Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31814 in Books
• Published on: 1994-05-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Synopsis
The first in Doris Lessing's visionary novel cycle "Canopus in Argos: Archives". It is a mix of fable, futuristic fantasy and pseudo-documentary accounts of 20th-century history.

Customer Reviews

An uncomfortable examination of the state of the world
There have been many excellent reviews of Shikasta in these pages, but I wanted to mention some elements I haven't seen anywhere else.

There are around the world, stone circles of the same type as the famous Stonehenge in England, and these were incredibly erected by prehistoric men whom had no recourse to the technology that builds our own monoliths today. It is one of the great unexplained mysteries of life on earth. Lessing weaves this idea into the first part of the book, using the idea of the stone circles and alignments as being energy receptors from the stars to the Earth. Our 21st century society, with all our extraordinary modernity, has no answer to how or why these stone circles were even assembled. Lessing's idea is beautiful, and thought-provoking.

After this initial fable the main bulk of the book follows George Sherban, an enlightened benevolent alien being, born into a family of doctors working for humanitarian organisations in the global south, as he acquires the ultimate education to help humanity regroup after a nuclear holocaust. The science fiction idea of benevolent aliens being born into human bodies to try and guide us through our difficult times is actually a mirage used by Lessing for religious and spiritual ideas that have a long history.
For instance, is it really so difficult to believe that men such as Gandhi or Jesus Christ were great loving souls who came to Earth to guide us? Lessing points to another fascinating idea, that the cults that arose around the great spiritual leaders of the past have in fact created as much damage to the world as any positive impacts they may initially have had.

The unique thing about Shikasta is the way Lessing manages to illuminate all the critical issues that face our world now, even though it was written in 1979 long before our looming crises came into perspective. Population explosion, environmental degradation, Western exploitation of the countries in the global south, unbridled consumerism, all form the background to this book. Lessing doesn't allow the mirror to be removed from our face for an instant.

This book is for anyone who wants to consider the state of the world as it really is. If you don't care, or are just looking for another science fiction novel, don't bother with this.

An acquired taste
Lovers of mainstream sci-fi will probably find Shikasta hard going. Many mainstream novels have a vision of the future as being pretty much the same as now, but with better gadgets. In truth, whilst humans will probably always love, lose, fight and seek meaning in their lives, you have to wonder how this will manifest in a thousand years, or a million. Now try to imagine how an alien race would think, given a head start on humanity of a few million years. Here Lessing recounts a spiritual evolution of mankind watched by such an alien race, from our earliest alien-doctored roots until the near future, in which a growing crisis comes to a head. Incarnation is tool for learning and development, and a stricken Earth (the ‘Shikasta’ of the title) is bursting with human souls imprisoned by an astrological accident that has left us at the mercy of our materialism and self-obsession.

Shikasta showed me many things that I had taken for granted were in fact very flimsy in substance. I love in particular the offhand way in which many things we see as important in our civilisation are viewed as trivial – and that we perceive such massive differences amongst our species purely because we have become so highly attuned to spotting those differences. Lessing’s colonial roots may account for the theme of guilt that the Western races are forced to face in this book, but I have to agree with her, and it is handled well. This is no tight, fluid narrative however, and you will find that the journal extracts, letters and reference materials that comprise the book need focus from the reader, but it is worth it.

The spiritual theme does not make it religious as such, so I wouldn’t worry about that if you are a hardened atheist. I would say however that the rest of the series is for committed fans only – if you like Shikasta, you may like the others, but this novel stands alone if that’s as far as you want to take it. For me, this was the Right Book At The Right Time, and not only fitted with the way my mind was going, but pushed it substantially in that direction. If you have a liking for the more exploratory sci-fi that makes you think hard about the now as much as the future, I think you will like Shikasta.

a prophetic work of fiction?
This is a wonderful book, huge in scope..the story of humanity and our struggle with good and evil, the meanining of life and death, and yet it manages to focus on the lives of individuals and their ability to make a difference against
huge odds. T here is something majestic about this story and aquality of imagination and compassion for the human condition that transcends the narrow margins of the science fiction genre. Her dark vision has been overtaken by reality yet this is a book that must be read, if only to help us see the possibilities of a better future.