What the fuck are connectives?

Whipping Star is an odd fucking book. I like it!

I haven't read any Herbert other than the 6 books he wrote in the Dune series but I adore Dune and figured I should give this a chance.

There are some things that are incredibly frustrating about Frank Herbert - mostly in his earlier works - when it comes to representation of women and different races and pretty much anything that ISN'T a straight white male. This book has good things and bad things when it comes to those frustrations; for instance, the first time we meet the main character he's getting his 54th divorce and thinking of his most recent ex-wife as a "stupid female." But the same character is non-white and the vast majority of the book is about different species trying not to suppress each other's cultures and attempting to communicate with a tremendously powerful being who identifies as female. But other than the barely-touched-upon ex-wife at the beginning of the book there are only three characters in the story who are identifiable as women: one is bringing about the end of the universe, one is a lawyer, and one is dead.

The way Herbert writes and uses women in his novels is something that's been hugely problematic for me in reading those novels, especially in the Dune series. The Bene Gesserit are powerful women, but their motto is "we exist only to serve." Chani is a Fremen woman who was raised to fight and march across howling deserts and provide for her family, but who ends her life as a concubine and dies in childbirth. Admittedly the place of women in the Duniverse improves drastically after God Emperor, but it kind of feels like it shouldn't have taken so many books to get there. And a ton of people say things like "oh, Herbert was really liberal, he was just proving a point about how badly women are treated in our world" as a defense but it doesn't hold water for me because there WERE opportunities in the first three books to make women both powerful and effective and to allow them to fight the injustices against them in the world and the only one who does even a tiny bit of that is Jessica. Sort of. But only to secure power for her grandson.

Anyway, other than the really irksome way that all non-Caleban females are represented in the novel, Whipping Star is a really good book. It's incredibly thoughtful on subjects such as communication and perception, there's a great far-future-noir feeling surrounding the investigation of a mysterious metallic beach ball showing up on a sparsely populated planet, and the primary plot is startlingly new to me - I'm really surprised that I've not seen many other novels that explore the concept at the heart of this book, though I am not surprised that the only other place I've seen such a story is in fantasy.

I'm delighted to have read Whipping Star, and it was such a fun, easy little read that I'm sure I'll do so again in the future.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Herbert, Frank. Whipping Star. Berkley Publishing. New York: New York. 1977. (1969).