Pure philosophical science fiction. Highly recommended

Saboteur Extraordinary McKie is back, in a much better sequel that focuses on a more interesting part of the ConSentiency universe. The planet of Dosadi has been locked away for generations, an experiment in applied social science that has gone tremendously wrong. McKei has been sent in to clean it up, though the ultimate motive behind his mission is a mystery.Dosadi as a planet is like Dune on steroids, a punishingly deadly environment where simple survival has attuned its inhabitants to superh...

Definitely better than Whipping Star, and set in the same ConSentiency universe that Herbert created. Again, the world-building is the best part of the book; it's such a strength with Herbert that it becomes the thing that carries the book. The plot is confusing, and some of the assumptions don't seem sensical. The characters are fairly unlovable. But the reader wants to keep going just to learn more about the universe Herbert has created. There isn't the universe depth of the Dune series; that'...

While I think I may have preferred the previous ConSentiency Universe novel more than The Dosadi Experiment, but that may be more because I prefer linguistics and math-crazy plus-dimensional aliens over most other ideas.However. This novel is pretty damn fascinating on its own, but for completely different reasons. I don't normally see hard-SF novels revolving around Alien Law. Or economics. Or psychology. Or a whole world that is a social and biological experiment writ very, very large.This is

I wanted to give this book a low rating because the first 70 pages are painfully boring and unintelligible... on the first read and the ending is kind of blah... Nevertheless, it has some unbelievably redeeming qualities (if you're a Dune fanatic)... and I even suspect that these 70 pages might yield whole new insights upon the second reading. I'd even go so far as to say that this is a must read for any serious Dune afficianados because the text provides one more point of entry into that univer...

I am perhaps too lenient on this book, else this review will serve as a confession that I am too stupid to grok the Dosadi mindset. But I think that the weakness of characterization that is a standard scifi caveat hinders this novel, one of Herbert's most ambitious(I say skiffy instead of scifi usually, cause I don't give a fuck. Yeah that's right). As in Dune, Herbert attempts a merciless dissection of society. Dune, rightly regarded as a classic, began as an exploration of the effect of trade

Frank Herbert’s Dune was a masterpiece, not just of the genre but of literature, it was and remains an amazing achievement. The second Dune book was good, the third pretty good, and the fourth OK, and so on. Fans of all the Dune books (and I am one) worshipped the original (correctly and justly) and simply enjoy reveling in the world building. And so I come to Frank Herbert’s 1977 novel The Dosadi Experiment. I read a review I liked and recalled the quality of his writing that I had enjoyed so m...

(...)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.He...

4.0 to 4.5 stars. This is best "non Dune" book by Frank Herbert that I have read. It is a sequel of sorts to Whipping Star (a book I did not really like) and is set in the universe of the ConSentiency. The basic plot involves a secret experiment in which a group of humans and aliens are kidnapped and placed on a planet with a brutal environment in order to produce...( no spoilers).In tone, this story reminded me a lot of the later Dune books in so far as its focus on the psychological motivation...

The first 70 pages are hard to follow but things quickly fall into place afterwards. So be prepared.I really enjoyed the story but the motivation of the main character was a little unclear to me.What I especially enjoyed was how the writing mirrored the story; The confusion you feel as a reader mirrors the confusion McKie feels when landing on Dosadi and trying to integrate into their society. The brisk pace of the book mirrors the brisk mental pace of the Dosadi inhabitants. Another author migh...

This had the makings of a second "Dune", twelve years after publication of that ground-breaking book. And all the elements are here: a richly-imagined world - Dosadi, a strong emotional focus - an enslaved population, a back story that goes back generations, and sinister forces to ramp up the suspense. And, also in prime form, Herbert's dramatic, impactful prose.And Herbert kept the suspense at a peak for much of the book. The story could have taken a turn for something entirely different at vir...

Wow. I loved Frank Herbert in middle school, and I hadn't realized just how poor a writer he was. It's especially apparent in this and Whipping Star. Herbert was skilled at creating fascinatingly foreign and complex cultures, and then demonstrating through them the tedious ideas of 1950s-era business gurus which he seemed to hold in high regard. He reminds me of Hubbard in that respect. Of course, he's still a much better writer than that!

I just couldn't get into this...in other words I found it uninteresting. May be me, I find that I'm harder and harder to please where novels are concerned. I have started several in the last few weeks and none of them has really drawn me in. I have unfinished novels of a couploe of different types and different genres laying around waiting.Oh well, I won't rate this as frankly I didn't care enough to finish it.Maybe you'll like it more. Good luck.

...My opinion that The Dosadi Experiment is Herbert's best non-Dune book has remained unchanged. It is a novel that summarizes many of the themes that can be found in his works but also highlights some of the problems with his writing. The lack of character development, the constantly changing viewpoints and the cognitive leaps that characterize the novel keep it from being a great work. Herbert's grasp of the ideas he wants to discuss is unrivaled in science fiction but the way he translates t

Herbert has created a fascinating universe with the ConSentiency, a diverse alliance of an eclectic group of aliens, of which humans are just a small part. This is a very good story, essentially a conspiracy within this alliance that threatens it from the inside. However, it gets weighed down in what feels like never ending levels of political machinations, legal maneuvering, psychoanalysis and internal dialogue. In the end, it was a bit too introspective to keep me fully engaged.

I'll start with a side note here: The cover of the edition I read had a synopsis that had only a slight similarity to the actual content of the book. So if you have some similar copy and are curious what's inside, don't read the book cover. It'll mislead you some. Consider yourself warned.Although Frank Herbert is best known for his Dune series, he wrote other science fiction. The Dosadi is in this "other" category -- other in that it takes place in an entirely different universe than what occur...

Herbert is the master of what I call whafuck?! in genre fiction. With masterly aplomb, he crafts devious and often hilarious worlds with nary an explanation and then forces it down your throat with nary a warning.It's obvious that if you haven't read the first book "Whipping Star" you will be largely lost reading "Dosadi". But that doesn't mean that you didn't leave "Whipping Star" without a whafuck?! in your frontbrain, because I bet you did, and that's why Herbert is so fun to read."Dosadi" ca...

If you've ever wondered what Dune would be like with aliens and computers, well... that's not exactly what this is, but it is a non-Dune Frank Herbert space opera so that's sort of what's going on. I was able to follow the basic arc of the plot, but I admit a lot of the details of the intrigues ("plans within plans within plans..." à la Dune) were hard to follow; it was also difficult to keep track of all the characters, factions, alien species, etc.The basic plot centers on McKie and Jedrik. Mc...

20th book for 2019.Spoilers ahead.For Herbert's future universe imagine something like the Star Trek Federation, but one where things are kept in check by the Bureau of Sabotage, which basically goes around screwing any social structures that come into being to avoid power accumulating too much; basically a supra-governmental CIA/FBI group of James Bond-like anarchists. One of the alien species in this federation is a frog-like race, who have the charming habit of eating their young tadpoles in

It was an okay book. It took a while to get into it; there were enough gems interspersed to keep me hoping it might get better. I was pleasantly surprised that it did.One part I liked/thought was hilarious: (view spoiler)[that McKie was described as looking like the frog-god of one of the races, and that because of this they gave him more deference than they would any other human. The guy was described as being of Polynesian descent with a flat face and big lips. He had a stocky, muscular body.