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Book Home  Books Information Dosadi Experiment
Dosadi Experiment
The Dosadi Experiment
is a science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert in 1977.
Jorj X. McKie is a saboteur extraordinary, one
of the principles of BuSab, and the only human admitted to practice
law before the Gowachin bar as a legum (lawyer).
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Summary
The Gowachin are a species of frog-people (in human terms) that utilise a form of survival of the fittest right from their tadpoles to the very pinnacle of their society. Their legal practices are based upon the notion of a healthy disrespect for the law: the losing legum may be killed by the winning legum; a client pronounced innocent before the court is torn to pieces by angry spectators; judges may have bias ("if I can decide for my side, I will"), but not prejudice ("I will decide for my side, regardless"); any participant in the trial is subject to judgement, including the judges.
McKie is chosen as a legum for the Gowachin to solve
a particular problem: generations ago, a secret, unauthorized experiment
was carried out with the help of the Caleban, a species of unparalleled
power from another dimension, whose visible manifestation in this
universe is as stars, and who provide jump-doors to sentients that
allow instantaneous travel between any two points in the universe.
The Caleban isolated a planet, Dosadi, behind "The God Wall",
and onto the planet were placed humans and gowachin with an unstable
form of government, the demo-pol. The planet itself is massively poisonous
except for a narrow valley, into which millions of humans and gowachin
are crowded under terrible conditions.
The problem which McKie must solve is caused by the
Dosadi's nearness to escaping the God Wall. The apparent purpose of
the experiment was to subject sentients to the worst conditions possible
for survival and see what behaviours and instincts were bred as a
response. Now the Dosadis are terrifying creatures with heightened
perceptions, intelligence, and drive to survive and prosper; if they
were to be loosed upon the universe, they would quickly conquer it.
McKie must find a way to prevent the God Wall from breaking, preserving
the secret of Dosadi, or find a way to destroy the planet, erasing
the original crime with one of greater magnitude.
The actual purpose of the experiment is to perfect ego
transfer. The Caleban follow contracts without exception, and the
contract with the Caleban enforcing the God Wall states that no Dosadi
may leave the planet. Thus, the only way for the Dosadi to escape
is in the bodies of outsiders sent by the Gowachin to investigate
Dosadi by switching egos with them. By perfecting ego transfer, the
power brokers behind the experiment give themselves a kind of immortality:
As they near death, they switch egos with a young person, taking a
new body and extending their ego lifespan through several generations,
and theoretically forever.
Analysis
The major themes of this novel are repeated in different forms in
other of Herbert's novels.
This novel is interesting to compare with the Dune series,
in which the Fremen are also a people who survive under terrible conditions,
breeding pure survival behaviours that make them dangerous to the
rest of the universe.
In Dune, the Fremen are a religious sect in retreat
the colonizes the desert planet Arrakis, a horrible environment in
which the harshest conditions breed the most brutal survival behaviours,
creating a population dangerous to the universe at large should they
escape with conquest in mind (as they do in the sequels).
Likewise, the creation of a hyper-stressful environment
as an incubator for the invention of a technological breakthrough
occurs in Herbert's book Destination: Void, in which a crew of clones
is placed on a spaceship designed to fail, necessitating the invention
of an artificial consciousness to continue the mission, with destruction
as their only alternative.
Finally, the use of some form of ego transfer to grant
immortality is revealed as a practice of the Bene Tleilaxu in Heretics
of Dune. In the Dune universe, ego transfer occurs as a result of
actual cloning, where the clones recover the memories of their ancestors
by undergoing a carefully staged moment of great stress.
There are also interesting parallels between the society
on Dosadi and that described by anthropologist Colin Turnbull in his
book The Mountain People (written in 1972, 5 years before The Dosadi
Experiment). That book describes an Ugandan tribe, the Ik, whose conditions
are so desperate and impoverished that they also have learned to survive
at whatever cost, up to and including the lives of their own families.
This novel is a sequel to Whipping Star.
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