As I’m not a fan of [b:Dune|234225|Dune (Dune, #1)|Frank Herbert|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434908555l/234225._SY75_.jpg|3634639], this is my favourite book by Frank Herbert. I have reservations about it, but I reread it now and then and always seem to enjoy it.

All fiction, especially science fiction, is akin to stage magic: the author tries to persuade you that his powers (of imagination, understanding, and intelligence) are greater than they can possibly be. In reading this book, I’m more than usually conscious that what I’m seeing is trickery. Some of the main characters are presented as abnormally intelligent (presumably more intelligent than the author), and all of the characters have grown up in societies alien to us, making them more than usually incomprehensible. In bringing them to life and telling their story, Herbert is perpetrating a fraud, because he can’t possibly understand what he pretends to understand.

I don’t believe either that he has a genuine understanding of the Gowachin legal system, although he delights in presenting it as spectacle. In fact, I doubt that the system as presented would work in any society, although perhaps I should give it the benefit of the doubt because the Gowachin are not human.

Despite all this, Herbert does his magic competently enough that the illusion is not shattered. Readers can imagine that there’s a planet called Dosadi populated by dangerously super-competent people who’ve lived their whole lives under constant stress, and that our hero Jorj McKie is so adaptable that he can both master the bizarre Gowachin legal system and rapidly learn how to live on Dosadi without having grown up there.

Incidentally, we’re told that McKie is dark-skinned and of Polynesian ancestry, although the story is set in a far future in which various non-human intelligent species are known; human skin colour and ancestry seem minor cosmetic details by comparison.

What is it about this book that attracts? I suppose the people of Dosadi are appalling but fascinating—and vaguely plausible—while Jorj McKie and the Gowachin legal system are implausible but quite entertaining.

The ending of the story is not too bad, but there’s something not wholly satisfying about it. Herbert wanted it to end with a firework display, and it does, but I’m left with a vague feeling that it could have been better somehow. ( )

This is a complex story that is focused on a blocked off planet, which was theoretically an experiment. In reality the planet provided bodies for beings to transfer into that allowed essentially eternal existence. The story is focused around a lawyer who tries the case of legality of the experiment. This human lawyer has significant insight into the culture and rules of the various sentient species in the story. He uses this knowledge and help from a human Dosadi to save the planet. This was an unusual story focused on law that is quite different than our court system. Since much of the complexity of the story is generated by customs created by the author, I find it too contrived. ( )

This was a book that I had thought I read in the past but turned out to be new to me (unless extreme CRS has set in). This was a solid space opera tale told by one of the past masters of this genre and was a really enjoyable story. I will need to pick up the first story with Jorj X. Mckie so I can see the past that is discussed in this one.

4.5 stars for a really fun read. Recommended for any fans of space opera especially if you enjoyed Dune!! ( )

(...)

The Dosadi Experimenti>'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.

(...)

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.

(...)

Read the full review on Weighing A Pig ( )

Here's a book I looked at with interest when I was a teenager who had read and enjoyed Herbert's Dune. I believe I passed it over then because it was the sequel to a book I hadn't read (Whipping Star), and which wasn't in the public library collection where I found The Dosadi Experiment. Since then, Dosadi has gone from being the second of a series to being the fourth, in the narrative chronology of Herbert's ConSentiency novels. Still not having read the others all these decades later, I went ahead and tackled this one, inspired by praise I had read for it on LibraryThing.

It may be that I would have enjoyed it more if I had been already acquainted with the ConSentiency milieu and the protagonist (Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary) established in Whipping Star, but I did like it all the same. It certainly has a number of themes in common with the original Dune books, most especially the idea of a eugenic program transforming humanity. But even more it reminded me of the later Charles Stross novel Glasshouse. Both are far future espionage stories where the protagonist must infiltrate an experimental world in an effort to discover its true purpose, knowing only that there is some great culpability involved. In both cases, the world being investigated is more like the reader's world than the somewhat utopian future of the novel's larger scenario. In Dosadi, "The whole thing reminded McKie of stories told about behavior in Human bureaucracies of the classical period before deep space travel" (222). There are other interesting similarities between the books that would be spoilers to detail.

Unique to Herbert's tale is the focus on the exotic legal system of the frog-like Gowachin aliens, an important peer-race of humanity within the ConSentiency. McKie is the only human credentialed as a "legum" in the jurisprudence of their "courtarena," where both lawyers and litigants are routinely exposed to mortal hazard. Far from a crude gladiator's brawl, however, the operations of this system depend on great subtlety and creativity, demanding both a reverence for tradition and the power to upend precedents and conventions.

This book read quickly, even though there were passages that were written with such verbal economy that they became ambiguous to the reader. That style is thematically consistent with the book, which attributes it to the inhabitants of Dosadi themselves. I don't know how far in our future The Dosadi Experiment is supposed to be set, and it glances lightly over many technological details, but it has aged pretty well for forty-year-old science fiction. I'm glad to have finally read it, and I appreciate the recommendations that got me to do so.