On other planets
Lessing, Doris
On other planets THE SIRIAN EXPERIMENTS by Doris Lessing Alfred A. Knopf. 288 pp. $11.95. In this third volume of Doris Lessing's series of "space fiction," she has created an imaginary realm in...
...Its world is so highly automated, life so easily survived, that no meaningful work remains for its vast, overpopulated society...
...But she states that her work is a unique attempt to retell this history from the perspective of Canopean-Sirian relations...
...She visits tribes of dwarfs and of giants...
...a tribe of ape-like creatures...
...Suddenly everything below was whitened: the rain had fallen as snow, and I was in a blizzard being whirled about in shrieking winds...
...And, it is a mark of Lessing's narrative ability that we have become absorbed and carried along by the questioning, intelligent, ironic voice of Ambien...
...or Lessing's readers, about the laws of Necessity...
...She goes to the Canopean Planet 10, where every few minutes there are sunsets so dramatic that she is disoriented by the rapid shifts from darkness to light, and where she is repelled by the sight of highly evolved, intelligent creatures who "had no hair on their tall domed heads...
...Her emotional response and her skepticism about the need for such an experiment mark her first step away from cold Sirian practicality and toward the Canopean view which she had always considered "sentimental...
...Caryn Fuoroli (Caryn Fuoroli, who teaches at Boston College, has specialized in contemporary literature...
...And no mouth at all...
...She emerges as a sympathetic character who makes the abstractions of Necessity and Possibility solid, and who guides us convincingly through an impossible world...
...It is difficult, for instance, to separate "Colonised Planet 23" from "CP...
...The planet Shammat is evil, grasping, and selfish...
...One of the five highest administrators of the Sirian colonial service, Ambien is accurately described in Lessing's preface as "a female bureaucrat who is dry, just, dutiful, efficient, deluded about her own nature...
...The planet Canopus is goodness itself, a realm governed by the principle of Necessity...
...It is driven by notions of conquest and progress, and crippled by such a limited vision...
...Ambien's narrative is a retrospective account of some of these experiments...
...Lessing does not tell us who we are, but demonstrates how we can look at ourselves and our history...
...people may die of broken spirits as plausibly as in any Victorian novel...
...In a brilliantly written scene she flies overhead and observes "the Events" which occur when the Earth shifts on its axis, moving away from the sun...
...It enables her to show how powerfully the fundamental human emotions control us, no matter how advanced our technology...
...The Sirian Experiments demonstrates even more clearly than its predecessors what advantages space fiction offers Lessing...
...Her appropriate response is a question...
...and by her new-found acceptance of Canopean values...
...and, it is also the history of Ambien"s accommodation to the superior Cano-pean world view...
...But the Sirian empire, neither good nor evil, is closest to human potential and failure...
...Ambien's progress, however, is slow, and at first her dry bureaucratic judiciousness makes the narrative style ponderous...
...It allows her to remain grounded in scientific facts while extending them beyond their known limits or probabilities...
...Klorathy's role as tutor is to evoke from Ambien the proper questions, to allow her to see for herself the meaning of Necessity...
...It will not do to lecture Ambien...
...She has contributed to Newsday and other publications...
...And it is the combination of these disparate elements which makes The Sirian Experiments a significant, effective, and ultimately an enjoyable work of fiction...
...The world Ambien experiences is one familiar to readers of Shikasta, the first work in the Lessing series...
...As Ambien moves closer to the perspective of Canopus her emotions and understanding are more fully engaged, and more vividly and fluently expressed...
...The confusion about details is bothersome, but then the experiments themselves are far less important than Ambien's reactions...
...In this third volume of Doris Lessing's series of "space fiction," she has created an imaginary realm in which rapid intergalactic space travel, psychic communication, and life expectancies of many millennia are taken for granted...
...The Sirian Experiments is the story of Ambien's self-discovery...
...24" or to recall which of the two was the home of the Lombis...
...We still did not know how to look at ourselves...
...When Klorathy explains, "Laws are not made—they are inherent in the nature of the Galaxy," Ambien is finally able to comprehend...
...She spends much time on Shikasta...
...The Sirians begin a series of experiments on Shikasta and on its other colonies, as a means of keeping its population busy...
...Lessing's carefully chosen vehicle for presenting those possibilities is Ambien II, the narrator of the novel...
...silently miserable in their displacement...
...It is an indication of how far the Sirian bureaucrat has come that she is able to intuit the voice of Canopus warning her of danger...
...Klorathy's lesson for Ambien, and Lessing's for us...
...They had three eyes, quite round, bright green, with vertical black pupils...
...You are saying we have to learn how to observe these laws in operation...
...Because Lessing believes we all share in one group consciousness, and because Ambien's high rank allows her to represent the Sirian empire itself, the narrator's discoveries extend to Lessing's readers even while the nature of Lessing's fictitious world is being defined...
...Spouts of water miles high rose into the air and crashed thunderously, land spurted upwards like water, clouds formed in the skies in a swift massing process that seemed impossible—and then poured down at once in rain...
...In the last stages of the novel, Ambien is nearly overtaken by the evil power of Shammat...
...When many of the Lombis are taken from their home planet and space-lifted to another as an experiment in adaptability, what matters is Ambien's sympathy for these "poor creatures...
...And still, human understanding remains difficult and limited...
...People are aging rapidly, withering for lack of purpose or direction, actually dying from a malaise of the will...
...While Ambien's character may be a stylistic burden to Lessing at first, it is also an effective device, for the narrator's resistance mirrors our own...
...Throughout...
...has been one of perception...
...Early in the novel Ambien recognizes a basic Sirian problem...
...Ambien is the perfect fusion of reality and fantasy, of the known and the imagined...
...She is saved by one of the incarnations of Klorathy...
...Space fiction frees Lessing to give us a sense of possibilities beyond the boundaries of our own imaginations...
...Ambien is in contact with Canopus through the figure of Klorathy, a character who meets with her at intervals of millennia in a variety of forms (for Canopus, death is merely a change in circumstance, personality a flexible, metamorphosing construct...
...No nose...
...On the planet Sirius, the consequences of technological accomplishment have become devastating...
...As the novel begins, Canopus has just defeated Sirius in a war and has generously allowed Sirius to take partial possession of the planet Shikasta (formerly called Rohanda, and clearly representing Earth...
Vol. 45 • May 1981 • No. 5
