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 li...
Left wing commentary from the heart and the head