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Doris Lessing, the visionary Science Fiction author



















Photo from Bloomfield College

"Look, an usher reading Doris Lessing.”
said the man to his wife before he showed me his ticket and walked into the auditorium. It seemed that at 18 I didn't match the profile of a typical Doris Lessing reader: someone in her fifties or sixties, probably a female fellow-traveller who understood the political and emotional journey of the heroine in The Golden Notebook (1962).

And yet Lessing was also a pioneering Science Fiction writer. As a young science fiction gourmand, naturally I would get round to taking Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) off my mother's shelf and reading it. But where my mother's expectaions may not have been completely met, mine were.

In Briefing for a Descent into Hell and then later on in the Canopus in Argos series Doris writes from the perspective of a agent of an advanced civilisation, watching human beings and their civilisations evolve and develop, only to end up ruining the life of their planet. And studying Russian together with Doris and her son Peter, getting to know her a little as a friend, I realised that Doris was a visionary outsider, like one of her aliens.

In other words, she was well matched to Science Fiction. In Shikasta (1979) she could see the death of the sea. In Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) she could see how fragile a civilised and tolerant British society was and how it might be torn apart - or fall apart. She forsaw the massive emigration of the poor from the south to the north. And in her non-fiction book on the possibility of surviving a third world war she could forsee the terrible consequences of a nuclear, chemical and biological warfare - so clearly, in fact, that tears would well up in her eyes when she talked of it.

Doris Lessing's enlightened alien society, reluctantly intervening in a human world, predates Ian Banks' Culture and Consider Phlebas (1987) by 15 years. But Banks is a technophiliac and whereas Banks renews his readers attention by writing close ups of Tarantino-like violence, Doris makes the flattering assumption that we have enough maturity to stand back from the action, far enough away to see the very curvature of our earth, and reflect alongside her about the forces that mould humanity and the planet. Shikasta, in particular has an vertiginous evolutionary sweep to it.

And while we studied the great Russian authors together, occasionally I studied Doris, the visionary Science Fiction author, not the touchstone of feminism. I noticed her bright blue grey eyes, her openness and her smile; the way her hair was pinned back into a bun and her softness of speech. I could see how one might want to sit at her feet and say. "Tell me about the future. What should we do?" And she would have had one or two suggestions.

But Doris was extremely dismissive of people who idolised authors. It made me smile to see her reaction to winning the Nobel Prize. "I'm delighted to win the lot. It's a royal flush."

For my mother and her female friends, Doris was one of the chronicler of their generation. But for me Doris Lessing was a great Science Fiction author.

Comments

  1. Anonymous08:33

    What a beautiful woman; it was said to me that the lines etched on the face of the aged would speak of their character. This is the first time ever that I have noted that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous09:35

    if you noted that then at 18

    ah!

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  3. Truly beautiful, as Anonymous says -- and so rare, now, to see someone ageing like this. . . A special treat to see her face on the same page as Eve Hall's, another great beauty.

    I don't like her science fiction, Phil, but have enjoyed considering your reasons for turning to that genre -- which I suspect are right ... I've never been excited about The Golden Notebooks, a novel I've always found rather pedestrian ... The Grass is Singing is marvellous ... her best book, for me, and I enjoy everything else I've ever read by her that's set in or about South Africa.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I meant, your explanation for _her_ turning to science fiction ...

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  5. I think of it as a sort of panning out shot to reveal. She was always a close and often cutting observer of people. In her personal life she abandoned children to persue her writing carear and escape racist Rhodesia. Her whole generation of intellectuals was hypnotised by communist orthodoxy. I think zooming out to the relative serenity of Gai was a wonderful sane move. She showed me a book of arial photographs taken of the Earth from the air, saying: You will love these. I saw that French film about a young teenager falling in love with an older woman and I seriously considered it, but there was the question of her fame. I doubted my motives. Then she reminded me a little of my mother, so that was the end of that for me. Would she have considered it? Perhaps.

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  6. _Really_. . . I'm shocked ... _shocked_! ... You should have put that fantasy of yours into the main piece. . . Now I'm going to have to tell a woman I know that when she thought she was only imagining that teenage boys young enough to be sons seemed to have something like that on their minds, they actually did.

    No one's blog can touch this one for hair-raising revelations, Phil. Can't wait to read your next installment.

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  7. Didn't you see that French movie Wordy? That was what planted the seed. But I was in my early twenties, not my teenage years.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Non. Quel est le nom de ce film, s'il vous plait, Philippe le mysterieux?

    ReplyDelete

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