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Why Everyone Should Explore Doris Lessing's Often Overlooked "Space Fiction"

An homage to the late author's sci-fi epics, which didn't have much in the way of spaceships or ray guns or whatever people thought sci fi was in the ‘70s.
via Wikimedia Commons

The author Doris Lessing died yesterday. She was the author of more than 50 novels, and obituaries are calling her "one of the great writers of our age," and a "visionary". Joyce Carol Oates called her "a revolutionary feminist voice in 20th-century literature." Lessing was 94.

While she isn't really known for it, Lessing explored science fiction as well, slightly to her critical detriment, but to the benefit of the genre and readers. The five-book "Canopus in Argos" series may actually be Lessing at the height of her powers.

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It would be a stretch to call anything that Lessing has done “underrated,” since by the time she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 she told reporters she “had won all the prizes in Europe.” Surprised outside her home, it seemed like she would rather just get her groceries indoors than bask in what she called “a royal flush” of literary laurels.

So at this point, it’s probably only next to her highly-lauded novels such as the The Golden Notebook that her other, lesser-known works can feel overlooked. But Lessing’s foray into science fiction at the tail end of the 1970s was actually fairly widely reviled by critics at the time, who viewed it as a betrayal to the naturalism and sharp feminism that ran through her work beginning with The Grass is Singing three decades before.

Totally on accident, the first Lessing I read was the first book of her “space fiction” epic, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. Coming to the novel without expectations—I literally found a copy in a hallway and recognized the author’s name—it stands up as a compelling piece of work; one that shows Lessing’s unique voice and prowess as a novelist even as she was deviating from what had made her name well known.

Like Margaret Atwood, another very literary writer whose novels flirt with the label “science fiction” even as the author dismisses it, Lessing’s work doesn’t have much in the way of spaceships or ray guns or whatever people thought science fiction was in the ‘70s. Time magazine’s Paul Gray said that Shikasta was closer to the Old Testament than it was to Buck Rodgers. Hence, much like Atwood insists that “speculative fiction” is a more fitting genre than sci-fi, Lessing calls the “Canopus” series “space fiction.”

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As the first novel in a series, Shikasta establishes an entire cosmology, in which the Earth is a bit player and a bit of a deviant. Earth and her residents are started as a lush garden planet that is nourished by energy of “substance-of-the-we-feeling” flowing to us from afar. Then the axis shifts, the “SOWF” is shut off, and war, famine, and pestilence follows.

As you can see, there’s quite a bit of heavy lifting to do for both the writer and the reader in all of this, and the first half of Shikasta is sort of tough. A lot of the criticism with it revolves around this epic section, and also the overwhelmingly negative view of humanity that one seems to get from it. The cosmology does include a fair amount of humanity's helplessness in the face of powers we can neither understand nor control. All in all it didn’t seem unfair to me, which is probably just a sign that I’m a budding curmudgeon, but is also a testament to the grace with which it's handled and the clever way the novel is put together.

The story of Earth is told from an outsider’s perspective, as a series of journal entries, documents and speeches compiled by an emissary from the planet Canopus named Johor. Just over halfway through, the book clicks in a more cohesive narrative as Johor is born into a family as a person after World War III, named George Sherban. Then it really starts racing.

The novel’s scope and subject matter feels like something only Lessing could gracefully handle. It moves from descriptions of the primordial age of giants and long descriptions of mystical, geometrically arranged cities, then skips up in time, tells the rising and falling of civilizations until finally the world is left a hot and ruined place after nuclear war, and—seriously—the white race is put on trial for colonialism in a court run by children. Would you believe me if I told you that it all works?

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Not to reduce such an imaginative work to the author’s biography, but it’s easy to see how Lessing’s life informs the authority that she writes with. Born in Iran to British parents, Lessing grew up in what was then Rhodesia, or what is now Zimbabwe. Living in England, she became what she called “an idealistic and utopian Communist.” As the “real politicos” had less and less to do with her beliefs, she came to see herself as someone who was political “out of a kind of religious reason.”

“I think it's fairly common among socialists: They are, in fact, God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth.” Lessing told the New York Times in 1982. “A lot of religious reformers have been like that, too. It's the same psychological set, trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future - always taking it for granted that there is a better future.”

After the invasion on Hungary in 1956, the gulf between Lessing’s ideals of Communism and the realities of how it was practiced on Earth became too wide for her to ignore. She left the party, and became interested in Sufism. This tension between the political movements in history and spiritual undercurrents of individuals is evident and at least part of what makes Shikasta feel so powerful and singular.

And far from leaving behind the feminism of her early work, the “Canopus in Argos” series uses “space fiction” as a lens to explore gender just as directly as Ursula Le Guin does in Left Hand of Darkness. Lessing’s second book in the series, The Marriages Between Zones Three Four and Five, at times feels a bit polemical—one zone is a strict violent patriarchy and its king must marry the queen of the harmonious, matriarchal zone—but it is still such a compelling novel that Lessing believed it to be one of her strongest. In 1997, Philip Glass and Lessing collaborated to adapt it into an opera.

Far from science fiction taking any legitimacy from Lessing, the “Canopus in Argos” series widened expectations for the genre. In 2007, M.G. Lord wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “today, such a novel would be no big deal; literature is full of time travel, gender ambiguity and that nifty catch-all ‘magical realism.’ But in the 1970s, mainstream fiction took pains to set itself apart—and above—genres like science fiction.”

Doris Lessing ventured into a genre where few women were working, and helped expand what science fiction was capable of. Even if her work was “met with jeers” at the time, as Lord writes, she had the last laugh. The Nobel Committee praised her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

What could be more epic that the whole scope of the human experience, except for expanding it to include the whole universe? Maybe expanding literature itself.