Books: Visit to a Small Planet

SHIKASTA by Doris Lessing

Knopf; 384 pages; $10.95

Science fiction is pastoral turned upside down, radiating a nostalgia not for what was but for what could be. Since this mystic longing has increasingly filled the novels and stories of Author Doris Lessing, 59, it is not surprising that she has finally got around to spaceships and galactic travelers; she herself calls Shikasta, her 24th book, "space fiction." This description is accurate enough, but it may mislead some into expecting much less than this dazzling novel actually delivers. Shikasta owes more to Gulliver's Travels and the Old Testament than to Buck Rogers; it is at once a brief history of the world, a tract against human destructiveness, an ode to the natural beauties of this earth and a hymn to the music of the spheres.

All that may seem too much for a 384-page book to accomplish, but Lessing's premise gives her aeons of time to fill. Scouts from the benign galactic empire Canopus discover a small but promising planet, obviously the young earth, whose denizens include a strain of monkeys beginning to stand on their own two feet. The Canopeans introduce a race of superior creatures to tutor these humanoids and help speed their evolution. Eventually, the planet, called Rohanda, is deemed ready to be locked into the vast, overarching harmony that prevails throughout the domain of Canopus.

After many Edenic millenniums an "unfortunate cosmic pattern" breaks this lock and introduces cacophony and dissonance into the new world. Almost immediately the inhabitants display symptoms of the "Degenerative Disease," a bellicose assertion of ego against the grain of the common good. Life-spans, which had stretched to a thousand years, begin shrinking dramatically; natural fulfillment is replaced by restless desires and dissatisfactions. The Canopean overseers sadly change Rohanda's name to Shikasta, "the hurt, the damaged, the wounded one." The period of earth's recorded history is about to begin.

The chief recorder in Shikasta is Johor, a virtually immortal Canopean who is in on the creation of Rohanda and who returns in the present (the Century of Destruction) to salvage what he can from the calamity. The novel is also pieced together out of passages from Canopean history books and archives, official communiqués, sociological reports, diaries and letters of assorted Shikastans. These documents enable Lessing to imply a vast skeleton of time out of a limited number of bones; she can also shift viewpoints dramatically from the near infinite to the minute. Oddly, the novel's unity rests in its variety.