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I was delayed in all my early reading because when we came back from Mexico, I was a year behind in school. It took about two and half to three years to catch back up, so I hit sci-fi at thirteen, but it was close enough. And it did exactly the same trick. It pulled me into reading on a depth I had never imagined. Ah, so this is why people read... because it is an adventure after all.
I can't remember what we were supposed to be reading in school, but history caught me about the same time, especially the Egyptians and of course Hitler and WWII. By the time I got to manditory Shakespeare, I could only take Macbeth, just barely. The selected sections of Moby Dick were a complete mystery to me. I had no idea what was going on in that assignment. The rest of high school American literature sucked big time. I had to gag force feed my way through Hawthorn, Austin, and James. Occasional poetry would fascinate me, Poe---just about everything of Poe, poetry, short stories. I remember liking Emily Dickinson. Two more. Jack London and John Steinbeck, especially Steinbeck. I tried English Lit as an elective. I enjoyed the selections, especially the modern poetry, WWI poets, but I can't remmeber any of the novels. Absolutely despised Boswell on Johnson. I remember thinking fuck Johnson. He was a class ridden asshole. What's the deal here with little slavish Boswell kissing ass. I liked Beowolf, the selections of the Canterbury Tales. I actually enjoyed trying to read some of the tales out loud to give my voice the sound of the words. I gaged through more Shakespeare, but liked some of his poetry. Who I really liked was John Donne. I always read him out loud. I don't why. When I think about now, looking back, maybe these few were like science fiction and history to me---highly imaginary, something out of the ordinary, a reading adventure of sorts. My problem with Shakespeare was and still is my inability to either suspend disbelief in the absurd actions and reflections of the character or identify with them in any way. I must have a Shakespeare bloc of some sort. I am only left with elegance of the speeches and artistry of turns of phrase which I think is pretty thin shit. Much later I sat in on a graduate drama class where the professor took Hamlet apart scene by scene and analyzed the ways each scene set up the directions of unfolding the drama. He also went over each of the characters and developed their personae. These were fascinating lectures, done by a real drama mechanic who knew how to direct a stage production. This was much more interesting than the play itself.
I can't remember how I saw my favorite science fiction in high school and early college. In high school, I could never figure out why they didn't have any science fiction on the reading lists. I just thought they were old stuff-shirts or something and hadn't revised the curriculum since the dark ages of the 1930s. I never disowned it, since it brought me the world. But it completed with art and history. The other thing that science fiction did was make physics interesting, so I always kept an interest in that bizarre world too. Was faster than light travel really possible? Could things in our space-time move into alternate dimensions, etc. Is space really curved? These kinds of questions also led to an interest in philosophy and math. That's not quite correct. All these interests merged together somehow and arrived one after the other as if they were all related to each other.
Anyway, getting back to Lessing. what she is doing is melting mythical histories and stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh, stories in the Old Testament, and something vaguely resembling foundational tales like Beowulf together into a narrative in such a way as to make the plausible sources for these stories a quasi-realistic or naturalistic series of events. In other words you recognize these myths as arising from events reported on Shikiska, written by an alien from Canopus---if that makes any sense.
I am not sure I would have been ready for this kind of writing until much, much later. For one thing, you have to have read the Old Testament and few classics to recognize the story she is telling through alien minds. You don't really have to have read all that, but having done so, you get an extra-dimension to the novel. One oddity, you also have to have read some of the OT pseudoepigraphia. For example there is one story where a group of rebellious angels came to earth and ravaged human women and breed a race of giants as offspring. These sorts of tales were left out by the rabbinic and christian scholars when they were assembling their primary texts. What I am really waiting for are some references to Quranic stories. They might have been there, but they didn't register.
I am enjoying this novel. But I see it is an acquired taste that suits a lot of my interests in history and science fiction. I think that science fiction which often takes place in some future world, is very much like the particular gendre that the 19thC romanics created in their invented stories that were supposed to take place in gothic times. The 19thC had no idea what the middle ages and the gothic world was like so they invented it as a legendary past, much like we invent a legendary future. Shakespeare also of course deals with this netherworldly history-fiction-myth world, which I think is about the only thing interesting about him.
I tried to find a serious review of this novel, but didn't find any.
This reminds me that the other thing about this novel is its composition which reads like series of chronological files, reports, letters, and notes. This kind of composition is a real no-no to the literature types.
CG