Code of the Speechmaker

James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker starts off very nicely. An ancient alien survey ship, designed to set up automated factories on uninhabited planets, ends up damaged on the moon Titan. There, the imperfect automatons undergo their own kind of evolutionary process, ending up with something very like organic life.

(This prologue is the best part of the novel, and it's excerpted here.)


The rest of the novel deals with a human expedition to Titan, which over the ages since the prologue has evolved its own machine ecosystems and even sentient machine life. The robots are at a roughly medieval/Renaessance level of development, and the humans take great advantage of this as they prepare to make Titan into an economic colony.

The writing is solid. The characters, with one exception, are shallow but tolerable. Hogan works hard to make his bizarre mechanical-organic world plausible, and it kind of works.

There are two problems. The first is that Hogan puts speeches into various characters' mouths- mostly, in this novel, about the advantages of the scientific method. This gets old quickly.

The second problem is something I've noted about Heinlein: the assumption that politics is chess writ large, a completely rational and controllable game that smart people can arrange to their liking. This is implausible enough with humans, especially with religion added in; with an unknown alien race, the idea breaks down completely.

I suppose I was expecting a very different ending to the humans' various machinations and deceptions. But on Titan, you really can fool all the people all the time.