Whipping Star

This is a truly bizarre story set in a future containing various weird phenomena that people have had to get accustomed to by then—although the phenomenon that's causing a big problem is new and mostly not understood.

The story spends much of its time dramatizing the difficulty of communicating between different intelligent species who perceive the world in completely different ways.

I find it all quite interesting and entertaining, a good enough story to reread occasionally, although Frank Herbert as an author is something of a conjuror. Superficially, his plots seem to make sense and his heroes seem to be intelligent, but I suspect that they wouldn't stand up to close examination.