id="u111b39b2-70bf-5e8b-9fa7-b19922e35c42">
DORIS LESSING
CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES
THE SIRIAN EXPERIMENTS
The Report by Ambien II, of the Five TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE LOMBI EXPERIMENT. SOME OTHERS
THE SITUATION IN THE CANOPEAN AREAS. OTHER SIRIAN EXPERIMENTS
SHAMMAT. THE END OF THE OLD ROHANDA
THE SITUATION IN THE SIRIAN EMPIRE
THE DWARVES. THE HOPPES. THE NAVAHIS
THE LOMBIS. MY THIRD ENCOUNTER WITH KLORATHY
PLANET 3 (1), THE PLANET 9 ANIMALS
AMBIEN II of SIRIUS, to KLORATHY, CANOPUS
DIRECTIVE FROM THE FOUR, TO THE SIRIAN MOTHER PLANET AND ALL COLONIZED PLANETS OF THE SIRIAN EMPIRE:
LETTER FROM AMBIEN II TO STAGRUK: The Sirian Experiments is the third in a series of novels with the overall title ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’; the first is Shikasta (1979); the second The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980); the fourth The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982); and the fifth The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983). The reception of Shikasta and, to a lesser extent, of The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five suggests that I should say something in the way of clarification … if I have created a cosmology, then it is only for literary purposes! Once upon a time, when I was young, I believed things easily, both religious and political; now I believe less and less. But I wonder about more … I think it is likely that our view of ourselves as a species on this planet now is inaccurate, and will strike those who come after us as inadequate as the world view of, let’s say, the inhabitants of New Guinea seems to us. That our current view of ourselves as a species is wrong. That we know very little about what is going on. That a great deal of what is going on is not told to ordinary citizens, but remains the property of small castes and juntas. I wonder and I speculate about all kinds of ideas that our education deems absurd – as of course do most of the inhabitants of this globe. If I were a physicist there would be no trouble at all! They can talk nonchalantly about black holes swallowing stars, black holes that we might learn to use as mechanisms for achieving time-and-space warps, sliding through them by way of mathematical legerdemain to find ourselves in realms where the laws of our universe do not apply. They nonchalantly suggest parallel universes, universes that lie intermeshed with ours but invisible to us, universes where time runs backwards, or that mirror ours. I do not think it is surprising that the most frequently quoted words at this time, seen everywhere, seem to be J. B. S. Haldane’s ‘Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’ The reason, as we all know, why readers yearn to ‘believe’ cosmologies and tidy systems of thought is that we live in dreadful and marvellous times where the certainties of yesterday dissolve as we live. But I don’t want to be judged as adding to a confusion of embattled certainties. Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it? We ‘make things up’. This is our trade. I remember, before I myself
