Word: canopeans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...primitive, beautiful planet called Rohanda, which is being jointly colonized by the two vast galactic empires of Canopus and Sirius. A misalignment of cosmic forces throws Rohanda awry; its developing inhabitants stop listening to their wise tutors and begin behaving suspiciously like members of the human race. The Canopean overseers sadly change the place's name to Shikasta, "the hurt, the damaged, the wounded one." In The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), Lessing unveils a different terrain in her new universe. A queen and king from adjoining regions are commanded by the mysterious powers to marry...
While keeping tabs on Rohanda, Ambien II begins to believe that Canopus is far more advanced than Sirius. The Sirians are technological wizards, but every millennium or so they discover that their ever more sophisticated machines have rendered more people useless and unhappy. Ambien suspects that the Canopeans have achieved a wisdom that transcends this problem, and she initiates a friendship with Klorathy, a senior Canopean administrator, in the hope of prying his secrets away. The job is not easy. He has the habit of answering a question with another question. He is also given to interstellar bromides: "Everything...
...dissonance into the new world. Almost immediately the inhabitants display symptoms of the "Degenerative Disease," a bellicose assertion of ego against the grain of the common good. Life-spans, which had stretched to a thousand years, begin shrinking dramatically; natural fulfillment is replaced by restless desires and dissatisfactions. The Canopean overseers sadly change Rohanda's name to Shikasta, "the hurt, the damaged, the wounded one." The period of earth's recorded history is about to begin...
...chief recorder in Shikasta is Johor, a virtually immortal Canopean who is in on the creation of Rohanda and who returns in the present (the Century of Destruction) to salvage what he can from the calamity. The novel is also pieced together out of passages from Canopean history books and archives, official communiqués, sociological reports, diaries and letters of assorted Shikastans. These documents enable Lessing to imply a vast skeleton of time out of a limited number of bones; she can also shift viewpoints dramatically from the near infinite to the minute. Oddly, the novel's unity...
| 1 |