December 18, 2012

• The Dosadi Experiment

  JDN 2456280 EDT 17:06.

   

  The Dosadi Experiment was a novel Frank Herbert wrote in the middle of his career, with some Dune books before it (up to Children of Dune) and some after it (God Emperor of Dune and beyond). Actually, come to think of it, it’s roughly “the good Dune books” before and “the bad Dune books” after.

  It’s a strange novel, longer than it needed to be, and with characters who manage to be complex without being particularly interesting or sympathetic. The closest to sympathetic are the co-protagonists (and by the end, they are co- in a way I probably shouldn’t give away), McKie, a galactic equivalent of a federal agent who is practically a James Bond stereotype, and Jedrik, a local to the hostile planet of Dosadi who is far more dangerous as an operative. It’s actually a sequel, though I didn’t realize that when I started it; the previous book is called Whipping Star, and there was also an earlier short story called “The Tactful Saboteur”.

  By being removed from the Dune canon, the novel gives us a glimpse into the mind of Frank Herbert himself, revealing the themes he felt were important enough to cross worlds. A surprising example is the chairdog, a genetically-engineered lifeform that apparently combines the functions of, well, chairs and dogs, a piece of mobile, living, affectionate furniture. Much less surprising is the ubiquitous betrayal, ruthlessness, and political intrigue; Herbert revels in this stuff, and frankly it gets so intense in The Dosadi Experiment as to be outright annoying. You never know anyone’s real agenda, even the co-protagonists’, until the very end (and even then…).

  Particularly bizarre are his depictions of women and gay people, which I had hoped would be confined to Dune, but alas, I was wrong. In the ConSentient universe as well, women are superior beings to which men must bow down (this is what ruined the later Dune books), and gay people are depraved. This line was so bizarre I had to stop myself from laughing out loud: “With rare exceptions, primitive Humans of the tribal eras reserved their homosexuals as the ultimate shock troops of desperation. They were the troops of last resort, sent into battle as bersekers who expected, who wanted to die.” As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no historical basis for this claim of homosexual berserkers. The Spartans were pederasts… but that’s the closest I can get. I’m not really sure what Frank Herbert was smoking here.

  Also weird is that once again we have another group, this time another species, who uses their females purely as breeding engines; in Dune it was the Bene Tleilax, here it is the Gowachin. Let me just say… I think Herbert had some issues with women. In all his stories they are either godlike or sub-sentient; the idea of an actually, well, human woman is apparently foreign to him. (Jedrik literally makes no mistakes throughout the entire novel. None. Zero. Everything goes according to her plans. Mary Sue Jedrik should be her name.)

  The story had some interesting potential, but I didn’t feel like that potential was well applied. The experiment itself involves an entire planet of millions of people that has been isolated for thousands of years in order to evolve in a particular way… and then when you get to the reason why, it feels really anti-climactic and banal. Surely any civilization capable of engineering chairdogs can think of a better way to achieve this objective (which I guess I shouldn’t spoil?).

  The book also displays more of Herbert’s ambivalence toward technology, which actually I sort of like, not because I agree with it, but because it adds a necessary corrective to a general trend among hard SF authors to love technology unconditionally and underestimate its risks. Herbert compensates for Asimov and Roddenberry. It was for this reason that I was very excited to read The Butlerian Jihad, and rather disappointed by its execution by Brian Herbert (Frank’s son).

  Then again, The Dosadi Experiment does a particularly poor job of discussing the limits of technology, as it grants superiority to the impoverished people who have evolved in a state of violence for thousands of years, rather than the wealthy technocrats who put them there and have ruled them, and presumably advanced in their technology, for those same thousands of years. It would be rather like pitting Rwanda against the United States and expecting Rwanda to win (only many times more so). This was also a bizarre outcome when the Fremen did it in Dune, so once again it seems to be a Herbertism. (Why, oh why, couldn’t it be the Spacing Guild versus the Bene Tleilax? That makes so much more sense.)

  In all, I was not particularly impressed by The Dosadi Experiment. It’s all right I guess; not as good as the early Dune books but better than the later ones. At least there weren’t any space-dominatrices conquering men by the power of sex. 

  • 6:27 pm
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