[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...