Aldiss published *Enemies of the System* in 1978, not 1971 — a correction the Librarian is obliged to make before the lights go down — and the difference matters, because by 1978 the Soviet model was no longer an abstraction but a grinding, documented fact. The book reads less like speculative fiction than like a thought experiment conducted in a language lab: what happens when you strand a busload of ideologically perfected humans on a planet where other humans have devolved into something pre-linguistic, and then force the perfected ones to watch? The answer Aldiss arrives at is bleak and precise. The System's citizens are not villains. They are simply people for whom the category of "human" has become a bureaucratic designation, revocable on ideological grounds. In 2026, that mechanism needs no science-fictional scaffolding. We have watched, in real time, how populations get reclassified — as threats, as illegals, as misinformation vectors — and how the reclassification always precedes the withdrawal of empathy. Aldiss saw that the vocabulary of utopia and the vocabulary of exclusion could be the same vocabulary. He was not wrong.

The planet Lysenka II is the book's cruelest joke, and one that has only sharpened. Naming a world after Trofim Lysenko — the Soviet agronomist whose politically mandated pseudoscience destroyed Soviet genetics for a generation — tells you everything about the System's relationship to truth. The tourists arrive expecting a managed wilderness; they find a planet where humans shipped as colonists have, over millennia, lost language, lost technology, lost upright posture, and regressed into something the System can only call "the Id." Aldiss is dramatizing Lysenkoism's endpoint: deny biology long enough and biology will deny you back. In an era of resurgent ideological hostility toward evolutionary science, toward epidemiology, toward climate data — toward any empirical finding that inconveniences a political project — Lysenka II feels less like a distant planet than like a weather forecast. The regression Aldiss describes is not physical. It is epistemic. And it is already underway.

What the book gets wrong, or rather what it cannot imagine, is the mechanism of conformity. Aldiss models the System on Soviet-style central planning: committees, bureaus, official lexicons, a party line enforced through social pressure and the occasional disappearance. The conformity is top-down, institutional, legible. He did not foresee that the more effective totalitarianism would be lateral — algorithmic, emergent, driven by platforms that no single committee controls. His utopianists debate in long, careful paragraphs; they cite approved thinkers; they correct each other's ideological deviations with the patience of seminar participants. No one doomscrolls. No one is radicalized by a recommendation engine. The System's citizens are over-articulate, not under-articulate, and this is the book's most dated assumption: that a future tyranny would still bother with language at all. The devolved humans on Lysenka II, grunting and gesturing toward the stars in a ritual they no longer understand, may be closer to our actual informational condition than the eloquent prisoners debating free will in their cave.