A review by danielmbensen
Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan

5.0

Now here's a story. When I was in high school, my dad told me about a scifi book he vaguely remembered, in which self-replicating alien robots found their way to Titan and evolved there into a robot ecosystem, complete with kingdoms of metal humanoids. I was fascinated by the idea. I designed robot animals with friends, built up a menagerie, and finally wrote a novella about the pros and cons of environmental protection in an eco-system that thinks your spaceships and environment suits are delicious. Hogan wrote a very different, and much better story.

Hogan didn't get as creative with the native life of Titan as I did, but he did give some very sweet descriptions of the families of concrete-pourers wallowing in the methane stream under softly humming generators. And then of course there is the actual story, where a stage psychic, symbol of everything that's gone wrong with America's relationship with science, becomes the hero. There are deep and poignant meditations on truth and lies, right and wrong, and how they don't always match up. Also there are such delightful passages as "a hermit in a wheel-skin tunic has wandered into town on a steam-donkey with some new heretical claptrap about pacifism. Shall we boil him in acid until he confesses?" Fingers to lips. Mwah!