The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

Blurb

The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire is a 1983 science fiction novel by Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing. It is the fifth book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series and comprises a set of documents that describe the final days of the Volyen Empire, located at the edge of our galaxy and under the influence of three other galactic empires, the benevolent Canopus, the tyrannical Sirius, and the malicious Shammat of Puttiora. It was first published in the United States in March 1983 by Alfred A. Knopf, and in the United Kingdom in May 1983 by Jonathan Cape.
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire is a social satire written in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and George Orwell, and focuses on the debasement of language in political rhetoric. In Lessing's fictional universe it is propaganda that keeps the fragile empires afloat, and when language becomes too distorted, some of her characters succumb to a condition called "undulant rhetoric" and are placed in a Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases.