SHIKASTA IS the first of a projected series of novels called Canopus in Argos: Archives. The collective title, like the component ones (the others are The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four, and Five and The Sirian Experiments), proclaims that Doris Lessing is working in a genre called space or cosmic fiction, related to Sci-fi and fut-fic and the rest but distinguished from them by a prophetic and highly moral quality. In other words, not an escape into fantasy but an attempt to look at the human condition from an imagined cosmic angle. In her foreword Lessing recounts an experience in the United States. She was lecturing on the salutary changes coming into the novel through the influence of cosmic fiction:
… space fiction, with science fiction, makes up the most original branch of literature now; it is inventive and witty; it has already enlivened all kinds of writing; … literary academics and pundits are much to blame for patronising or ignoring it… I do think there is something very wrong with an attitude that puts a ‘serious’ novel on one shelf and, let’s say, Last and First Men on another.
Her professional chairperson at once struck in with ‘If I had you in my class you’d never get away with that!’. I have to confess that this is much my own attitude. If space or science fiction is good, then it must be good as Jane Austen or Henry James is good – through the artful delineation of human character in credible situations, through the generation of a pattern out of the chaos of actuality. Lessing’s point about Olaf Stapledon’s book is well taken, but Stapledon belongs to literature as does Wells, and it is only the specialist SF departments of libraries and bookstores that relegate him to shelves full of BEMs glooming through bad prose. The separation of SF from literature in general has helped to condone a loosening of artistic standards in the SF field. Writers of regular fiction would never get away with some of the psychological implausibilities, unreal dialogue, and ill-managed récit that are positively welcomed by addicts of the SF genre as signals of a new kind of literature. But Wells, Stapledon, Aldiss and Ballard can be evaluated as Green, Snow and Mrs Lessing herself are evaluated and not be found wanting.
There is something ontologically disturbing about fiction that deals with human affairs from a fanciful cosmic viewpoint. Space probes are demonstrating that there is probably no intelligence ‘out there’ yet Doris Lessing now joins those who purvey the somewhat old-fashioned hypothesis of galactic empires, huge extraterrestrial powers that look down on planet Earth (or Shikasta) with shame and pity, an endless Manichaean war between the Great Ones and Shammat (or the Devil). The agonies of human life are, God knows, real enough, but to posit cosmic aetiologies and galactic cures is an evasion of reality as well as a mockery of terrestrial suffering. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five the horror of the Dresden bombings was diminished by the superficial SF frame. It is to Lessing’s credit that she so frequently moves from the cosmic view to the human, functioning as the ‘traditional’ novelist we know and admire, even making her Johor (emissary to Shikasta) assume human qualities and the name George Sherban.
The book pretends to be a compilation of documents ‘selected to offer a very general picture of Shikasta for the use of first-year students of Canopean Colonial Rule’. The documents cover the whole history of the earth from the first stirrings of life to the last, or Third World War, in which humanity nearly destroys itself, but not quite. Those nodes in history where, inexplicably, man’s urge for extinction is countered by glimpses of the Good or thwarted by an advance in knowledge, are seen to be contrived by the Great Ones out there, Beneficent and discreet saviours. Try as the author may in works of this kind (one thinks also of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey), he or she cannot evade the traffic of the divine and the human, there always has to be the flavour of a ‘sacred book’. ‘The sacred literatures of all races and nations’, says Mrs Lessing, ‘have many things in common. Almost as if they can be regarded as the products of a single mind. It is possible we make a mistake then we dismiss them as quaint fossils from a dead past.’ More than possible.
And so, as we were taught a long time ago but now have to be retaught in SF terms, good and evil exist and are at perpetual war with each other, but the war must some time in the remote aeons be resolved. There will be no victorious archangelic trumpets, but there will be a muffled minimal creeping through, on the part of perhaps one per cent of the survivors of the next catastrophe, to salvation:
Poor people of the past, poor poor people, so many of them, for long thousands of years, not knowing anything, fumbling and stumbling and longing for something different but not knowing what had happened to them or what they longed for.
I can’t stop thinking of them, our ancestors, the poor animal-men, always murdering and destroying because they couldn’t help it.
And this will go on for us, as if we were being slowly lifted and filled and washed by a soft singing wind that clears our sad muddled minds and holds us safe and heals us and feeds us with lessons we never imagined.
And here we all are together, here we are…
The virtue of Doris Lessing’s novel lies in its rage and its hope and, of course, its humanity. The cosmic fancies become a mere decoration, not, as with true SF, the innutritious essence. Tafta, Supreme Lord of Shikasta, may send a dispatch to Supreme Supervisory Lord Zarlem on Shammat about the victory of evil, but the truth is the physical one of polluted seas, crammed prison camps all over Europe, the Third World happy to see its former oppressors starving, the trees dying, the Youth Armies on the march. And Lessing’s compassion blazes through in images of human and animal suffering – the dignity of a dying cat, a man and his cow dying together from drought and sharing the final drop of water. And then there are the casebooks which attempt the objectivity of students’ texts – INDIVIDUAL THREE (Workers’ Leader) and so on – but are indistinct with the author’s own agony and incomprehension.
Incomprehension? Doris Lessing does not understand any better than the rest of us why the eternal human mess should exist. But it is in order for a novelist to try to resolve his or her bewilderment by taking a Stapledonian view of history and looking for a pattern. The pain of bewilderment can be eased by invoking a contrived cosmic plan, or even an invented theology – through, as she seems to admit, all theologies are fundamentally the same: they all have to find an explanation of evil. As for the human future which nags us as though it were already the past, it is an altogether worthy thing for a novelist to attempt to predict it. This is one of the novelist’s jobs, since it cannot be safely left to professional futurologists. By viewing the world from space, it becomes possible to see human time, as it were, spatially, and Doris Lessing’s vision of the next and final catastrophe gains credibility from her technique of cosmic detachment. But she is not too detached: her characters are as much alive as they are in her more orthodox fiction, and her Johor assumes, with a kind of relief, his human lineaments. I have no doubt that the whole trilogy will be worthy of standing on the same shelf as Last and First Men and Sirius and The Starmaker. And this will not be because of its SF trappings.
Times Literary Supplement, 23 November 1979
Review of Shikasta by Doris Lessing
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1979)