Word: canopeans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
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