THE DOSADI EXPERIMENT – Frank Herbert (1977)

Okay, I urgently need to reread the entire Dune saga. In my mind Dune is the best series I’ve ever read, and the two final books (Heretics and Chapterhouse) are the best of the series – contrary to a popular opinion the series became bad after Children Of Dune. The thing is I’ve read those books at the onset of my adult rediscovery of speculative fiction, and my mileage wasn’t high at the time: maybe I was too easily awed?

Popular opinion also has it Frank Herbert didn’t write much else that’s good. Both Whipping Star and The Santaroga Barrier proved to be utter pulp indeed. Yet The Dosadi Experiment is supposed to be one of the few books still worth reading.

The Dosadi Experiment is set in the same universe as Whipping Star, but it’s a very different book: it doesn’t feel as absurd & cartoonish. It’s not really a sequel either, so you can read them independently. As usual, Val’s Random Comments does a great job summarizing the basic premise of the novel, so I won’t dwell on that too long: basically Dosadi is a planet with extreme living conditions on which some conspiracy secretly put inhabitants to see what such conditions would do to their society, in order to gain insight in politics and power systems.

That gets me to the million dollar question already: yay or nay?

Well  …nay.

The Dosadi Experiment‘s basic problem is that the reader can’t really partake in its supposedly deeply intellectual plays. An important part of this book is courtroom drama: the main character, Jorj X. McKie, is not only a top notch secret agent, coincidentally he is also the only guy in the universe who was accepted at the bar of the Gowachin court – the Gowachin being frog like aliens who have a legal system with intricate, changing rules and high stakes, the courtroom being an arena.

Herbert tries to convey all this by passages like this:

They provide legal ways to kill any participants – judges, Legums, clients … But it must be done with exquisite legal finesse, with its justifications apparent to all observers, and with the most delicate timing.

Yet, the pocket is only 300 pages long, and these 300 pages simply aren’t sufficient to make the reader a Gowachian legal scholar too, so we can’t really appreciate or judge the “exquisite legal finesse” displayed by the characters. It’s like watching a game of cricket without knowing the rules. Or to use a review trope: Herbert tells a lot about finesse, but doesn’t show any.

It sucks the joy out of the reading. The book takes some time to get going – the first 80 pages drag and feel random – and when it does get interesting, it also becomes obvious quickly that Herbert will stick to his guns, and won’t solve that problem. In the end, I just kept on reading to follow the plot to its conclusion, but that felt like being led, not something that engaged my mind actively, as I had not enough information to do so.

I have to admit the story itself was interesting, but this same mechanic also takes the joy out of the plot twists. There are conspiracies inside of conspiracies, and the pacing’s brisk, so it’s not an easy read. Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention, but again, I very much feel the main problem is that Herbert didn’t provide me with enough data.

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On a thematic level, Herbert tries to tackle quite a lot of themes familiar to those who’ve read Dune: religious engineering, breeding systems that enhance the offspring, power, violence, mind melting. But those of you thinking you might learn something about politics or power systems, look elsewhere. It’s all pretty standard fare and poorly worked out at that too. For example, the people set on Dosadi evolve to be both extremely perceptive and quick thinkers, as their violent living conditions are ruthless to the meek and the slow. Similarly, the Gowachin are focused on individual excellence, and are outright elitists. The philosophical foundation of this novel boils down to simple social Darwinism. It might have still been interesting in the late 70ies, but in 2017 it just gets a ‘meh’ from me. Moreover, it’s unclear what Herbert’s own position on the matter is in this book.

In the typical introductions to each chapter – snippets from fictional histories, scientific reports, alien aphorisms – Herbert does utter thinly veiled criticism at bureaucracy and militarism, both Soviet totalitarianism and USA imperialism. Some of them are interesting, and some of them are bland and chewy. You be the judge.

Law must retain useful ways to break with traditional forms because nothing is more certain than that the forms of Law remain when all justice is gone.

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Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority’s forces. History has already answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.

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Communal/managed economics have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed. This is what Dosadi says: Greed sets its own limits, is self-regulating.

A theme The Dosadi Experiment has in common with Whipping Star is communication. But in both books it’s handled quite silly. In Whipping Star Jorj X. McKie needed to teach the godlike Caleban to communicate as a human, resulting in pages looking like gibberish. In this book, McKie meets the Dosadians, who have extreme command of body language and verbally limit themselves to “the nonemotional essentials”, “compressed communication”. The problem is Herbert builds up so explicitly to the Dosadi abilities – they are dangerous monsters with superpowers, if they are let lose on the universe it will be an utter disaster – that when it becomes clear what their powers actually are, the sizzle soon becomes a hiss.

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In conclusion – this is indeed Herbert’s best non-Dune novel I’ve read so far. But the competition isn’t exactly stiff. If anything, this book needed 300 pages more. In those 300 pages, Herbert could’ve taken the time to set things up properly, so that we readers could have had the time to be able to care for the characters, and care for that damned legal system. They might have also provided the time & space to inject some of that epic feeling Dune had, because that’s severely lacking here.

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Click here for my other Herbert texts: long analyses of Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune & Chapterhouse: Dune, and more regular reviews of Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier, Whipping Star & Soul Catcher. I’ve also tackled Hunters of Dune & Sandworms of Dune, and wrote about Villeneuve’s 2021 film Dune: Part One.

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