Category: Sci-fi

Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star is the first installment of the ConSentiency novels and I took it up a couple of weeks ago mainly because I wanted to read the pre-quel to Herbert’s The Dosadi Experiment. It’s a quick read – the mass market paperback amounts to a mere ~180 pages so there is not much to talk about. However, in providing my thoughts on this book I am going to make some overarching assumptions – I’m going to blatantly present the hypothesis that the majority of Whipping Star readers consumed a subset of the Dune novels prior to picking this one up. It doesn’t seem likely that this would be a reader’s first Herbert novel – mainly because the majority of his non-Dune books didn’t get a lot of exposure and were not award winners (Dune won the Hugo for Best Novel in 1966 and Children of Dune was nominated for the same in 1977). Thanks to the tremendous success of Dune in the mid-60s, all of Herbert’s pre and post Dune works were able to piggyback on Dune’s success. You can see this very clearly on the paperback covers of all the non-Dune books – they clearly mention Frank Herbert as “Author of Dune and <insert-another-dune-chronicle-book-name-here>”.

That being said a big chunk of non-Dune book readers could be placed in the “Herbert Fan” bucket – readers who hungered for more ideas and universes beyond Dune and who hoped that Herbert could replicate the success he achieved with Dune somewhere else. I think Herbert did pretty good with the WorShip and ConSentiency universes in general, however, I expected a little bit more from Whipping Star as the first installment of the ConSentiency series – this small work was supposed to set the stage for The Dosadi Experiment, but it lacked in certain key areas that could have been improved to achieve some first-class world building.

Whipping Star is a short conceptual work with the following background – in the future humanity has been able to co-exist peacefully with other sentient species such as the Gowachin, Laclac, Wreaves, Pan Spechi, Taprisiots, and Caleban. To bring order to this hot pot of civilizations, a federated government called the ConSentiency is established. However, this new government brought its own challenges – they were so efficient at government that laws were passed faster than you could change your underwear so another organization had to be created to slow down the pace of government and add red-tape – the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab). In addition, humanity has been able to travel to any point in the universe thanks to the gifts of the Calebans, who are able to open “Jumpdoors” to travel from point A to point B anywhere in the universe.

The novel’s story deals with the attempt to save a female Caleban called “Fannie Mae” from the hands of Mliss Abnethe, a sadist woman with a penchant for plastic surgery who has a binding contract with Fannie Mae. The contract stipulates that Fannie Mae can be physically hurt by Abnethe and that they get some sort of mutual benefit from it (however I’m not sure what benefit Fannie Mae gained from it). The narrative centers on Jorj X. McKie’s (a BuSab agent) efforts to track and stop Abnethe, who is using jumpdoors at random intervals to get next to Fannie Mae and hurt her. A big portion of the book centers on dialogues between Fannie Mae and McKie, who interrogates the Caleban to find more information on Abnethe’s intentions and whereabouts.

Whipping Star reads like a classic non-Dune novel in the sense that it doesn’t have any of the philosophical heaviness or atmospheric bleakness that Herbert is known for. In fact, it even has some comical dialogues that you will not find in any of his Dune novels (for example all of the conversations with Tuluk). The pace is quick and it centers mainly on dialogues, events and actions performed by the characters, not on character’s thoughts, ideas or moral dilemmas. The conversations between McKie and Fannie Mae are particularly interesting – these exchanges are thought-provoking because McKie finds communication with the Caleban excruciatingly frustrating due to world-view differences between humans and Calebans. With these dialogues Herbert offers some examples of the inherent difficulties faced when different sentient species try to communicate – this is the central theme of the Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, however Whipping Star seems to emphasize more of the semantical difficulties and less the philosophical ones.

In terms of world-building, I expected the text to explore a little bit more the different cultural and societal aspects of the co-existence between all the sophonts of the ConSentiency. However I only found bits and pieces of it due to the short length of the book (a total of 188 pages). Had the book been longer, Herbert would have had better luck setting the stage for this universe. Just to keep in mind – Herbert is not here to hand-hold you. He is very infamous for this habit. That is why the first ~100 pages of Dune make for very difficult reading. Beginning with page 1 of Whipping Star Herbert throws at the reader terms, names and concepts that are relevant to the ConSentiency universe but which have no context for the reader. This is what makes Herbert’s books both frustrating and enjoyable – you need to put in the leg work in the very beginning to gather all the bits and pieces. Once you break through this barrier you basically unlock the wonders of the book’s universe – this makes for a very rewarding reading experience.

I recommend this book if you are looking to venture into The Dosadi Experiment of if you want to explore a Herbert novel with a somewhat lighter touch. However, if you want to read something with Herbert’s usual brutal tone and mood, stay away.

I came across this book by accident. I had been browsing for computer games to play and ended up in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Wikipedia page. There I read that Brian Reynolds (Alpha Centauri lead designer) had gained inspiration by reading Frank Herbert’s The Jesus Incident and Hellstrom’s Hive. I later found out that the former was the second book of Herbert’s WorShip series – Destination: Void being the official “prequel” (Book 1) to the books in the Pandora Sequence (made up of The Jesus Incident and all the others that came after). I decided to give Destination: Void a read in order to get into this universe.

Destination: Void is not the typical Herbert book by any means. Fans of Dune will not feel at home, mainly because Destination: Void is the polar opposite of what Dune tried to be. In Dune Herbert purposely suppressed technology in order to focus on the future of humanity, not the future of humanity’s technology. Because of this Dune has been able to endure. However, with Destination: Void, Herbert ventured into the the realm of hard sci-fi and in doing so made some daring steps into domains that are not his forte – cybernetics, hardware and AI.

In a nutshell the book deals with the trials and tribulations of a crew of 4 as they manually operate a ship en-route to Tau Ceti carrying thousands of hibernating colonists. In the opening scene the crew is faced with a problem – each of their 3 on-board AIs, called Organic Mental Cores (OMCs) either committed suicide or had to be disconnected due to rampancy. Due to this the crew is forced to manage ship functions and operations manually – a repetitive and stressful task impossible to perform throughout the while to Tau Ceti. Following this the crew receive clear orders from project management based on the moon: “Build a conscious AI that can automatically manage the ship and go into hibernation for the 400-year trip to Tau Ceti”.

Following this order from the project director, the narrative breaks into a series of philosophical, moral and religious discussions between the 4 crew members surrounding the main question of “what is consciousness?”. The novel is actually a 200+ page-long Socratic dialogue (and by Socratic I mean that in each of the conversations between the crew members there’s always someone trying to be a smart-ass) on the definition of consciousness masqueraded as a sci-fi paperback. The narrative follows this basic framework:

1. Crew members have philosophical/moral/technical/whatever debate on the definition or origin of consciousness
2. Crew members disagree with each other
3. Crew members develop paranoia and become distrustful of each other or distrustful of project management motives
4. Something malfunctions in the ship and the crew has to repair it
5. One of the crew members explains the technology behind building a self-aware AI and builds a piece of aforementioned AI using 1960s computer hardware – note: some of the components are actual 1960s hardware and others are blatanly made up by Herbert (for example ENG MULTIPLIERS). These sections are basically the most brutal and unreadable portions of the book. Herbert here is purposely trying to confuse the common paperback reader who has absolutely no idea about hardware or cybernetics. Actually, something very upsetting about the book is that by Herbert coming up with his own pseudo-technology (yes, ENG MULTIPLIERS), he is basically making himself impervious to criticism and scientific scrutiny. Since only he knows what the hell an ENG MULTIPLER is, nobody can tell him what it’s not or how it should function. Had Herbert tried applying actual 1960s hardware technology he would have been scolded for his lack of scientific rigor
6. Crew members receive a message from project management and react to it
7. Go to #1

While some might find the philosophical discussions intriguing, these discussions mainly detract from the tension that this novel could have had, and the actual moments of tension are restricted to situations when crew members develop various paranoias or question the motives of project management when they receive orders from the moon. The other moments where tension can be found are when things break in the ship that need to be fixed – mainly because you never know if these are actual malfunctions or if they were pre-programmed by project management as some sort of morbid prank or if they were caused by the AI-in-the-making (called “The Ox” in the book), which is running in “TEST MODE”. All in all these moments of tension amount to perhaps 10% of the book.

If you ignore the numerous philosophical debates and skim over Herbert’s techno-jargon there is some room left to enjoy the moments of tension. The techno-babble can be easily ignored since it doesn’t add any value to the story whatsoever – in fact the quasi-science depicted here is less offensive than most Golden Age sci-fi descriptions of “coal-powered space ships”. Since so little background information is revealed about the project’s mission, the reader is left to put together the missing pieces and figure out what the project goals really are. Parts of the novel remind me vividly of J. G. Ballard’s short story Thirteen to Centaurus. In this story crew members are made to believe they are on a journey to Alpha Centauri when in reality they are on Earth playing the role of guinea pigs in a experiment to test the psychological effects of deep space travel.

I won’t recommend this book to the casual sci-fi fan looking for an easy read. If you can make it half-way through the book you will be rewarded with some fine moments of tension and anticipation – these are mostly confined to the second half of the book. Also, I believe the book’s ending was entertaining and gave me some moments of contemplation. In terms of the science, like I mentioned previously, most of it can be ignored but if you are a purist and need to read everything line by line you will find some gems scattered here and there that cover AI topics that are very relevant today. For example, Herbert mentions the idea of creating an AI from scratch and producing the equivalent of a dumb infant with 0 experience and 0 instincts. He then mentions the challenges faced with “training” an infant and providing a superset of past experience data points to serve as the AI’s experience. If you are familiar with the training of Machine Learning models, it’s amazing that rudimentary machine learning concepts are present in Herbert’s 1960s writings – considering his lack of formal technical or computer science education.

I will most likely continue exploring with the WorShip universe, but mostly because I read that the storyline of Bungie’s Marathon Trilogy was heavily influenced by the rampancy concepts presented in The Jesus Incident.