Word: marked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...moon is rapidly becoming a mark of where one stands on political and social issues. If Apollo was a victory for U.S. engineering genius, it could not disguise American failures at home. That fact has already become a thundering cliche, and one that promises to be heard for a long time. If we can put men on the moon, why can't we build adequate housing? Or feed all citizens adequately? Or end social and economic injustices? (Or even make the airlines run on time?) One answer, at least, is obvious: unlike the moon landing, these earthbound problems involve...
...whether there is really any drift between continents and accurate figures on the earth's wobble. The major reason for the trouble was apparently that earth monitors were not immediately able to plot the site of Tranquillity Base accurately enough for the laser beams to hit their lunar mark...
...laugh. The reaction is more akin to horror. People are suffering because they are caught in the breakdown of society. Private institutions like marriage and the family lead to isolation or madness; public causes and institutions reflect that madness in alternating currents of paranoia and greed. Old activists like Mark Coldridge have quit fighting. His only political activity is to keep two huge world maps, one charting wars and riots, the other showing stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons...
Futuristic Coda. If Lessing has given up on politics, she has not given up causes, and in Mark's wife Lynda lies the key to her new radical direction. As the book progresses, Martha becomes more camera than character, and Lynda takes over as the book's imaginative center. It becomes clear that she is not mad at all but maimed-by a troubled childhood, by marriage to Mark, by years of corrosive drugs casually administered in mental hospitals. She is also a mystical speaker of truth whose hallucinations are eerily accurate. She hears voices, consults cards, studies...
Shocking as it may be to her disciplined following of rationalists, Lessing is coming out for ESP, and fearless as ever, she writes her way right into the 1990s to prove her point. Like Mark's maps come to life, Lessing depicts most centers of civilization as destroyed by nuclear and bacterial chaos. Survivors huddle together in remote regions, and a human mutant begins to flourish: a people in touch with the past and the future not through signs or portents but through a consciousness expanded to link the past with the future...