Shikasta
Envoys of a benign galactic empire file reports on a colonised planet whose supply of the substance binding its people to one another has been cut by a cosmic misalignment, leaving the natives short-lived, quarrelsome and unable to say what ails them. One envoy takes birth among them in the last decades before the century turns, growing up in a family of refugees and moving through camps, riots and a youth tribunal convened to try the empires. Lessing broke off from realism here for a five-book space fiction sequence, saying she wanted to write in the manner of the Old Testament and its apocrypha; readers who had prized The Golden Notebook were not pleased.
Open Shikasta in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.
Lineage
Attributes
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Mode / tone
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 46% · 11 shared
- 44% · 11 shared
- 43% · 11 shared
- 41% · 10 shared
- 41% · 10 shared
- 40% · 9 shared