Herbert's alien species and the difficulties of communication cross-species are really interesting in this book, which is really a think-piece on love and communication wrapped in a mystery with some nicely-done science fiction trappings. A fair amount of 1960s sexism permeates the novel, unfortunately, but McKie and Fannie Mae are great characters.

I enjoyed this book - I love the worlds that Frank Herbert creates, and the alien races. This book didn’t fail to capture my imagination and take me on my own journey in the universe.

Love dune. Didn't love this. Which was a shame.

5/10. Media de los 9 libros leídos del autor : 7/10.

A ver, de Frank Herbert hay que leerse Dune, sí o sí. Al menos el primero de la saga (me gustaron casi todos, conste). ¿Y el resto?. Pues bien, pero no esperéis un nivelazo.

Доста отдавна се каня да прочета нещо в жанра фантастика. Добър мой приятел ми препоръча "Експеримента Досейди", но каза да започна първо с "Фани Мае".

Книгата определено е добро начало за всеки ентусиаст в жанра. За Хърбърт съм чел само хубави неща, макар и масово отзивите да са, че точно тази книга не е пикът в кариерата му.

Хареса ми историята, макар и с бавното тръгване на самата книга. Сюжетът беше интересен и успя да задържи вниманието ми до края.

The good thing about this book is that it is short. The protagonist, who works for a government agency that is designed to prevent its government from becoming too efficient, is for some reason assigned to a xenological investigation and encounters the antagonists who are attempting to kill off all sentient life save their ark planet for some unknown reason.

Half of this book is senseless, confusing dialogue for the sake of showing how senseless and confusing the dialogue is because the primary alien/sentient manifestation of a star cannot have meaningful and proper dialogue.

A big gripe I have: the alien (whose name is Fanny Mae….) lives in this spherical sci-fi pod. Mr Herbert refers to this chamber as Beachball. This novel is good if you are in need of kindling to start a fire or you love reading terrible books.

Another title I read in my big "classic sci-fi" push. Enjoyable, with typical Herbert levels of worldbuilding packed into a tiny book. If I get the chance to reread these, I'll be sure to come back and and give a better review when it's fresher on my mind.

It's definitely done by Herbert, but I didn't have as easy a time with visualizing things like I could in, say, Dune. The main character comes off as a character from a Tom Clancy or Brad Thor book. The sci-fi elements give a Lies Inc. feel, but tends to make me feel like it's used similar to the video game Night Trap.

Might go on to Dosadi Experiment later.

I thought "hey, it's time for another fabulous book by Frank Herbert". Fabulous? Right? So you've read one, two, maybe more interesting novels from one author and, after a while, you think... whenever I want to read something fabulous, why don't I get back to that author...

Wrong! This novel is a strong supporter (or example if you wish) of Sturgeon's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeo...).

The first quarter of the book is just one gigantic scene where the author tries to show just how difficult it is to communicate with aliens... by using on-purpose bad English and what looks like a million typos to show a dialogue between a few humans and an alien.
After huge relief seeing this part of the book done, I ran into another unreadable area consisting of dialogue only, again, between said humans and more aliens.

Half-way through I decided to carefully place the book back on the shelf, bid it adieu, and praise Theodore Sturgeon!

No trial scene? No trial scene...

The blurb here tries to make the story sound more epic by keeping it vague, but it's really an absurd premise. A mysterious energy-being called a Caleban, Fannie Mae, has entered into a contract with a human woman that will lead her to being whipped to death. Calebans provide "jumpdoor" teleportation services to the multi-species ConSentiency civilization, and she just barely manages to communicate that her death will kill every being who has used a jumpdoor. Calebans have nearly no experiential commonality with any other species, so her speech is ungrammatical, uses words oddly, and is overall confused and confusing. Jorj repeatedly wonders if any communication has occurred at all after pages of dialogue. A large portion of the plot hinges on what she means by "connectives", and by the end this wasn't even entirely clear to me. Memories?

"Have you learned anything from me?" McKie asked.

"All mingled connectives instruct."

"Connectives," McKie muttered.  "I must be getting old."

"Explain old," the Caleban said.

"Never mind.  We should've discussed your contract first thing.  Maybe there's a way to break it.  Under what laws was it executed?"

"Explain laws."

"What honorable system of enforcement?" McKie blared.

"Under natural honor of sentient connectives."

"Abnethe doesn't know what honor means."

"I understand honor."

McKie sighed.  "Were there witnesses, signatures, that sort of thing?"

"All my fellow Calebans witness connectives.  Signatures not understood.  Explain."

McKie decided not to explore the concept of signatures.  Instead he asked, "Under what circumstances could you refuse to honor your contract with Abnethe?"

After a prolonged pause the Caleban said, "Changing circumstances convey variable relationships.  Should Abnethe fail in her connectives or attempt redefinition of essences, this could produce linearities open for my disentanglement."

"Sure," McKie said.  "That figures."

He shook his head, studied the empty air above the giant spoon.  Calebans!  You couldn't see them, couldn't hear them, couldn't understand them.

If page after page of this sounds like a good time, this is the book for you.

The other half of the story is a space opera police investigation as the Bureau of Sabotage tries to work the legal end of things and track down the contractor. What initially seems like a mere miscommunication between her and Fannie Mae proves to be much more sinister. This thread was arguably worse, since it just goes in circles with little movement independent of Jorj and Fannie's conversations. Despite the book's less than 200 pagecount, it could stand for some serious compression. It has good scenes. It has some twists, albeit none very mindblowing. While it may be a fundamentally bad story on some level, it could also probably be made a lot less bad just by having less of it.

All that said, I like the ConSentiency universe, and I'm sad that I'll get to read of it no more. I like its absurd and comic tone compared to Dune's suffocating seriousness, I like the world of weird alien races trying to not step on each other's emotional toes too much, I like the court and investigation theming (even this book has the Bureau trying to find a pretext to charge the villain with so they can move to discovery). I like everyone worrying about receiving telepathic phonecalls because it makes them semi-catatonic. I love the protagonist's stupid phonetic rendering of "George" name. I like the weird harem of mind-waifus that Jorj was accumulating. It all agrees with me so so much more than Dune.

Dosadi Experiment > "The Tactful Saboteur" > Whipping Star > "A Matter of Traces"

Summary: Saboteur Extraordinary Jorj X. McKie is called in by the Bureau of Sabotage to speak to a Caleban, whose mechanical "Beachball" enclosure has washed up on the shore near a Bureau office. Inside, he meets the Fannie Mae, who has entered a contract with Mliss Abnethe, a partially rehabilitated sadist, in order to be whipped, since Calebans feel no pain. Nevertheless, the whipping is slowly killing Fannie, and once she dies, all beings who have used the teleportation jumpdoors provided by the Caleban species will die. The two are barely able to communicate linguistically, though she can transmit her emotions to him. After some discussion, Fannie teleports McKie to the planet Mliss is on, where he discovers a primitive village whose language he cannot understand. He is captured and nearly executed by Mliss. While McKie is gone, his colleague Furuneo stays with Fannie, and Mliss contacts him by opening a jumpdoor. She shows him his wife, dead for decades, alive past a jumpdoor, and promises that he can go back and live with her again. He refuses, as his past self would not have forgiven him. Mliss' lover, Cheo, pulls Furuneo's head through a jumpdoor and decapitates him.

After McKie is teleported back, Mliss and Cheo begin attempting to kill him regularly, while Fannie weakens gradually. Analysis of artifacts recovered from Mliss' attacks reveals that they are seemingly of ancient design, but recent manufacture. Time travel seems impossible, but eventually McKie comes to believe it may be possible for Calebans to create pocket universes that recreate past events, so that Mliss cannot be found anywhere, and Mliss believes her world will survive Fannie's death. He also realizes that stars are the "mouths" of Calebans in our universe, and after identifying which star Fannie is via the prismatic spray from her whipping, they begin feeding Fannie hydrogen, strengthening her enough to survive. The violence and the hatred behind the whippings was what had been killing her. After McKie fans Cheo's PanSpechi fear of having his psyche subsumed by Mliss, Cheo begins beating Mliss, and leaves her to asphyxiate in a tank. While Cheo attempts to kill McKie via jumpdoor, Mliss dies, and her pocket universe collapses, dissolving Cheo into nothingness.

Here's a basic premise of this novel: A seemingly divine being is discovered that allows instantaneous travel from any known point in the universe to any other. It is dying. If it dies, anyone who has used its abilities, which means nearly every known sentient being in the universe, will die with it because they are all now "connected." This sentient being has entered into a binding contract with a woman in order to learn about life in our dimension. Unfortunately, this woman is a sadist and wants to aid in its death for reasons of her own. It is up to intersteller saboteurs to stop her... Yeah, it's a damned weird book.

It's a really good book though. And at a short 180+ pages, you would think it would be a very fast read, but I found myself reading certain passages over again and thinking... "huh?" Herbert goes into many scenes where the main characters are trying to communicate with this being, and even after they seem to have deciphered their conversations, it's still confusing as hell. Still, the implications in this book are insane and as unlikely as it seems, it actually makes sense. If you've read Dune, you'll know that Frank Herbert is a great author and I doubt many other authors could have pulled off a book like this.

If you're in the mood for a short and just plain weird piece of sci-fi, I'd recommend Whipping Star. You'll just have to find it since, unfortunately, it is out of print.

This Frank Herbert fella wrote the book Dune which was a semi sleeper for me as it walked around this barren planet with some aristocracy stuff going on, got to try to read it again maybe I'm missing something?

This other "WHIPPING STAR" is swell though. Frank's little obtuse and abstract words and concepts hobble around and die and later get picked up and slapped back to life when you are completely confused and he nonchalantly needs to explain the word/concept for the story's sake which works most of the time in this book. Imagine (children) in the distant future people can instantly travel anywhere so there are planets for swimming, hospital hatcheries, entire planets of libraries etc. relying on these weird spheres who bend space to make it seem next door/through a door. Some old kooky dominatrix takes on any and many a sentient being to torture (with a whip for starters) for entertainment and discovers she can torture one of these weird spheres which house a formless mass that reacts to leather whips. She forms contracts with these sphere/mass things and one by one kills them off thru her one armed multi-legged hate servants who enjoy beating the hell out of anything.

It's so abstract in parts trying to talk to these sphere things since you have to be on some kinda drug to deal with them that it makes the book interesting, plus the idea of torturing a mass that's abstract makes me revel in the perversity panties on my head and cassette tape all over my toes. That's the beginning of the book folks, there's a fertile pile of concepts that go with each alien race introduced with the idea of if everyone was isolated to their own system what the hell would happen. The food and hospital supplies closed off from the rest of the worlds etc. The book is able to cover a lot of ground since the concept of bouncing around from system to system/world to world keeps it fresh and active.

A 4 and a half hour read for me, never set it down, and didn't eat. Wanna lose some weight? Read this five star joy buzz. Sorry. Five Black Holes!!

Review posted originally on sfbook.com