Now what did he really mean by that? Frank Herbert and The Tactful Saboteur

the bit i don't follow -- which really feels like a line got omitted -- is when dooley sez "but if i'm not mistaken, mckie is saying there are TWO sabotages here not one" <--- i honestly can't work out where mckie says this clearly

(some of the difficulty is that it's NOT made very clear who knows what at any given stage about the two confidential items -- viz BuSab boss-swapping protocols and Pan Spechi sex-lives -- the reveals on both these are quite murky, and i think some of the leaps the quicker characters are making are based on them getting something we actually already know, but NOT saying "oh, i get it", just jumping straight to the leap)

jesus christ not until this very moment did i realise the glaring parallel in this story, viz:

both BuSab and the Pan Spechi pass leadership from one person to the next via a mechanism whose inner workings remain murky to the world at large

chosen btw partly bcz i wanted to big up whipping star and partly bcz i thought it might draw interesting ideas from ken, which indeed it did

one of the things that i think distinguished herbert from standard-issue SF libertarians (heinlein, niven) is that he was obsessed with the hidden social function of certain aspects of culture, ostensibly there for one reason, actually fulfilling another; he doesn't have the pea-brained rational-choice-theory monomania of some (most?) libertarians, and is interested in unintended consequences (good) as well as unintended consequences (bad) -- viz if you remove bureaucracy (as per anti-big-government propaganda) you'll get the following unintended bad consequences; what if you ritualised the disruption of bureaucracy? what might be the good consequences?

x-post yes! i thought i said that last night? possibly it was the B of an A and B where i only got to the A --- the exchange of confidentialities is formally symmetric, that's why it's (allegedly) a good move that blin is to be the next boss

(but this is stated by mckie in utterly opaque politesse, presumably so he doesn't get blasted by bolin)

haha herbert's like henry james if HJ couldn't write a well-formed sentence to save his life

mark you did say it, but not quite so explicitly - i think there's something about this story that addles my brane so much that i can't think properly

i'm still chuckling over ledge's "wet his lips" pick-up

he wet his lips... WITH HIS PERSONAL PET NEWT LIP-WETTENER

he pulled up a chairdog, sat down at the tabledog and lifted a tankard-dog to his thirsty lips

lipdogs

WAIT I have Whipping Star and Dosadi but not this one! Must find must find must...

I love The Dosadi Experiment.

heh i think that's the one mark was talking about, whith the "double ngative" theory of prosecutorial proof, where you not only have to prove that the defendant is guilty, but that his lawyer is innocent??? or something

btw i apologize for the length of the reading this time around... it was hard to know where/how to cut

whipping star amazes me bcz of how quickly herbert throws out all the unexplained alien conceits in it - "do you swear by your trunk sir" "why yes pesky human i do" "but do you swear by the EGG of your trunk sir?" "GODDAMN YOU PESKY HUMAN I CANNOT"

plus it has a great SF macguffin

dosadi i think suffers in that 'courtarenas' or whatever are a fun thing to read about in a couple pages offhand total in whipping star but far less so in whole scenes - or just in total lack of new ideas by comparison.

i think it has three really strong ideas that it essentially sets out then runs away from -- certainly it doesn't let them run into one another, just gestures at the idea of they're being explored (if he had explored them in full implication he'd have another dune-style trilogy-of-trilogies on his hands, of course)

1: the idea of the dosadi hyper-competitive sensibilities being secretly unleashed into a soft consentiency
2: the idea of the gender-swap -- (un)naturally this was the bit i wz most excitied by as a teenager
3: the court-arena stuff (a highly civilised and subtle judicial procedure built on a radically darwinian biology)

1&2 are what i'm calling the "answer-record" to triton (with the dosadi as the expansion of delany's "unlicensed zone")

1: the idea of the dosadi hyper-competitive sensibilities being secretly unleashed into a soft consentiency

I was v excited about this idea when I started Dosadi b/c of one moment in a Dune book where the old nurse is telling something to one of the Atreides (maybe Alia?) and her listener says, "My eyes are as blue as yours" and it seems like a non sequitur but really is a bunch of hyper-capable, you-dare-explain-my-heritage-to-me stuff packed together. Which had a strong appeal when I was 15.

i'm rereading dosadi (and loving it all over again): what slightly o-0s me is how much of its contrarian "see what happens" playfulness i have absorbed into my own politics (personal rather than who i vote for but even so)

i think my problem was that "becoming Dosadi" completely failed to become convincing — there seemed to be nothing impossibly unique about the environment of it, it seemed so tame in its evocation of this supposed ultimate — a bit like 'the road' really ...

i am actually reviving this because it is the first slugs thread i could find and wanted to ask if tracer hand was still around