Doris Lessing SHIKASTA First Edition
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Doris Lessing SHIKASTA First Edition
First UK edition, first print hardback of CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES Re: Colonised Planet 5 SHIKASTA Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by JOHOR (George Sherban) Emissary (Grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days, by Doris Lessing and published by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London in 1979. Jacket design by David Prout.The book is in very good condition (clean blue cloth boards and gilt lettering on spine) with slight wear to dust jacket, which is price clipped (minor creasing to edges and minor tanning around the top edges inside the jacket). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions.
Born in Kermanshah, Persia (later Iran) on October 22, 1919, Doris Lessing grew up in Rhodesia (the present-day Zimbabwe). Her father was an amputee due to injuries received in World War I and, and her mother had treated his war injuries. As a child, Lessing explored the rural Rhodesian landscape, occasionally hunting small animals. While working as an au pair and a telephone operator in Salisbury, Rhodesia, Lessing read such authors as Chekhov and Tolstoy, refined her writing skills, and married twice. During her two marriages, she submitted short fiction and poetry for publication and, after moving to London in 1949 with her son, Peter, Lessing published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in 1950. This work treated apartheid/racial issues that existed in Rhodesia at that time.
She would go on to explore the individual's - women's in particular - relationship to society in many types of experimental fiction thereafter. Lessing has published many solid short-story collections but is perhaps best known for her 1954 Somerset Maugham Award-winning experimental novel The Golden Notebook. She has received numerous awards for her work including the 2001 Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, the David Cohen British Literature Prize, and the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. Lessing has also had a lifelong interest in such topics as Marxism, telepathy, and social psychology.
Shikasta is the first instalment in the visionary in Lessing's five-book novel cycle Canopus in Argos: Archives. Shikasta is also the name of the fictional planet featured in the novel. The book is presented in the form of a series of reports by Canopean emissaries to Shikasta who document the planet's prehistory, its degeneration leading to the "Century of Destruction" (the 20th century), and the Apocalypse (World War III).
"The Devil's supreme achievement is that nobody believes in him. There is a Deity, certainly, but one to be seen within the terms H.G. Wells suggested, that when man cries out his little gimme, gimme, gimme, it is as if a leveret snuggled up to a lion on a dark night. The Old Testament and other sacred literatures of the world may not, after all, be superseded rubbish. These are some of the old ideas Doris Lessing uses in her new and audacious history of the earth. It could be called a stars eye view of things, energetically encompassing millions of years of evolution from the time of lifes beginnings in the warm swamps to mans near-extinction in the Third - and last - World War, soon to be upon us.
This war is Shammats (the Devils) victory, but also his defeat; optimism can be defined as the ability to believe that one percent of mankind may survive the wrath to come for a new start under the guidance of The Great Ones who bide Their Times. They watch, and wait, and monitor and adjust human development - employing, for instance, a judicious introduction of celestial genes in crucial epochs, or a supply of Messengers and Technicians whose task it is to warn and to instruct.
In the extraordinary career of Doris Lessing no work has been more ambitious or more startling. Shikasta refuses to be confined within the Western view of history and culture, suggesting that the West is not necessarily seen by other cultures as flatteringly as it sees itself. Can it be classed as space fiction? Perhaps as sociological space fiction, that hybrid genre which takes present or potential social and psychological possibilities to their logical conclusions so that we may examine them, and with determination refuse, or modify, and master them.
Those who have followed Lessings evolution as a writer will recognize in this first book of her visionary novel-sequence, Canopus in Argos: Archives, certain of her old preoccupations transformed and developed on this space-age stage of star-Empires, evolving or dying or damaged planets, celestial management (or mismanagement), the givers of good for mankind and the wicked ones from the thieving planet that preys on us.
This books has in it nothing of permissiveness, of the hope that everything will come all right in the end: it is a return to the older and even traditional concepts of a timeless confrontation between good and evil, dark and light. It is a vision so striking and so powerful that it if certain to be recognized as one of the major works of modern fiction."
Magnificent an astouding book that sets out to chronicle the whole world of humanity, spirit, earth, stars, soul, virtue, evil, pre-Eden forever - Myrna Blumberg, The Times
Profound, relevant and daring - Rachel Billington, Financial Times
Shikasta is a piercing diagnosis of the unease spreading through our civilization. A powerful fable. - W.L. Webb, Guardian
Shikasta is at once a brief history of the world, a tract against human destructiveness, an ode to the natural beauties of this earth and a hymn to the music of the spheres. - Time
364 pages.
ISBN: 0 224 01767 5
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Doris Lessing SHIKASTA First Edition
