Word: novelization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last we have in Henry Kissinger's White House Years [Oct. 1] a political memoir of world events for the lay person. The excerpt, void of political jargon, punctuated by imagery and vivid characterizations of political figures, moves along like a well-written novel. I only wish my college history textbooks were written in this fashion. Who says that past political events have to be flat...
Science fiction is pastoral turned upside down, radiating a nostalgia not for what was but for what could be. Since this mystic longing has increasingly filled the novels and stories of Author Doris Lessing, 59, it is not surprising that she has finally got around to spaceships and galactic travelers; she herself calls Shikasta, her 24th book, "space fiction." This description is accurate enough, but it may mislead some into expecting much less than this dazzling novel actually delivers. Shikasta owes more to Gulliver's Travels and the Old Testament than to Buck Rogers; it is at once...
...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...
...argument. There is something unsatisfying about a vision of history that suggests humans could not, after all, help making the messes they have, that their blunders were all ordained by a small tic in the cosmos. But belief in Lessing's theory is not required to find her novel pleasurably, even furiously engaging on every page...
...creative energy expended in this novel has not, apparently, exhausted Lessing's supply. She has announced a companion volume, to be published next year, in what may become an even longer series. That is good news, but the Shikastan habit of ignoring present pleasures in favor of a chimerical future should be avoided. For the moment, it is enough to welcome an audacious and disturbing work from one of the world's great living writers. -Paul Gray...