Whipping Star (Consentiency Universe)

The spoiler is in the title. The book makes much of something that is disclosed before you have read a single page.

Strange (in a good sense) bit of Fiction by the auther of DUNE

Read this decades ago and still have the paperback. Was almost hoping I could get it on my kindle as I didn't want to read a 40 year old book. Sometimes the images you had at the time of reading come back to you and you want to dive back into the worlds that Sci-fi writers give you.Acceptance is the only requisite apart from a smattering of cosmic and scientific knowledge as today in 2016 we are using stuff that would have been considered mind boggling when this book came out.Secondly, the Green Brain would make a great movie as we can use CGI so well it is hard to tell the difference nowadays.

Frank Herbert, the author of the  Dune  series, tells the story of a crisis in the future. Humanity has reached out from its home world to join the community of other races. Some seem no different than the bumpy-headed, English-speaking humans of  Star Trek  fame. And others, like the Calebans, are as hard to understand as they are to see. Ninety years before the book's story begins, the Calebans gave an instantaneous travel system to... everybody. Now everybody who has ever used it is in jeopardy. Jorj McKie of the Bureau of Sabotage is the human on the spot to resolve the crisis.This book disappointed me. It wasn't bad, but it seemed to have so much going for it from the beginning that it didn't live up to in the end. It is by a well-known, successful author. Some of the alien races have very different anatomies, attitudes, and agendas. The need for a Bureau of Sabotage to dampen the sudden fads of popular government is intriguing. But you don't learn enough about the alien cultures, the Bureau's other activities of the motivations of the central characters. And it is particularly irritating that a long stretch in the second half of the book takes place in a meeting. A meeting! The pacing seems off, too. It drags, then seems to wrap up too quickly.I'm still fond of the book's interesting new ideas. And I'm glad I read it. I just wish the author was still around to take another shot at rewriting it.

A terrific story which should be on Kindle

Whipping Star takes some seemingly outrageous concepts and turns them into a believable and enjoyable story. The main characters are very likable and the dialogue and humor will have you smiling while reading it. Somehow the fate of the universe is almost treated in a comic way, due to Mckie, the main character and his bumbling conversations with Fanny Mae. In this sense there are almost shades of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. It suits this book well. And I would say it is best to go in to this looking for a fun and humorous book, rather than expecting too many serious and in-depth psychological reflections. There is a serious back drop to the story that makes it believable, but it is the humour along the way that makes this particular story so good.

Enjoyed the book but took some getting my head round the theories/storylines discussed.

Frank Herbert never disappoints (OK - The Green Brain is a bit zzZZZZ) - this is a great introduction to the even better Dosadi Experiment  The Dosadi Experiment . I must confess that I read Dosadi before read this - and I think that was a wise move.This is a short book that sets up and interesting premise -- Stars can be inhabited by living creatures. What the book does really well, is get you to buy into such a leap of imagination.If these two books had been combined into one, longer story I feel that the result would have been a more satisfactory outcome.By both and relive the hay day of early SciFiGlen Gilchrist