Book 36: "Shikasta" by Doris Lessing

[kittiwake]

Canopus in Argos: Archives
Re: Colonised Planet 5
Shikasta
Personal, Psychological,Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban)
Emissary (Grade 9)
87th of the Period of the Last Days

The first witness was brilliantly chosen. (From a certain point of view.) She was a delegate from Shansi Province. A girl of about twenty. She was, of course, well-fed and neatly dressed and looked healthy and at once the atmosphere lost tension. We are not popular. That is the penalty we have to pay for our superiority!

This book takes the form of an academic text for first-year students of Canopean Colonial Rule. It covers the whole history of Shikasta from prehistoric times, and it is clear from the start that Shikasta is Earth.

Initially the Canopeans had high hopes for the planet Rohanda, the fruitful, the thriving. But their long-term project to mould the physical and spiritual development of its inhabitants was spoilt when Rohanda came under the influence of the criminal planet Shammat, and the link to Canopus was severed. From then on, Rohanda was known as Shikasta, the broken, the hurt one, and however much the Canopean agents tried they were unable to undo the damage caused by Shammat. I found the middle part of the the book very depressing, with the Canopean agents tell the story of various humans whose lives were sent off track by the power of Shammat. It was so depressing that I nearly gave up reading, but luckily I didn't as the final third of the book was the most involving.

There are other ways of accessing Shikasta, but Canopean agents who need to be there for the long term are incarnated as humans, and they enter Shikasta via Zone 6, where souls wait to be reborn. Some agents live a whole human life without remembering their true identity and purpose, but when Johor is incarnated as George Sherban, he spends his life working with youth groups around the world, culminating in a youth congress that conducts a mock trial of the white faces for the evil they have done in the past. But the Canopeans don't want to lose the Europeans' wide genetic diversity, and the Chinese contingent doesn't realise that every aspect of the congress is being manipulated to leave the delegates wondering why they are trying the white races, when it is the Chinese who now run everything and patronise the other races 'for their own good'.

And there was just one casual comment somewhere in the book that made me think that the Canopeans might not be quite as altruistic as they appear.