The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fifth and final instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.‘The Sentimental Agents …’ is set in the declining Volyen Empire as the empires of Sirius and Shammat compete to overwhelm it with rhetoric and false sentiment. The Canopean Empire deploys covert agents to help the Volyens resist. But one of these agents, Incent, succumbs to ‘Undulant Rhetoric’, and Agent Klorathy must go to Volyen to help him see through the empty words that have beguiled him.Once more employing alien races to identify human failings, Lessing uses social and political satire to show how we misuse speech (a…