I found this book extremely slow to start, with too many fictitious names, places, and things off the bat. But slowly it caught my attention and ended very interestingly, so that I couldn't put it down. Not sure I loved it, but glad I finished it

The first 70 pages are hard to follow but things quickly fall into place afterwards. So be prepared.

I really enjoyed the story but the motivation of the main character was a little unclear to me.

What I especially enjoyed was how the writing mirrored the story; The confusion you feel as a reader mirrors the confusion McKie feels when landing on Dosadi and trying to integrate into their society. The brisk pace of the book mirrors the brisk mental pace of the Dosadi inhabitants. Another author might have turned this into 3 or 4 books, there's a lot of world building going on in a small amount of space but a Dosadi would consider that wasteful and stupid.

When I was recommended this book, I was told it mirrored the Palestinian conflict and I found a thoughtful blog post that explores the connection: http://h2oreuse.blogspot.com/2007/06/...

Saboteur Extraordinary McKie is back, in a much better sequel that focuses on a more interesting part of the ConSentiency universe. The planet of Dosadi has been locked away for generations, an experiment in applied social science that has gone tremendously wrong. McKei has been sent in to clean it up, though the ultimate motive behind his mission is a mystery.

Dosadi as a planet is like Dune on steroids, a punishingly deadly environment where simple survival has attuned its inhabitants to superhuman levels of competence. Keila Jedrik is the most Machiavellian of its inhabitants, and she leads an organization to break free and get revenge on whoever put her on Dosadi at any cost. Keila suborns McKie almost instantaneously, outplans her opponents with a mental facility which would put an Mentat to shame, and engineers an escape with McKie, who she merges egos with.

Then it's up to McKie to reveal the truth in a mortal courtroom drama. The toadlike Gowachins have an attitude of 'respectful disrespect' towards the law, and McKie is the only human ever admitted to their ranks of Legums. In the Gowachin court-arena, failure is punished with death, and the knife can be turned on defendant, plaintiff, witness, legum, and/or judge. The crime of Dosadi is not the intensive prison-planet environment, but that it serves as the raw material for a body-swapping immortality ring that is the real secret power in politics. The courtroom drama is quite tense, but the whole thing exists to make Herbert's points about power, and how it is too dangerous to put in the hands of mere humans, but also disastrous to hand over to any bureaucratic entity or superhuman. The whole thing feels like a cartoonish first draft of the ideas in God Emperor of Dune, and let's be real; if you're reading this book, you've already read all of the Dune books, and even some of the KJA ones.

The writing is good. Some interesting descriptions and political ideas. The Gowachin race is well-developed (even if they are just frog people). The characters are not all stereotypical. That’s the good. It brings it up to the level of average mass-market sci-fi and keeps me from giving this book the two stars I want to give it.

The theme of the book is social Darwinism, how the Dosadi have been isolated from the rest of the universe and forced to become ruthlessly selfish, competitive, and uber-competent in a hellish world. But the book commits an egregious version of one of the worst sins in fiction. It is not that it “tells not shows,” it is that it tells us many things and then what it shows contradicts that.

Some minor spoilers ahead, but I feel like I’m doing the reader a favor by calling them out.

The Dosadi are said to be ruthless wolves, just waiting to fall on the sheep of the ConSentiency. Yet, the ConSentients are playing ruthless politics, where even the innocent are given death sentences in a legal system based on arena combat. We are told McKie is helpless on Dosadi, yet within days he is one of their military leaders. We are told he will be killed if he reveals his origins. He reveals them immediately to no effect. We are told the Dosadi do not love, but this is again immediately contradicted. If Herbert were making a statement about reality vs perception, he would have the characters “tell” and then show the contradictions in their behavior, but it is the omniscient author’s voice that tells us these things and then shows us the opposite.

This isn’t the only thing wrong with the book, but it is the root of a lot of it. It is hard to take characters seriously when both their stated and actual actions are so cartoonish, but it is worse when they don’t make sense.

I think I need to give up on non-Dune Frank Herbert. I’ve been reading them since I was a kid and they were some of the few sci-fi in the public library. I swear I’m not holding them all to the Dune standard…they just don’t do anything for me.