| Whipping Star | |
| Author: | Frank Herbert |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Science fiction |
| Publisher: | G. P. Putnam's Sons |
| Release Date: | 1970 |
| Media Type: | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Isbn: | 0-8398-2648-6 |
| Preceded By: | “The Tactful Saboteur” |
| Followed By: | The Dosadi Experiment |
Whipping Star is a 1970 science fiction novel by American writer Frank Herbert. It is the first full-length novel set in the ConSentiency universe established by Herbert in his short stories “A Matter of Traces” and “The Tactful Saboteur”.
In a far-flung future in which Earth is not so much as mentioned, Homo sapiens and other sentient species, namely the Gowachin, Laclac, Wreaves, Pan Spechi, Taprisiots, and Caleban, comprise the galaxy-spanning ConSentiency. After suffering the unexpected consequences a pure democracy –laws could be created so quickly that no thought could be given to their full consequences– the sentients formed Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) to slow the wheels of government, thereby precluding reckless legislation. Not itself a law-enforcement organization, its ambit comprises elements of both espionage and diplomacy.
Jorj X. McKie is a saboteur extraordinary, a born troublemaker who has naturally become one of BuSab's best agents. As the novel opens, the small population of immensely powerful Calebans, by far the most powerful and inscrutable members of the ConSentiency, have been disappearing one by one, inexplicably leaving millions of deaths and numerous cases of incurable insanity in their wake. Only one remains: the partially corporeal Fanny Mae.
Ninety years prior to the setting of Whipping Star, the Calebans had appeared and offered jumpdoors to the ConSentiency, affording instantaneous travel to any point in the galaxy. This seemingly miraculous technology was accepted with out `too many questions being asked (and even fewer being answered), and the sociology of the ConSentiency was remade. Mliss Abnethe, a sociopathic sadist human female of immense power and wealth had however somehow contractually bound the all-too-curious Caleban Fanny Mae to be apparently whipped to death; when Fanny May dies, everyone who has ever used a jumpdoor (which is practically speaking everyone in existence) will die as well.
The Calebans begin to flee one at a time, leaving our plane of existence (or exiting "our wave"). Inasmuch as all Calebans are interconnected, if they were to remain in our wave of existence when Fanny Mae dies, they would also die. McKie has to find Mliss and stop her mad, solipsistic project before Fanny Mae reaches, in her words, "ultimate discontinuity" and civilization utterly collapses and all sentience with it. Maddeningly he is constrained by the law protecting private individuals, which restricts the ministrations of BuSab to public entities.
The action ranges from solar systems to office politics, ontology to semantics, and more. In the denouement Fanny Mae's insatiable curiosity stands her in good stead, and sufficient communication is established with BuSab for the mystery to be solved and the omnigenocidal gang to be hoist by their own petard. It proves that the Caleban are more alien than any of the other species imagined, or could have imagined. Not only were the jumpdoors intrinsic aspects of their own hyperdimensional being (they were the network), they partially manifested in our wave as stars. Accordingly "Fannie Mae", home being an important plot element and her identity more fully revealed, requests that she be addressed as Thyone, a star in the Pleiades henceforth.
Whipping Star was preceded by the short story "The Tactful Saboteur". It was followed in 1977 by Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment. These stories take place in the same imaginary universe and have the same main character, Jorj X. McKie, as in Whipping Star.
The chairdogs that appear in multiple Dune novels—both the original series by Frank Herbert, as well as the extended series by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson—are also a feature of the later Whipping Star novel.[1]