Enemies of the System

One million years in the future, humanity has evolved into homo uniformis—a unified race sharing a centralized nervous system. This utopian civilization has eliminated war, disease, violence, emotion, and the afflictions of their ancestors. A small group of elite travelers becomes stranded on the planet Lysenka while en route to a distant vacation. The planet is inhabited by descendants of human colonists from Earth's ancient past. Over millennia, these inhabitants have evolved into creatures bearing little resemblance to the uniformly civilized travelers now marooned among them. Survival on Lysenka follows a single rule: adapt or die. Brian W. Aldiss explores what it means to be human through this speculative work set in the far future, examining how the stranded utopians confront the reemergence of traits their species believed it had transcended.