Mind-blowing.

Like a lot of Herbert fans, I was introduced to Frank Herbert through Dune and its original quintet of sequels. And like a lot of Herbert fans, I kind of stopped there. It was only later, years later, that I bothered to read some of his other books. And while the Dune saga still represents his most complete vision and best storytelling (at least through the first four books), and is deservedly his best-known work, I've started to realize that some of his most truly impressive feats of imagination and intelligence lie within his books outside of the series. Destination: Void, with its penetrating insights on the nature of consciousness, is one such book. The Dosadi Experiment (actually a sequel to Whipping Star, but which I accidentally read first), which takes a much more detailed look than Dune at exactly how humans might evolve in a hyper-hostile environment, is another. And Whipping Star is absolutely in that same class.

Here's just one example of Herbert's genius: One thing that was shocking to me, in reading Whipping Star, is how deeply Herbert approached the idea of communication between humans and aliens. Extraterrestrial contact is such a basic staple of science fiction that it's amazing how little some SF authors seem to think it through. On the shallow end of the depth continuum you have the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, where the vast majority of aliens are just humans with weird bumps on their heads, and most of them happen to speak English as a second language for your convenience. Certainly there are cultural disconnects as humans deal with Klingons and Wookiees, but they're roughly on a par with "Crocodile Dundee making his way through New York City" in their severity. Slightly better thought through than those examples might be Larry Niven's aliens in Known Space: clearly, they think differently than humans, and understanding is rarely perfect, but everyone seems to have magic translator boxes and once again, the real problem of interspecies communication is hand-waved away. Closer yet to a realistic treatment would be Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, where the Mars-raised human, Valentine Michael Smith, knew the words and syntax of English, but that was no guarantee of clear communication because his whole way of thinking and set of experiences was so vastly different than an Earthling's.

Heinlein is the first SF author who appears to have honestly thought the thing through, and Herbert takes it to a whole different level in Whipping Star. As the protagonist, Jorj X. McKie, attempts to communicate with the mysterious Caleban, the basic breakdown in understanding is evident, and the characters' frustration is palpable and believable. Herbert makes the reader think of what it would be like to deal with a creature that's as intelligent as a human, maybe more so, but not at all human. The dialogue between McKie and Fannie Mae alone makes this book worth the price of purchase, and the book is filled to bursting with other ideas besides that, in spite of being short and fast-paced. For one, it takes a unique and plausible stab at FTL travel and time travel.

An enormously impressive and enjoyable book. I give it four stars instead of five only because, much like Destination: Void, the story is a ramshackle thing, mostly meant to convey Herbert's ideas from Point A to Point Z. It's still more than worth the read, though, if you're into science fiction that makes you think.

Title is spoiler (although I misread it as Whispering Star for the longest time). Diverting, though little more than a "that does not compute!", Green Acres type miscommunication gag stretched out to near novella length, and a vehicle for Herbert to hone his Aphorisms of the Galaxies chops. Would have made a decent episode of Star Trek . Kept on picturing the main guy as Albert Finney.

2.5 stars. Not in the same category as the Dune series (but what it). Overall, a decent to good story and some very good writing, especially in the conversations between the human and alien characters.

Frank Herbert excels at the creation of truly alien, incomprehensible cultures, and it is this problem of communication that is the heart of the superb novel, Whipping Star. In the universe of the future multiple alien species live together in a government called the ConSentiency. For several decades, the peoples of the ConSentiency have taken advantage of advanced technology provided to them by a new race called the Caleban. The Caleban are almost impossible to understand, but they have a jump door technology that permits people to instantaneously move anywhere in the universe. At the start of the novel, the Calebans are disappearing from the universe and with each new disappearance millions of beings are going insane or dying. Very quickly, the protagonist Jorj X. McKie, learns that the disappearances and deaths are connected, and if the last Caleban in the universe disappears or dies (a phrase the Caleban refers to as “ultimate discontinuity”) all people (99% of the ConSentiency) who have used a jump door will also die.

So the stakes could not be higher in Whipping Star as McKie tries to determine what could threaten the existence of a being with cosmic power. The answer is totally perplexing, but is also the key to the communication problems which make this book the masterpiece it is. The Caleban is being murdered by the richest woman in the ConSentiency who has an obsession with flogging people, but has had her psyche treated so that she can’t bear the thought of causing suffering. Her answer was to form a contract with a Caleban—a sort of energy creature—and whip her. But why a primitive leather bullwhip could threaten the existence of the most powerful creature in the universe…well that’s the heart of the story.

This is a wonderful novel by a master of the science fiction field.

Review to follow

I wanted to like this book more than I ended up liking it. A bunch of techno-babble and made up metaphysics that didn’t really lead me to a satisfying conclusion. I like the idea of the universe this is set in, but this story wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be.

I can’t explain how I feel about this book without this first paragraph. There are minor spoilers in it, but nearly all of them are made pretty clear early on in the novel. Whipping Star‘s plot more or less boils down to this: a sadistic, psychotic woman with vast amounts of wealth – who was obliged to undergo conditioning so she wouldn’t be able to tolerate seeing pain in others anymore – has her minions nonetheless whip (with an actual bullwhip) a godlike alien (visible to humans as a small star the size of a big football & the shape of a spoon) that has the power to transport everything across space & time in the blink of an eye. Our villain can do this because the alien shows no feelings of pain. The alien lets her do this because it willingly entered a contract with her: being whipped in exchange for knowledge about humanity. However, in the very near future, the alien (that calls itself Fanny Mae!) will die because of the whippings, and when it dies, it will cause all other sentient beings – including humanity and a host of other aliens – to die instantly. There’s a kind of government agent trying to solve the problem, but the alien has hidden the sadistic women on some planet in another dimension as part of the contract.

Well – and you thought giant sandworms were odd.

(...)

Whipping Star is definitely interesting for its goofiness. I’d even say this: as it isn’t a timeless classic like Dune, it might even be more interesting than Dune – that is, for those interested in the history of SF, and for scholars of the times in which it was published.

(...)

Please continue reading on Weighing A Pig...

This whole story is a miscommunication. The difficulties of not being able to properly communicate with those of other species is the central theme of this brief story. Imagine Arrival, but with spoken words.
I found the "love" aspect of the plot between Fannie Mae and McKie to be a bit strange.

A galactic dominatrix flogs the last living member of a species that makes real-time travel across light-years possible. Thing is, if that thing dies under the perverse ministrations of the galactic dominatrix who is whipping it, everyone who has ever traveled using this creature (basically every sentient being in the galaxy) will die.
I am not kidding. That is the plot to this fantastic novel which might surpass even Herbert's own mighty "Dune" saga for its sheer alien weirdness and delightful whimsy. I don't want to give too much away, but it is also a great exploration of third forces in politics (there's a subculture of saboteurs that keep a little chaos injected into galactic government) and, with a sort of nonchalance atypical of science fiction, multi-species interactions. That's probably the meat of the book: how we interpret something utterly and alienally alien. And how it interprets us. Highly recommended.

I like the Dune universe better :)

Whipping Star is a loose mystery about trying to advert the end of the universe.
However it's equally about communication: how species communicate and how we understand one another.

Full review on blog here

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Original.

Whipping Star by Frank Herbert, first published in 1970, explores among many things the complexities of communication; heightened by hyperbole as between xenological species but also as an allegory for human relations.

I once cross-examined a troglodyte who was being intentionally evasive and it was maddening. Reading passages in this book was akin to that experience, yet Herbert uses it as an illustration of the frailty of relational semantics.

Another aspect of this book that was disconcerting was an undertone of absurdist humor. From reading other Herbert creations, I cannot believe that this was intentional, yet there it was, kind of a Monty Python sensibility. And all the more amazingly, Herbert pulls it off as a psychological instrument. This would have made a bizarre Doctor Who episode, or a CSI show written and produced by Terry Gilliam.

Fascinating, oddly hypnotic, weird and completely unique (except for the pseudo-sequel The Dosadi Experiment) Whipping Star is a short, strange trip.

Finally, Whipping Star represents a singularly jaw-dropping phenomenon, one that was not achieved by Heinlein’s Starman Jones or by Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. After decades of reading science fiction, I wish that I had paid more attention in math class.