They say North America is full of troubles but I said I didn’t want to listen any longer. I have always admired Doris Lessing’s vision as a novelist and a humanist; The Golden Notebook was (as was The Diaries of Jane Somers, about which I wrote at length, and very personally, here) such an important book to me, and continues to be to this day, and I think its focus on our deep psychological and interpersonal rifts is still highly visionary, ominously prescient.With that said, and perhaps beca

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS -NOT WITH A BANG, BUT WITH A WHIMPER.The Hollow MenEliot’s is indeed such an apt envoi for the Shikastan world, if you know the plot of this novel...Doris Lessing seems to have been BORN to write sci-fi - though most of her critics were relatively aghast at such presumptuous temerity on her part, back in the 1970’s.And whenever I consider the brilliance of this marvellous Nobel laureate - in the panoptic Vision of her superb novels like this one - it almost seems a...

This work is kin to Oryx and Crake, and to a lesser extent Babel-17: conservative where it needs to be progressive, progressive where it needs to be informed, and all in all amounting to little more than a done to death rehashing of various mainstream assumptions sprinkled with a few intriguing hints at veritable open fields. The insensate jabbering on and on about the evils of history with nary a holistic breakdown into tiers of intra community issues and intersectional community action outside...

I enjoy Doris Lessing and I enjoy speculative fiction. Somehow though, the combination had a tragic outcome. An attempt to be clever that fails in an impenetrable epistolary mess. If you want great epistolary spec-fic, try The Prestige by Christopher Priest instead. If you want great Lessing, read anything by her that's realist. Ignore this novel. Erase it - if you can - from you memory because Lessing was actually a super talented writer.

A book like Shikasta is hard to describe and difficult to reflect upon. It's full of ideas. Perhaps so many ideas that it is too big and too full to truly coalesce into itself and become that perfect creation that every book has the potential to be. But that's not unfamiliar territory for Lessing, an author who often got away from herself when she was writing but also, often, and maybe even always, wrote something that really mattered when she did. I finished reading Shikasta convinced that it i...

My favorite quotes from this book both come from the introduction:"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.""I do think that there is something very wrong with an attitude that puts a 'serious' novel on one shelf and, let's say, First and Last Men on another."And, indeed, the overall effect is rather as though Olaf Stapledo...

Shikasta is the first of five volumes in Lessing's Canopus in Argos cycle. Lessing herself calls these books space fiction and explains that this genre (i.e. a type of science fiction) in her eyes is unjustifiably maligned and provides the opportunity to think beyond boundaries.Essentially, the five books together represent nothing less than a holistic view of Earth and mankind. The planet Shikasta is clearly recognizable as Earth. Canopus is the home planet of a superior, almost transcendental

I read this book shortly after it was first published. I've since finished re-reading it in its eBook form.It was hard. But then, Lessing's "Briefing for a Descent into Hell" was hard, and worth the trouble. Shikasta was then, and remains, a book of huge scope. It runs across all of human history, adding in pre-history and moving forward beyond today and into the future.As I read it I fancied I discovered echoes of "The Four-Gated City", the final book in Lessing's Children of Violence series. I...

This book is so terrible that I added a new shelf: "refused-to-finish". It has managed to supplant Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson as the worst book I've had the misfortune to encounter (and this includes Breaking Dawn!). The main problem with this book is that the writing is bad. Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in literature for this series, so I had high hopes that at a minimum the prose would be good. It's not. Not even a little bit. There have been precisely two moments in the 156 pages I...

First read January 2005This book does three ambitious things.1. It takes the Old Testament of the Bible as inspiration for its mythical geo-historical content, but instead of an angry bearded guy in charge, it has a super-advanced utopian-collectivist space-travelling civilization colonising Earth and then struggling to maintain a shadow of hope and stability through thousands of literally star-crossed years when the unfortunate planet is fed on and influenced by another, evil space-travelling c...

I first read this book over 20 years ago. I reread it a couple of times in the following 10 years. I am not a person who rereads books; especially not novels. My reading comprehension is and always has been extremely high. So I generally get it when I first read it. The fact that I read this book multiple times is an indication of the importance that this work holds in the constellations of some people’s universes. I made the mistake of reading some of the negative reviews. I am astonished at th...

Doris Lessing is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 with the formulation "with skepticism, passion and visionary power considered a divided civilization." There is an authoritative opinion that its main achievement was "Canopus in Argos".I don't share it. As good as "Great Dreams" are, "Shikasta" is so impossibly heavy and pathetic and boring. I doubt that I will ever want to return and continue my acquaintance with the cycle, but I will tell you about what I have read. So, Shik...

I read this edition in 1979. Bought the hardcover, even! Went on to buy the rest in hardcover, and devour them, enjoying the bravura performances that they were...but they're not good SF. The genre's conventions are simply disregarded, if (and this is by no means certain) Lessing was even aware of them.My rating is for my memory of the melancholic mournful musicality of the prose. I'm not going to claim that, forty years on, I retain a grasp the subtleties of the story told, and I don't have the...

This is absolutely the most janky book I have ever read.from the 1st Dictionary of Nate:janky--JANE-key (adjective); 1: thrown together at random; patchwork. 2: containing multiple elements, many of which contradict each other, and some that are mutually exclusive 3:top-heavy; lurching randomly in every direction at once 4:aspirations beyond achievement, and/or aspirations that are impossible to achieve 5:distinctive in being completely psychotic 6:something designed over the course of eons by a...

The full title is Canopus in Argos: Archives Re: Colonized Planet 5: Shikasta: Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by JOHOR (George Sherban): Emissary Grade 9: 87th of the Period of the Last Days.To begin, we receive a Preface from the Nobel-winning author. It contains a brief defense of S-F as a literary form. Lessing’s contribution to S-F is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Totaling over 1100 pages, her 5 novel series constitutes an exhaustive study of a fictionalized ga...

i first read Shikasta fifteen years ago, and found it fantastic but very difficult. Rereading it now i felt differently, it was both a lot easier but also a lot less impressive.A white woman who grew up in Zimbabwe back when it was Rhodesia become a nobel laureate in literature last year. Amongst her reactions were something like "what took you so long" and "my science fiction was my most important work."Shikasta is the first book in Lessing's science fiction series, and it is very much a long,

I have fond memories of reading Doris Lessing's space opera series ”Canopus In Argos” but do not remember that much of the actual content in those books beyond the broad strokes: The series' basic concept of rivalling extraterrestrial empires influencing human history behind the scenes; most of the viewpoint characters being aliens in human disguise; as well as Lessing predicting a near future where the People's Republic of China becomes the Earth's dominant superpower. As a result I decided to

(It may contain spoilers not related to the actual plot, but to various ideas therein):Many people did not like this book, probably because it is more of a political and historical report than an actual novel with a plot, even though events do flow through time sequence. But in my opinion, it blends together various interesting esoteric and SF concepts, even though some have to be inferred and they exist in disguise. For example, I believe the book somehow accepts the idea of reincarnation, in m...

This is a very depressing book, an alternate take on human history, but I like being miserable so I dug it. It is very well-written and I don't feel it is slow-moving at all. Ms. Lessing does a great job of making such a ( seemingly ) far-fetched story believable.One thing--Am I the only person who noticed the similarity to "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" by G.I. Gurdjieff? The plot and even some of the writing style are so much alike. Since Ms. Lessing was a student of Sufism and Idries Sha...