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

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