Shikasta

Shikasta
Doris Lessing

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a ‘totally crazed species’, racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task.Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing’s astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.

CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES

Re: Colonised Planet 5

SHIKASTA

Personal, psychological, historical documents relating

to visit by Johor (George Sherban) Emissary (Grade 9)

87

of the Last Period of the Last Days

DORIS LESSING

Copyright (#u67cdd700-ba76-5d7a-afcb-00e0f6e5febb)

Fourth Estate

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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

Cover (#u45ad8038-2068-5d89-ae61-b4874c6ef5e5)

Title Page (#ud6ccbfe2-8d79-5275-b65e-985b19d99b07)

Copyright (#u4dd4aed2-8542-5a0f-9951-3fd112397c2a)

Some Remarks (#u4138ed58-6795-5880-9124-c2ad7548b1a3)

Shikasta (#u7bdcfa9f-b019-5e94-bd26-61b65c1e9d57)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)

The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)

The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)

Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)

The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

SOME REMARKS (#u67cdd700-ba76-5d7a-afcb-00e0f6e5febb)

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 other. This view shows signs of becoming the stuff of orthodoxy.

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.

What a phenomenon it has been – science fiction, space fiction – exploding out of nowhere, unexpectedly of course, as always happens when the human mind is being forced to expand: this time starwards, galaxy-wise, and who knows where next. These dazzlers have mapped our world, or worlds, for us, have told us what is going on and in ways no one else has done, have described our nasty present long ago, when it was still the future and the official scientific spokesmen were saying that all manner of things now happening were impossible, who have played the indispensable and (at least at the start) thankless role of the despised illegitimate son who can afford to tell truths the respectable siblings either do not dare, or, more likely, do not notice because of their respectability. They have also explored the sacred literatures of the world in the same bold way they take scientific and social possibilities to their logical conclusions, so that we may examine them. How very much we do all owe them!

Shikasta has as its starting point, like many others of the genre, the Old Testament. It is our habit to dismiss the Old Testament altogether because Jehovah, or Jahve, does not think or behave like a social worker. H. G. Wells said that when man cries out his little ‘gimme, gimme, gimme’ to God, it is as if a leveret were to snuggle up to a lion on a dark night. Or something to that effect.

The sacred literatures of all races and nations 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 when we dismiss them as quaint fossils from a dead past.

Leaving aside the Popol Vuh, or the religious traditions of the Dogon, or the story of Gilgamesh, or any others of the now plentifully and easily available records (I sometimes wonder if the young realize how extraordinary a time this is, and one that may not last, when any book one may think of is there to be bought on a near shelf) and sticking to our local tradition and heritage, it is an exercise not without interest to read the Old Testament – which of course includes the Torah of the Jews – and the Apocrypha, together with any other works of the kind you may come upon which have at various times and places been cursed or banished or pronounced non-books; and after that the New Testament, and then the Koran. There are even those who have come to believe that there has never been more than one Book in the Middle East.