One of my few Desert Island books, along with Samuel Delany's Driftglass and Jack Williamson's Seedling Stars, LOTR, anything by Barbara Tuchman, Winston Churchill, Oliver Sacks. Wait, the list is getting too long.
Let me start again. What are the natures of intelligence, communication, pain, compulsion, identity, compassion & the role(s) of government? The prose - it's Herbert after all, is dense, intense, often confusing (frequent re-reads), but full of the excitement of ideas, by a very good writer.

A sample quote for starters:

"Once, long centuries past, ... sentients with a psychological compulsion to "do good" had captured the government. Unaware of the writhing complexities,..... they had eliminated virtually all delays and red tape from government. The great machine with its blundering power over .. life, had slipped into high gear ... Laws had been conceived and passed in the same hour. Appropriations had flashed into being and were spent in a fortnight. New bureaus for the most improbable purposes had leaped into existence and proliferated like some insane fungus.

Government had become a great destructive wheel without a governor, whirling with such frantic speed that it spread chaos wherever it touched."

An interesting idea, government likened to a great flywheel out of control. Sounds like it's heading that way, whatever your political bent - be careful what you wish for! I leave the rest of the story for everyone else to read, but it's definitely something I'd like to see onscreen, perhaps by Guillermo del Toro, because in addition to the political philosophy, it's a stomping great action book with the best aliens I've ever encountered, aside from Larry Niven's (another author to bring to the Desert Island).

Okay read but not great science fiction

First read this in the late 70s when I was a teenager, along with most of Herbert's other novels. My recollection was that I liked this and Dosadi more than his other Non-Dune work so I have decided to reread these two books. I'm glad I did - the novel has a very unique premise and is filled with snappy dialogue. Great stuff!

That was a LSD fueled sci-noir thriller that jump-gated its way through a pop-psy and philosophical fun-house.

An excellent story well told. Much of the action revolves around communication/cultural divides between sentient species in the universe Herbert builds for this and the sequel, The Dosadi Experiment. There is also murder, mystery, and intrigue, with a few interesting surprises. Whipping Star and Dosadi Experiment both basically stand alone, although the latter makes a few passing references to the former. Reading them in order is not necessary but maybe slightly helpful, or one could read only one or the other if desired.
Herbert's characters are colorful, though only the main characters are deeply developed. His writing and especially the dialogues are what make the work stand out. If you want a taste of Frank Herbert without the commitment that is the Dune series, this may be an excellent place to start, although there is always the The Jesus Incident-The Lazarus Effect duo, but they are a little harder to grasp. One will find some of Herbert's favorite features included, such as organic furniture (chairdogs) and throw-back primitiveness in an otherwise advanced universe, but certainly put together in distinct combinations.
A very good read, a fun and thought-provoking treat.

Another DNF. Hard to suspend disbelief with such a laughable premise. I could tell from the 50 pages I read that it's mostly philosophical and language based, but it wasn't enough to keep me going.

...I thought Whipping Star is one of the more interesting novels by Herbert I have read. It is not a very heavy read like some of his other works, but definitely worth my time. The short tempered McKie makes for an interesting character. There are some parallels with Lewis Orne, main character in the novel The Godmakers as well as number of short stories, but McKie is much better developed. His humanity gives the reader a firm anchor in the ConSentiency, with it’s numerous alien characters. This universe may not have the epic scope of Dune but it is definitely worth looking into...

Full Random Comments review

Mental sciences fiction novel.Its hard to read and to go after what the writer want.But survive and turtu in whipping star total pain and blind ...We have many whipping star in our world ....

This is the first major work in the ConSentiency universe, but the last of these stories that I read. By chance, I came across the Dosadi Experiment in a bookstore years ago when looking for Frank Herbert books. Since then i have read the other works regarding this universe, and I am a little sad that the author didn't explore this universe further, a third full-length novel would have been a nice addition.

This title was solid for most of the book, and until the last few pages, I was prepared to give it 4 stars. However, in the last few pages it felt like Herbert couldn't decide what he wanted to do, and just tossed in a quick, sloppy ending as a resolution to the Caleban issue.

Crazy stuff ! The Palenki Arm!

Unfortunately, there's not much redeeming value to Frank Herbert's 1970 novel "ConSentiency, Book 1: Whipping Star". Essentially, it's an awful lot of talking with an awful lot of 1970s type gibberish thrown in. Plus, an awful lot of the talking IS gibberish. There's not much else that needs to be said here. I'm rating the book at a Not Very Good 2 stars out of 5.

It was an amazing journey in the realms of psychology and philosophy, centered on solipsism or at least in conjecture with it.
Our reality exist only in our mind, but what kind of reality is there outside our mind? How could we explore a reality outside our minds? Aristotle, Plato, Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, even John Ellis and others tried to understand it and we see this struggle from a different perspective in this book, in a fictional universe.
I highly recommend it to introspective people.