Whipping Star by Frank Herbert

Weird-for-weird’s-sake space cop adventure

American science fiction author Frank Herbert is famous for his Dune series of novels, and some may be familiar with his trilogy The Pandora Sequence. His 1970 novel Whipping Star, however, is part of Herbert’s lesser-known ConSentiency series. This series takes place in a future where mankind has not only colonized other planets in the galaxy, but has also, unlike Dune, made contact with several sentient alien species. Somewhat like Star Trek, an interspecies government has been established to govern the galactic community. The ConSentiency series began with two short stories that are included in Herbert’s collection entitled Eye. Whipping Star is the first novel in this series. It is followed by 1977’s The Dosadi Experiment. These four works in the series were all previously published in science fiction magazines before appearing in book form.

What ties the ConSentiency series together is the character of Jorj X. McKie, agent of the Bureau of Sabotage (or BuSab for short). BuSab is a government agency created by the interplanetary government to sabotage the government itself and impede its own progress as a form of bureaucratic self-regulation. I found the idea of BuSab pretty ridiculous when I read the short stories in Eye; it is even more so here. Whipping Star comes across as so weird-for-weird’s-sake that you’re never quite sure when Herbert is trying to be silly.

A species called the Calebans have aided mankind through their gift of jumpdoors, teleportation portals between worlds. When a Caleban beachball (their form of spacecraft/dwelling) lands on the planet of Cordiality, McKie is sent to investigate. He finds that this particular Caleban is being literally and periodically whipped by an evil woman with an S&M fetish. (One can imagine Herbert delighting in his own naughtiness as he worked in that plot device.) This is more than just a consensual good time, however. This Caleban, in fact, is being slowly flogged to death. Even more shocking, McKie discovers that when this Caleban dies, almost all sentient life in the galaxy dies with her (why is too complicated to explain here). McKie must put a stop to the flagellations in order to save intelligent life as we know it. What makes his task difficult, however, is that these are long-distance floggings, employing jumpdoors (portal opens, arm swings whip, portal closes), so McKie has no idea where the dominatrix resides. He must track her down and stop her, or the end of humanity (and several other intelligent species) is imminent.

The most interesting aspect of this novel is McKie’s conversations with the Caleban, in which Herbert explores the language barrier between two species. Both parties speak the same language, but their syntax and vocabulary are different enough to impede understanding, which makes a critical situation even more difficult to overcome. These linguistic exercises seem to be the reason Herbert wrote the story, because beyond that, Whipping Star is just a jumble of goofy anything-goes space gibberish that is so divorced from any recognizable logic that it’s hard for the reader to care about any of it.
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