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I'm going to mention one theme which I touched upon in my earlier posts which these days is very politically charged. Diversity. Its necessity but also its limits. Of course diversity in the book is much wider than a mere diversity of races, though humanity as a whole is one of a number of sentient races considered in the book. The diversity that is important in the book is the diversity of viewpoints, of ways of thinking. This is most immediately apparent in the Juwain philosophy. Juwain is an extraordinary individual of the sketchily drawn Martian race. Despite his notes, neither humans nor the remaining Martians are able to reconstruct his philosophy. Yet it is understood effortlessly by the first mutant it is presented to. The book largely regards humanity as failures incapable of real understanding. In Huddling Place Webster, adventurous in his youth, develops extreme agoraphobia with age. To some extent this is a metaphor for the whole human race. The mutants who had a sufficiently different understanding to comprehend Juwain's notes had ceased to be human and no longer shared humanity's goals. On the other hand humanity had recognised that its own viewpoint was deficient, both to follow Juwain's reasoning and to do who knows what else. They hoped to overcome these limitations by re-integrating or at least co-operating with the mutants, but the mutants had now diverged so far from humanity they did not share its goals. The Dogs were another effort to make up for humanity's limitations in thinking and understanding. The mutated Ants offered a truly alien perspective if in fact they had a perspective at all, but one too alien for humanity to ever understand. They bring to mind Demosthenes Hierarchy of Foreignness in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, which would definitely characterise them as Varelse, So diversity is good up to a point but has its limits. The only real ways to overcome those limits the book offers for humans are either to become something else, or to live through our own "creations" who we hope will be able to succeed where we cannot. Jupiter and the Loper's is an example of the former, the dogs and the robots and perhaps even the mutants of the latter. It seems the best humanity can do is get out of the way, for better or worse. It seems that the Dog Society rejected committing genocide on the ants, or would have had Jenkins saw fit to even present it to them. Or, despite their beliefs, did Jenkin's fail to present this solution to them because he feared they may be too human-like after all?
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