Novels
- Shikasta (1979) – A secret history of Earth from the perspective of the advanced Canopus civilization that is thinking in eons rather than centuries. The history spans from the very beginning of life into our own future. The book ends with a metaphorical telling of the trial of Socrates.
- The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980) – Depicts the influence of unknown higher powers on interactions between a series of civilizational "zones" of varying degrees of advancement that encircle the planet Earth. One zone is representative of an overtly feminine high civilization initially coupled by royal marriage to a militant and male civilization. The novel culminates with the latter, male, civilization allying with a tribal female realm again following directives from Canopus.
- The Sirian Experiments (1980) – Focuses, like Shikasta, on the history of Earth, but from the perspective of visitors from Sirius rather than Canopus. The Sirians are depicted as a highly managed society with fascist overtones, that attempt experiments on lesser civilizations while trying to mitigate the stagnation of their ruling class. The story is told from the perspective of Ambien II, one of a peer group of five who rule Sirius.
- The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982) – The story of the civilization on a planet that, because of interstellar "re-alignments", is slowly facing extinction, and Canopus's relationship with them. The story is greatly influenced by Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition, and is Lessing's homage to it.
- The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983) – A story of Canopean agents on a less advanced planet; explores hazards of rhetoric and mirrors events in revolutionary societies such as Communist Russia.
The five books have also appeared compiled in a single volume entiled Canopus in Argos: Archives (1992, ISBN 0-679-74184-4).
Read more about this topic: Canopus In Argos
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)