Word: rohanda
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This is the third installment of a space saga that Author Doris Lessing calls Canopus in Argos: Archives. That running title is matched by the pace of Lessing's production: three good-sized novels in the past 16 months. Shikasta (1979) tells of a 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...
...Sirian Experiments, unfortunately, recapitulates as much as it adds. The primary subject is once again the catastrophe that overtakes Shikasta (earth). The observer this time is a woman named Ambien II, a virtually immortal emissary from Sirius. She was in on the original cultivation of Rohanda-Shikasta. She retains a proprietary interest in the ailing planet, and visits it every eon or so. In addition to the unfolding spectacle of human savagery, she sees some spectacular sights. She happens to be flying over in a small bubble of a spaceship when the planet suddenly tips over from its upright axis...
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...
...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...
...remember the great beasts of Rohanda, the wonderful ancestors of these little animals, miniature lions and tiny deer and half-size elephants that seem to these dwindled people so enormous -yet to those who knew those vast wise beasts of former times, they are endearing, almost toys for children. The children are heartbreaking now. In those times, the children of the Giants, the Natives' children, were each one born after such deliberation, such thought, each one chosen and from parents known to be the best. . . each with such a long life, time to grow, time to play, time...