Word: canopus
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...that may seem too much for a 384-page book to accomplish, but Lessing's premise gives her aeons of time to fill. Scouts from the benign galactic empire Canopus discover a small but promising planet, obviously the young earth, whose denizens include a strain of monkeys beginning to stand on their own two feet. The Canopeans introduce a race of superior creatures to tutor these humanoids and help speed their evolution. Eventually, the planet, called Rohanda, is deemed ready to be locked into the vast, overarching harmony that prevails throughout the domain of Canopus...
Thus passages that infuriate can be endured in the knowledge that enchantment is on the way. The book's allegory points insistently to earth, and the history of Shikasta as seen from Canopus is often, by earthly standards, particularly hamhanded: "For a couple of centuries at least, then, a dominant feature of the Shikastan scene was that a particularly arrogant and self-satisfied breed, a minority of the minority white race, dominated most of Shikasta, a multitude of different races, cultures, and religions which, on the whole, were superior to that of the oppressors." Such polemics alternate with passages...
...before in Bolivia. Searching his records, he found that the carvings showed four small circles-similar to the so-called "False Cross" star grouping in the constellations Vela and Carina-flanked by two larger circles. Michanowsky identified one of these larger circles as a representation of the bright star Canopus. The other circle, which was even bigger, had no existing counterpart in the sky. But it was approximately at the site of the invisible pulsar. Could the second circle be a primitive drawing of the supernova...
...should be cooled to below - 400° F. to operate efficiently, refused to chill at all. Mariner 7 caused even greater concern at Mission Control when it went off the air entirely for seven hours. Apparently struck by a tiny meteoroid, the spacecraft lost its fix on the star Canopus and its directional antenna spun away from earth. A new roll-and-search command went up from Pasadena. Mariner 7 obeyed, and though performing at less than capacity, its radio functioned again...
High above the atmosphere, Mariner unfolded its four rectangular solar panels and wheeled around until sensors locked onto the sun and the star Canopus, stabilizing the 850-lb. craft in space. Then, right on course, the complex space traveler settled down for a five-month, 226 million-mile journey that is scheduled to take it to within 2,000 miles of Mars on July...