Code Of The Lifemaker

Long before humanity develops the means to visit Saturn’s moon Titan, an alien automated factory ship arrives there, suffers damage and begins producing machines that no longer operate quite as their designers intended. Given enough time, these machines evolve intelligence, culture, politics, religion and social inequality, thereby demonstrating that mechanical life can reproduce every important achievement of civilisation, including most of its mistakes.

James P. Hogan’s Code of the Lifemaker follows a human expedition sent to investigate Titan and the remarkable society that has developed there. The native machines have cities, traditions, rulers and beliefs of their own, while remaining unaware of the technological origins behind their existence. Into this complicated situation comes Karl Zambendorf, a professional psychic and entertainer whose supposed supernatural powers depend largely upon observation, deception and the public’s enduring willingness to believe an impressive man who speaks confidently.

Zambendorf may be a fraud, but he is not necessarily a villain, particularly when compared with those who intend to exploit Titan and its inhabitants in a more organised and respectable manner. His talents for performance and manipulation become unexpectedly useful as the human visitors encounter a civilisation interpreting machinery as theology and technical processes as divine mysteries. It is difficult enough making first contact with an alien species; matters become more delicate when the aliens are robots, their religion is based upon misunderstood engineering, and one member of the diplomatic party makes his living pretending to read minds.

Hogan combines hard science fiction, satire and philosophical speculation in a novel concerned with artificial intelligence, evolution, colonialism and the origins of belief. The mechanical civilisation is not merely decorative background but a carefully imagined society, complete with its own internal conflicts and assumptions. Humans arrive convinced of their sophistication, only to reveal the customary mixture of curiosity, greed, idealism and bureaucratic ambition that has made our species such a reliable presence in speculative fiction.

Published by Del Rey in 1984, Code of the Lifemaker offers a generous helping of ideas alongside its adventure. It will appeal to readers who like their robots fully equipped with metaphysical uncertainty, their conmen capable of ethical development and their first-contact missions complicated by corporate interests. It also raises the uncomfortable possibility that intelligence, wherever it arises, inevitably leads to hierarchy, dogma and meetings.

This copy is in Very Good condition, having survived more than four decades without developing consciousness, founding a machine religion or demanding legal recognition as an independent life form. It remains a clean and attractive copy for readers and collectors of Hogan’s inventive science fiction.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where every volume is produced by traditional biological labour and inspected for signs of unauthorised evolution before dispatch.

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