Overlooked classic: James P. Hogan’s Code of the Lifemaker

(Discussion of this post on Reddit’s r/printSF)

If someone’s gonna recommend just one book by classic sci-fi author James P. Hogan to you, it’ll usually be 1978’s Inherit the Stars. It turns out I don’t have the one with the iconic Darrell K. Sweet cover of two astronauts discovering a giant’s mummified, red-space-suited body half-buried on the Moon. Instead, I have this unfortunate sci-fi book club omnibus edition from 1981, shown here with a border collie for scale:

Don’t get me wrong, the Giants series (continued in The Gentle Giants of Ganymede and Giants’ Star) are great books. Lesser-known, however, is Code of the Lifemaker, from 1983:

The great cover by David B. Mattingly is very evocative of that era of sci-fi, and tells you exactly what you’re in for: a first-contact story between humans and robotic aliens.

The idea of self-replicating robots wasn’t new in 1983. Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series used it to great effect starting in 1967, and scientists had talked about the idea at least since John Von Neumann in 1948. In fact, NASA did a study in 1980 which Hogan could have heard about, looking at how you might build self-replicating factories on Earth’s moon.

But Hogan had an original twist—these robots are the product of an abandoned alien factory complex, whose deployment on Saturn’s moon Titan in the year 1,000,000 B.C. goes awry due to damage it sustained during its travels. The factory sprawls messily all over the moon, running amok, and the end result is the evolution of an entire robotic ecosystem, instead of an orderly mining complex that would have shipped valuable products back to the aliens’ home planet.

The main part of the story is about humans discovering this robot society in around the year 2020 A.D., when an unmanned probe sends back pictures. The robots’ own bodies are quite sophisticated technology, as are the other robotic ‘animals’ and ‘plants’ that have evolved on Titan. But the technology that this robot society has developed for itself is the inverse of humanity’s, built using organic materials, with their own bodies’ inorganic workings remaining a mystery to them.

The robotic society is at approximately a medieval level, and the arrival of humans, whose rival factions compete to exploit or befriend them, threatens to change that society forever. The book explores many thoughtful themes, including colonialism, religious intolerance, and humanity’s bizarre attraction to pseudoscience even as our real science becomes ever more advanced. It’s a fun read, and stood up pretty well on a re-read forty years later.

As usual, with a book this old, a few things will seem odd. All the characters have very square-jawed ‘Firstname Lastname’ kinds of monikers, and many of the women in the story have secretarial-type roles, though Hogan did grant one of them a Ph.D. and another a military pilot’s license, so you could tell he was at least making an effort to get beyond what was normal in his day. Hogan himself reportedly adopted some crackpot beliefs later in life, but those don’t come through in this work. And anyway, down that road lies madness—I’m a big advocate of taking each work as it stands, and not worrying too much about authors’ weirdnesses. Plus, for a book this old, you can always opt to buy it from a used bookstore, if you want to choose who profits from your purchase.