| Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia in 1919 and was taken to Southern Rhodesia when she was five. Shespent her childhood on a large farm there and first came to England in 1949. She brought with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was published in 1950 with outstanding success in Britain, in America, and in ten European countries. Since then her international reputation not only as a novelist,. but as a non-fiction and short-story writer has flourished. For her collection of short novels, Five, she was honoured with the Somerset Maugham Award. She was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature 198, and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 1982. Among her other celebrated novels are the five-volume Children of Violence series, The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark, and Memoirs of a Survivor. Many of her short stories have been collected in two volumes entitled To Room Nineteen and The Temptation of Jack Orkney; while her African stories appear in This Was the Old Chief's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. |
I admit, I'm often underwhelmed when someone says, breathlessly, "You
really *must* read this book"; but these are easy, beguiling, original,
and
all quite different. Caveat lector: it's not really science fiction
at all.
The best I can think of, is to quote some:
I do not think it is surprising that the most frequently quoted words at this time, seen everywhere, seem to be J.B.S. Haldane's "Now, my suspicion is that the universe is only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
The reason, as we all know, why readers yearn to 'believe' cosmologies and tidy systems of thought is that we live in dreadful and marvellous times where the certainties of yesterday dissolve as we live. But I don't want to be judged as adding to a confusion of embattled certainties.
Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it? We 'make things up'. This is our trade.
I remember [ ... ] reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us, as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself, Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.
It has been said that everything man is capable of imagining has its counterpart somewhere else, in a different level of reality. All our literatures, the sacred books, myths, legends - the records of the human race - tell of great struggles between good and evil. This struggle is reflected down to the level of the detective story, the Western, the romantic novel. It would be hard to find a tale or a song or a play that does not reflect this battle.
But, what battle? Where? When? Between what Forces?
[ ... ] What do our ideas of 'good' and 'bad' reflect? [ ... ]
We see ourselves as autonomous creatures, our minds our own, our beliefs
freely chosen, our ideas individual and unique ... with billions and billions
and billions of us on this planet, we are still prepared to believe that
each of us is unique, or that if all the others are mere dots in a swarm,
then at least I am this self-determined thing, my mind my own. Very odd
this is, and it seems to me odder and odder. How do we get this notion
of ourselves?
It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides. Where do they come from?
I would so like it if reviewers and readers could see this series, Canopus in Argos: Archives, as a framework that enables me to tell (I hope) a beguiling tale or two; to put questions, both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities.