``Around those beds where lovers lie obsessed, what accomplished beings hover, savouring each caress, each long drunken look, each kiss---of all the intoxicants, this is the most powerful, and these are not savage or brutal ghosts, no hungerers for pain or to inflict it, not owners of comfortable bellies and soft beds---no, these may be among the most refined and responsive souls, most closely tuned to Canopus, but who allowed themselves to be tangled in these Shikastan nets and could not free themselves before they died. Among the fascinated crowds are the uglier beings, the succubi and the incubi, the many varieties of vampire, those who have learned how to feed off the energies of Shikasta.
Around the accomplished and the talented, those who have easily, or through some lucky combination of circumstance, become artists of all kinds, the teller of stories, musicians, makers of images or of pictures---the souls who linger here are to be pitied more than any. They knew what it was to feed the needs of poor mankind with the nourishments of art (part food though it is, only shadows of what they might have had) but who could not, for some reason to do with the oppressions and hazards that are the very nature of Shikasta, which chokes off and destroys so much vital creativity. These are not souls to be feared or shrunk from. As I passed by a scene, perhaps of a scientist calculating the nature of stars and star-forces, or a woman at work on a tale that may help others to see a situation or a passion more clearly, I recognized friends crowding hungrily there. Poor ghosts. ``Move on, move on,'' I urged, ``leave here, don't allow yourselves to be fastened here around these glass walls, go---free yourselves. Find useful work in the other Zones, or return the hard way to Shikasta---those are your ways out. You may yearn and lean and pine here for long ages and never know anything but frustration and emptiness and longing....'' But they cannot hear, these bewitched ones, hanging there, eyes fixed on scenes which to them have a wonderful attraction, a glamour which makes them forget anything they ever really knew of the truth....'' (Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta, 206-7p)
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This is Johor speaking of his time in Zone Six, which he dreads visiting in his intermittent travels to Shikasta to monitor the development of a colony that has gone bad. Johor was the chief administrator for this colony and was part of the original planning team, back when hopes were high. Well, it is of course Earth, and Zone Six is the transfiguration of Dante's Inferno, in its moments of regret, loss, remorse, and failure of fulfillment. Even the oppressive tone of ghosts crowding up to the rare living visitors makes its effect all the more lonely and desperate---as if Dante's Florentines were chasing each other, pursued and pursuing with flickering candles in the cold of a medieval night.
The reason Doris Lessing turned to science fiction, or what passed superficially for such fare, is because she enjoyed the pure art of telling a story. The deepest problem with naturalist fiction is that it can not tell a story properly, because a story is more like a fairy tale, a mythological order that does not sit well with the demands of realism. Dante was not plagued with this narrative dilemma. He was freed by his mythological cosmology to tell any story he wanted. We tend to think he was bound by his medieval mind set, but that is not entirely accurate. He was liberated by it.
I know others will argue otherwise. But consider how difficult and how rare it is to be able to conceive the religious, philosophical, and human archetypes of a society and cast them as living figures working their fates out through an unfolding narrative that is also the history of the society itself. There are just not that many writers for The Brothers Karamozov.
No, Lessing is not Dante or Dostoevsky, but that is certainly where she wants to be, and she knows that only great stories, that is stories that transcend themselves and reach into the mythological narratives of a people take us there.
So the classic science fiction types will be disappointed in the humanistic narrative with its endless reflections and complete absence of techno-gizmos, while the literati will despair over the purely inventive and apparently arbitrary world setting---a literary minded alien administrator who is appalled at what he and his colleagues have raught and takes notes on the tragic developments. Everything that could go wrong, does. And yet there is something profoundly naive about Johor and somewhat blindsided as well. He fails to see that the struggle itself has a nobility that needs no redemption---and just perhaps might be feared---if it were ever to be loosed on the galaxy.
CG