Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)

Dreck, dreck, dreck, possibly the worst science fiction series I've had the misfortune of reading -- tedious to the infinite. Forced myself to read the series hoping it would improve... ( )

'After I left the hotel, through a lobby all excitement and noise – a trade delegation from the Sirian HQ on their planet Motz were just leaving, looking pleased with themselves – I walked straight into the park opposite. Some freely wandering gazelles came to greet me. They originate, as it happens, from Shikasta, stolen by Sirius and presented as part of a state gift. They licked my hands and nuzzled them, and I knew my emotional apparatus was nearly at Overload. Plant life in every stage of growth. The songs of birds. In short, the usual assault on one's stabilizing mechanisms. So hard did I find it to keep my emotional balance that I nearly went back into the hotel to join Incent.
Oh, the glamour of the natural life! The deceptions of the instinctual! The beguilements of all that pulses and oscillates! How I do yearn for Canopus and for its... but enough of that. Forgive my weakness.

I already suspected that the Canopean Empire was not as altruistic as it at first appeared, but in the fifth and final book of the series it also becomes apparent that its agents are fallible. The usual dispassionate stance of Canopus towards members of lesser species can be rocked, as its agents sometimes fall into a state where they are overtaken by emotion and easily swayed by rhetoric. When this happens agents are admitted to a Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases to undergo treatment designed to bring their emotions back into check and stop them from being affected so powerfully by words.

In this book Klorathy, who previously appeared in "The Sirian Experiments", guides the inhabitants of Volyen, its inhabited moons and neighbouring planets through the break-up of the Volyen Empire, while helping a junior agent called Incent through illness, relapses and recovery, and just about warding off the illness himself.

This isn't my favourite book in the series, although this book's stance against rhetoric and the power of words to rouse emotion and sway people to behave unreasonably was though-provoking. Incent's constant relapses and his alternating attraction to and shamed rejection of Shammat soon became tedious, although I was interested in the inhabitants of the Volyen system as they faced the break up of the Volyen Empire and invasion by Sirius and their reaction to the manipulation by Canopus. ( )

Though some of the Canopean agents in this book previously appeared in Shikasta and The Sirian Experiments, The Sentimental Agents is otherwise unrelated to them, as it concerns the Volyen Empire, a minor power that Canopus, Sirius, and Shammat are all jockeying for control over. It's interesting to finally get back to the perspective of Canopus for the first time since the first volume; when Klorathy appears, we realize that no matter how much he mattered to Ambien and how much he claimed that Sirius could one day be like Canopus, Ambien actually probably meant nothing to him, and he is continuously vilifying Sirius. Much of the book is about Klorathy's attempts to "re-educate" a Canopean agent who has fallen away from Canopean beliefs, and this is where the critcism of doctrine in the series becomes the most overt: the techniques that Canopus uses to "help" Incent seem no different than the criticisms the other, villainous empires use to indoctrinate their own agents. Indeed, the Canopeans are at their most patriarchal here, sneering that the attempts of former Volyen governor Grice to hold his people accountable for their crimes in a big public trial, when in actuality what Grice is doing is not very different from Johor's climactic condemnation of western civilization in Shikasta. Indeed, poor Grice who struggles to do the right thing but never quite figures out what it is, was my favorite character.

The Sentimental Agents was my second-favorite book in the series, because it finally let me understand Canopus, and cemented my understanding of Lessing's point with the series: the dangers of believing any rhetoric too strongly. At one point, one of the characters quotes Klorathy: "It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda." There is no empire who believes its own propaganda more than Canopus, yet Klorathy utters this line with no sense of self-awareness. One wonders when the fall of Canopus will come, because when it does, it will be positively enormous. All of its agents have a lot to learn.

Though I found Canopus in Argos: Archives interesting as a whole (with the exception of The Making of Representative for Planet 8), it was often intellectual interest that came at the expense of emotional engagement, making the books something of a slog to get through at times. A worthy if flawed experiment-- much like Shikasta itself, which is appropriate, I suppose.

The Sentimental Agents is the final book in the Archives cycle, it stands out like Shikasta. This time the 3 empires (canopus,syria, and puttoria) are influencing the backwater empire of volyen (hardly an empire on the scale thatcanopus & sirius are).

It ties up a lot of things from the earlier books, but leaves one tempting thread hanging, should the archives ever need more work.

Like the others, its high brow sci-fi, and if it sounded dull before it'll sound dull now, but the episode with Grice in the courtroom had me quietly chuckling away, I'm tempted to send it to a lawyer friend ( )