Reviews for Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

The average rating for Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-02 00:00:00 Andy Le Gourrierec THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS - NOT WITH A BANG, BUT WITH A WHIMPER. The Hollow Men Eliot's is indeed such an apt envoi for the Shikastan world, if you know the plot of this novel... Doris Lessing seems to have been BORN to write sci-fi - though most of her critics were relatively aghast at such presumptuous temerity on her part, back in the 1970's. And whenever I consider the brilliance of this marvellous Nobel laureate - in the panoptic Vision of her superb novels like this one - it almost seems as if she saw the true nature of our glaringly dysfunctional age in all its broken and tragically fallen nature. She did that through the medium of Science Fiction! And it's a Fall which our era acknowledges at appropriate times, but blithely glosses over when it doesn't seem appropriate - when there are public good times to be had, for example. Superficial good times, however, to the rulers of this Omelas-Clone world are almost ALWAYS appropriate. So in consequence Lessing's view is much too deep for most of us to ever accept nowadays. "Not with a Bang, but with a Whimper"... As a Christian, however, I have very serious reservations about Lessing's heavy-handed shaping of Shikasta according to a world-view that seriously undermines any hope we may have for the future of our world. Nobody knows that future. And Lessing very self-assuredly but misleadingly casts a pair of loaded dice. I would for that reason also have serious reservations about recommending this book to those of my friends who have lived with depression at any point in their lives. As I (alas!) have... We all tend to read with a "willing suspension of disbelief" - especially if, as it is with Lessing's tale, it is a tale told by a Master. For there can be no question that Lessing writes masterfully: but this book can plunge you into the Pit of Despair if you aren't careful. However, it is a superlative tale. And it has all the blockbuster force of her previous Realist writing, so caveat emptor! Johor is an alien ambassador from the Canopean Empire, sent to save Earth (Shikasta) once again, in its Last Days. He has visited Earth from its earliest times, in different bodies.(!) His attitude, like Lessing's, isn't always upbeat, to say the least! And the beginning of the book is its end, for Lessing herself has inserted a spoiler right at the outset. If you have a fairly tough skin like me, you'll be careful just how far you suspend that disbelief of yours, but you'll nevertheless revel in Lessing's radiant writing. When I read her incredibly difficult Briefing for a Descent into Hell in 1976, I recognized her as a 20th-century Titan - it was unmistakably a work of genius. Here was a brave woman who had personally grappled in single combat with many Demons - her own and the world's - and she had won. But it was a Pyrrhic Victory. So she saw the Good and the Bad. Very clearly (read her brilliant Massey Lectures which she delivered here in Canada - they're available in compact book form). Lessing's dualism, unlike my own more mollified variety, was delineated in her own experience so starkly - and with such acute sensitivity - that her Sufism became the only valid response to her mounting pain that she could imagine. That may be why the wonderful lyric passages in this book - especially her description of our planet in a paradisal Golden Age - bear comparison to the ecstatic utterances of that well-known Sufi, Rumi. For both Rumi and Lessing have their little Jeremiads! But though she lived to a ripe old age, she had absorbed and learned from all the bitter lessons of life. She was nobody's fool. When the news of her Nobel Prize came out, she missed it. Trudging home from a grocery store with onerous bags, a mob of reporters on the doorsteps of her apartment building asked her for her reaction. Not missing a beat, she retorted (and I paraphrase from my memory of the news story): "Well, and so what? I've won all the rest of 'em!" A great book - and a truly classic sci-fi masterpiece - but a DANGEROUS one for the oversensitive.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-25 00:00:00 Paul Rasband This book is so terrible that I added a new shelf: "refused-to-finish". It has managed to supplant Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson as the worst book I've had the misfortune to encounter (and this includes Breaking Dawn!). The main problem with this book is that the writing is bad. Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in literature for this series, so I had high hopes that at a minimum the prose would be good. It's not. Not even a little bit. There have been precisely two moments in the 156 pages I read where the writing rose to the level of "not bad". The rest was tortuous monotony. The second problem with this book is that it thinks it is being clever when it is really not being very clever at all. The central conceit of this book is that all the stuff from the Bible is actually literally true, but misunderstood. So, for example, the Giants mentioned in Genesis were actually a different breed of alien brought from another planet to act as mentors for the indigenous humans. The long life-spans from the geneology sections of the Bible? Also true: but humankind has been devolving horrifically due to a shortage of "substance-of-we-feeling" which I did not make up and which is often referred to in the book as SOWF (I didn't make that up either). The Flood happened literally, although the rain lasted for "nearly 2 months" instead of 40 days, and although Noah escaped by going to a very high mountain instead of building a boat. Soddom and Gomorrah? Burned to cinders by space lasers. What all this means is that so far the first 156 pages of the book have been an incredibly tedious reimagining of the history of Earth told by someone who doesn't realize that the "shaggy God" cliche is, in fact, a cliche. Wikipedia: "A shaggy God story is a minor science fiction genre characterized by an attempt to explain Biblical concepts with science fiction tropes." Now you might say, "But this book was written in 1971! Surely it wasn't a cliche then!" In fact, the term was coined in 1965 and the cliche was a cliche long before that. Now maybe Doris Lessing had never heard the term and was completely unfamiliar with the trope, but the most charitable thing you can possibly say is that she ignorantly recycled a very well-trod genre cliche and then did a very poor, unimaginative, and boring job of it. Which brings me to the last part of why I've decided to set this book aside and turn over a new leaf in the book of my own life, a leaf that reads on the reverse side: "Stormin will now feel not shame but *pride* for refusing to finish truly awful books and rating them on Goodreads anyway." The entire ideology Lessing apparently admires is ignorant and reprehensible. I give her some credit for trying to be non-partisan in her writing and for criticizing the left along with the right in her meandering and semi-coherent polemic, but the fact is that it's possible to be non-partisan and *worse* than partisan. I didn't now this until now, so I guess that's one thing that I've learned from this book. Her entire ideology is some frightful all-or-nothing choice between total individualism, self-interest and greed and absolutely losing oneself in the collective we (remember that "substance-of-we-feeling"?). The majestic Canopeans (who play the role of God with thinly veiled patience, slumming it as mere deities for the sake of their troublesome human charges) put the service of the Greater Good above all else, to the point where they choose where to live based on where they can do the greatest good irrespective of friendship or family. This could be a morally fraught and emotionally charged aspect of their culture, were it not conveyed with such mind-numbing lack of imagination. "Sorry, mom, I have to go to Square City where everything is made of squares because I just really have the essence of that Shape in me, and I'm not in tune with the vibrations of this Circle City where everything is a Circle." That's not an exact quote, but the city names and overall concept is. It's not that you *couldn't* make something like this up it's just that--if you cared about your readership--you *wouldn't*. Aside from being banal and ignorant of history, science, economics, and common sense her ideology is frankly *evil*. She is outright in favor of eugenics, totalitarian rule, and mass slaughter in the name of ideological purity. Because she envisions SOWF (that's "substance-of-we-feeling", if you tried to forget) as a kind of literal substance (like Midi-chlorians from Star Wars, but so much worse) there's a blatant belief in austere population control and the world gets remarkably better off after a thermonuclear war reduces the world's population by 99%, so that the survivors have enough SOWF to be getting along with. (There's no apparent trace of irony to someone who spends endless pages castigating rampant materialism basing her entire ideology on having enough physical stuff to go around, and culling the excess population if necessary to keep it that way.) Look, some of her politics I find rather personally reprehensible. I think even pro-choice people would cringe at lauding someone who "had three abortions, because the men did not seem to her to be originallyenough minted from the human stock to make their progeny worthwhile". I mean, "safe and legal" is one thing, culling the genetically inferior is another. But there's a reason I listed my political problems last. First: they are pretty universally bad. Not many folks are really going to stand up and clap for the eugenics movement. Secondly: you have to wade through terrible writing and awful cliches just to get that far. So that's why I've written this long, extensive review. So that you won't have to. Because, and trust me on this, it's not worth it.