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CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES
Re: Colonised Planet 5
SHIKASTA
Personal, psychological, historical documents relating
to visit by Johor (George Sherban) Emissary (Grade 9)
87th of the Last Period of the Last Days
DORIS LESSING
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1979
Copyright © Doris Lessing 1979
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006547198
Ebook Edition © May 2012 ISBN: 9780007455539
Version: 2017-06-09
For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our house in Africa, watching the stars. ‘Well,’ he would say, ‘if we blow ourselves up, there’s plenty more where we came from!’
Contents
Shikasta was started in the belief that it would be a single self-contained book, and that when it was finished I would be done with the subject. But as I wrote I was invaded with ideas for other books, other stories, and the exhilaration that comes from being set free into a large scope, with more capacious possibilities and themes. It was clear I had made – or found – a new world for myself, a realm where the petty fates of planets, let alone individuals, are only aspects of cosmic evolution expressed in the rivalries and interactions of great galactic Empires: Canopus, Sirius, and their enemy, the Empire Puttiora, with its criminal planet Shammat. I feel as if I have been set free both to be as experimental as I like, and as traditional: the next volume in this series, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, has turned out to be a fable, or myth. Also, oddly enough, to be more realistic.
It is by now commonplace to say that novelists everywhere are breaking the bonds of the realistic novel because what we all see around us becomes daily wilder, more fantastic, incredible. Once, and not so long ago, novelists might have been accused of exaggerating, or dealing overmuch in coincidence or the improbable: now novelists themselves can be heard complaining that fact can be counted on to match our wildest invention.
As an example, in The Memoirs of a Survivor I ‘invented’ an animal that was half-cat and half-dog, and then read that scientists were experimenting on this hybrid.
Yes, I do believe that it is possible, and not only for novelists, to ‘plug in’ to an overmind, or Ur-mind, or unconscious, or what you will, and that this accounts for a great many improbabilities and ‘coincidences’.
The old ‘realistic’ novel is being changed too, because of influences from that genre loosely described as space fiction. Some people regret this. I was in the United States giving a talk, and the professor who was acting as chairwoman, whose only fault was that perhaps she had fed too long on the pieties of academia, interrupted me with: ‘If I had you in my class you’d never get away with that!’ (Of course it is not everyone who finds this funny.) I had been saying that 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; and that literary academics and pundits are much to blame for patronizing or ignoring it – while of course by their nature they can be expected to do no
