Word: rohanda
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Dates: during 1979-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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...