It is the third book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series[1] and continues the story of Earth's evolution, which has been manipulated from the beginning by advanced extraterrestrial civilisations.

[5] Lessing stated in an afterword in the next book in this series that The Sirian Experiments and The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 were inspired by her 50-year fascination with the ill-fated 1910–13 Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott.

[8] Robert Alter of The New York Times suggested that this kind of writing belongs to a genre literary critic Northrop Frye called the "anatomy", which is "a combination of fantasy and morality" and that "presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern.

"[14] The Sirian Empire, centred in the Sirius star system, has advanced technology that made their citizens effectively immortal (barring accidents) and sophisticated machines that did almost everything for them.

As a gesture of reconciliation, Canopus returned all the captured Sirian territory and invited Sirius to jointly colonise a new and promising planet called Rohanda (an allegorical Earth).

She sets in motion a series of bio-sociological and genetic experiments where large numbers of primitive indigenous people from Sirian colonised planets are space-lifted to Rohanda and adapted there for work elsewhere in the Empire.

Then an unforeseen "cosmic re-alignment" breaks the Lock and Shammat of the malicious Puttiora Empire begins exploiting the situation by corrupting Rohanda's Natives.

In an attempt to foster better relations with Sirius, Klorathy, a senior Canopean Colonial administrator, invites Ambien II to observe events in their territory.