The Whipping Experiment

"All we know is violence, do the job in silence

Walk the city streets like a rat pack of tyrants"

 

2Pac - Trapped

 

 

With yet another Dune adaptation having come out in recent years, I can only assume publishers have been pushing Herbert books left and right, so you may have glanced at The Dosadi Experiment's cover. Worth a read, almost entirely for its highly memorable social experiment core gimmick.

For a bonus, read it alongside its loose predecessor Whipping Star. Neither's the author's best work. Both carry a juvenile air of overstatement (sapient stars, etc.) born of early 20th-century pulp SF, but lacking Pandora or Dune's multifaceted world-building to redeem them. A fairly cartoonish superspy type, uniquely talented and connected, is called upon both times to do the impossible. Whipping Star's more forgettable "save the galaxy" plot spiced up by an awkward fetish mention barely ties into Dosadi's. Well, except for borrowing the almighty star gods as phlebotinum justifying planetary isolation.

Dosadi fares better for its tighter focus and less forced hyperbole. There's a fairly common trope in fiction of heroes emerging from harsh environments as not only pluripotent renaissance men but also moral paragons, a variation on the noble savage or salt of the earth arguments superimposing the notion that overcoming adversity builds character. (A common theme of politicians' and corporate profiteers' "born in a log cabin" hagiography as well, always cheerfully eliding survivorship bias as gratuitously mandated by the end-goal of producing such a perfect being as the speaker.) Herbert's rejoinder is a cackling novel-length "NO" taking the idea to its logical extreme via privation and overcrowding within a megalopolitan nightmare isolated on a poisonous world. Mumbai cubed. The social experiment yields products alert and proactive but also hopelessly sociopathic.

 

Hard to miss the real-world parallel to the wealthy fomenting slum conditions in a thousand cities around our world, and without spoiling too much of the ending, it's worth noting Herbert's characteristic moral ambiguity: someone will always find a use for sociopaths. Whatever his intent with the book (maintaining as it does a large degree of characteristic fascination with cut-throat survival) it works best as an illustration of the upper and lower classes' conspiracy against the middle. Ravenously power-hungry underlings are the first necessity for ruthlessly powermongering overlords, a resource factory-farmed and hoarded, and the science of breeding animalistically murderous hordes continues to advance.

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P.S.:

For a counterpoint, try Lem's Return from the Stars.