[Frank Herbert] is abetted in "The Jesus Incident" by the West Coast poet Bill Ransom. Their collaboration in no way improves those scraps of liturgical upchuck that Mr. Herbert, with his tin ear, somehow thinks portentous. But the ideas, as always in a Frank Herbert novel, provoke and astound.

The usual spaceship, with the usual mothering computer, spends the usual thousands of years wandering one way or another across the usual incomprehensible universe in search of a planet like the usual Earth. As usual, the humans are in suspended animation. As usual, they will be beeped awake in time to fiddle with our myth of voyage, our sense of otherness, the ambiguity of the past, the mysteries of worship and the complications of sex….

Mr. Herbert is in the business of producing what might as well be called eco novels. Such eco novels look for a system, harmony, symbiosis, decent respect, accommodation, weaving, rhythm and compromise. Each swamp has its logic, and its fatalism. The alien, brilliantly imagined, is made familiar. The thinking reeds are no better than the perturbed kelp. These novels, of necessity, are religious; they associate with the sacred and the profane, and they kill off fallen angels, cowboys gone wrong. We experience awe and play Go. (p. 263)