main character of the book, echoing a strong version of the Gaia Hypothesis. As the book progresses, the reader discovers that the kelp, the hylighters, and other creatures of the planet appear to be linked into a large entity with a shared consciousness, Avata.

The novel opens with the awakening of Raja Flattery, who has been in long hybernation since the completion of Ship's consciousness. Ship informs Flattery that for centuries the humans have failed to learn how to WorShip him. He tasks Flattery with intervening in the society which has developed on Pandora to solve this riddle of WorShip, or else Ship will destroy all of humanity under his control.

Jesus Lewis is the manager and chief scientist of Lab One which is a genetic engineering facility that is working on genetically modified clones of human beings in order to develop a class of engineered human beings who can survive the predators of Pandora. The clones are viewed as organic tools much like clones are presented in "Destination: Void" where clones are organic tools sent out in specially prepared space ships to create an artificial consciousness. There is a clear social distinction between clones and naturally born human beings, a distinction that in the end leads to the outbreak of a series of battles and confrontations (slave rebellions) between natural humans and clones as conflict over food supplies and assignment of risk escalates.

The other major project of Lab One is to create a tool that will eliminate the kelp living in the seas of Pandora. The kelp is viewed by the leadership of the Oakes administration as the major impediment to the exploitation of the seas as a source of food.

Major themes

The book deals with concepts such as Artificial Intelligence, worship, resource allocation, and religious violence. Clones and genetic engineering take up themes of racism. One of the major themes is leadership and how the values of leaders influence a society through the actions and narratives of a society's leaders. There are echos of Herbert's exploration of the effect of greed on the leaders within a society and how greedy leaders will warp a society in order to consolidate their own power, a theme in the Dune books as well as The Dosadi Experiment.