Like its predecessor, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, Doris Lessing's latest exercise in science fiction, The Sirian Experiments, is a didactic fable about the need to learn. Both books show leading figures from one culture encountering those from another, and being gradually changed by what this teaches them. In the earlier book—a feminist parable—Al'Ith, Queen of Zone Three, went on an educational visit to the muddy, militaristic male world of Zone Four; later, scaling the rarefied heights of Zone Two, she became a visionary ostracised by her own people.

In The Sirian Experiments—a parable about colonisation—the same pattern applies. Ambien II, one of The Five who rule the Sirian Empire, is initially a desiccated bureaucrat. Transformed by contact with a more enlightened way of life, she has become, when her story ends, a disturbing reformer, held 'under planet arrest'….

Rather smugly...