Doris Lessing's rapidly growing series of novels, "Canopus in Argos: Archives," raises certain compelling questions about the uses of fiction. Through her prolific work from 1950 to the early 1970's, Mrs. Lessing acquired a deserved reputation as one of the most intelligently discriminating of contemporary English novelists, her characteristic mode of fiction being a traditional novelistic one in which individual fates, caught in a tangle of social and political circumstances, were rendered with moral and psychological nuance…. Then, as she approached her 60th year, she conceived the idea of writing a "space fiction," which became "Shikasta" (1979).

Rather unexpectedly, as she explains in the preface to that novel, she found this particular mode of fantasy so exhilarating that she was drawn on to write two more volumes, "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five" (1980) and "The Sirian Experiments."…

The two previously published "Canopus" books—the first of which is intermittently intriguing, the second, continually enchanting—have elicited a good deal of admiration but also some perplexity and disgruntlement, especially from readers with fond memories of Doris Lessing the realistic novelist. Nettled by the expressions of dissatisfaction, she feels impelled to explain her purpose once again in a preface to the new novel. Here she reasserts an affinity proposed in her earlier preface between what she is doing and sacred literature, myth, legend, while she puts greater stress on a seriously entertained notion that reality may be more mysterious than we imagine. (p. 1)

["The Sirian Experiments"] runs through the stages of human history, this time from the viewpoint of a female Sirian colonial administrator….

The story Ambien II tells is a panorama of the possibilities of civilization and barbarism, ranging from a matriarchal version of Atlantis just before its engulfment, to the Aztec cult of human sacrifice, where Shammat reigns supreme, to the Mongol hordes sweeping over the Moslem East and the Conquistadores ravishing South America.

Is all this, strictly speaking, science fiction? And what has the writer gained by turning away from the riches of individual experience that are the great, fascinating subject of the realistic novel? Doris Lessing calls her "Canopus" series "space fiction" rather than science fiction, and I would infer that she associates the latter with what others have pejoratively termed "technology fiction."…

Let me suggest that the genre to which this kind of writing most directly belongs is what Northrop Frye has called the "anatomy"—a kind of fiction, as Frye notes, that is "a combination of fantasy and morality" and that "presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern." The most familiar instance of the anatomy for English readers, and one particularly apposite to Doris Lessing's project, is "Gulliver's Travels." The fantastic assumptions of Swift's narrative are an elaborate game of perspectives, exploited, quite obviously but also quite brilliantly, to magnify and expose the pettiness, the savagery, the silliness, the brutality of our supposedly civilized lives. (p. 24)

There is, I think, a delicate interplay between the fantasy and the morality that comprise any anatomy, and in the first of the "Canopus" novels, moralistic purpose often threatens to overwhelm the fantasy or, rather, the fantasy often is too transparently calculated for moralistic ends. (This is a tendency reinforced by the author's decision in that novel to represent the world as a simple Manichean division between the forces of good, Canopus, and the forces of evil, Shammat.) In "The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four, and Five," fantasy is given much freer play, and what looks at first like a schematic feminist allegory of the relation between the sexes proves to be full of the constant charm of the unexpected, the discoveries of an imagination surrendering itself to the momentum of its own narrative and visual inventions.

"The Sirian Experiments" again reveals patches of didactic insistence: Its author, one senses, is still too intent on shaping her fiction to convey the Canopean message to humankind that they must practice "moderation, abstention from luxury, plain living, care for others whom they must never exploit or oppress, the care for animals, and for the earth." In the new novel, however, fantasy is deployed in the service of morality with a zestful inventiveness often lacking in "Shikasta"—perhaps in part because the new book concentrates on a fabled past and not on the contemporary world. "The Sirian Experiments" also makes the juggling of perspectives that is inherent in the anatomy an explicit and sometimes suggestive theme. (pp. 24, 26)

"The Sirian Experiments" abounds with images of observation: high towers, mountain outlooks, spacecraft windows, and certain specialized instruments of perception. One of these is particularly noteworthy. Klorathy, Ambien II's mentor, invites her to stare at a wall on which he projects, apparently through some mental process rather than by a mechanical apparatus, an arresting panoramic display of Shikastan history unfolding:

I … saw on the wall, quite as clearly as one does with ordinary vision—but as it were distanced and speeded up, so that what I was seeing was both exactly accurate, a true representation of actual events, and yet encapsulated, and simplified—a series of pictures, or visions, that drew me forward into them so that it was almost as if I was more a part of the events I watched than a spectator of them.

Klorathy's curious visual display is essentially an ideal image of the anatomy form as Doris Lessing uses it in "The Sirian Experiments," the book's accelerated and distanced scenes of humanity having been devised to put us as readers into the same relation to them as that in which Ambien II stands to the encapsulated pictures on the wall.

Admittedly, it is in some ways an awkward and risky maneuver for a writer to turn in this manner from the intimate and subtle home-truths of the novel to the intellectually defined global truths of the anatomy. Doris Lessing's fictional projection device does not always operate with the perfect authority attributed to Klorathy's. Nevertheless, in this latest volume of the "Canopus" series—because in many scenes she remains, for all her didactic urgency, so splendidly a writer, reveling in the complex movement of evocation—she does often draw us directly into her rendering of history as a true if simplified version of the actual events, achieving at moments a largeness of vision beyond the horizon of the conventional novel. (p. 26)