136 Chapter Six OUTER SPACE FANTASY II: THE SIRIAN EXPERIMENTS, THE MAKING OF THE REPRESENTATIVE FOR PLANET 8 AND THE SENTIMENTAL AGENTS OF THE VOLYEN EMPIRE Nettled by expressions of dissatisfaction after the publication of Shikasta and Marriages, Leasing explains her purpose once again in a preface to the third novel in this series, The Sirian Experiments (1981) . In sum, Lessing invites readers to see the series "as a framework that enables me to tell (I hope) a beguiling tale or two; to put questions both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities" (1981:12). Lessing, certainly does this in the next three novels of the series—The Sirian Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1983) ,_and The Sentimental Agents of the Volven Empire (1983). THE SIRIAN EXPERIMENTS The reviewers find ii\any faults with Lessing's The Sirian Experiments. For instance, Edwin Morgan says that the book "is not as well written as it might be. Misplaced particles abound. Singulars and plurals are confounded, sentences are made verbless quite unnecessarily and there is too much reliance on those magic dots..." (TLS, 1981:431). They find her ideas "too near the 137 surface, too little assimilated" (Wilce, 1981:24) but do not explain which ideas they mean, and hastily conclude that the book is "not good science fiction or good Lessing. Fanatics only " (Niccol, 1981:72). However, Robert Alter's review is a perceptive and interesting one. He considers the Canopus in Arqos series to belong to what Northrop Frye called an "anatomy"; that is, "a combination of fantasy and morality" (NYTBR, 1981:1) which "presents a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern" (NYTBR, 1981:24). But he does not fully expand this idea; nor does he realize that "morality" for Lessing has different dimensions. He draws parallels between this series and Gulliver's Travels and shows how both expose "the pettiness, the savagery, the brutality of our supposedly civilized lives" (NYTBR. 1981:24). Alter rightly considers the figures from outer space to serve as tellers of an earthly tale which is to say, to provide a new sometimes startling perspective on earthly affairs seeing, in their sweep across the geological eons from the first beginning to the possible ends (1981:24). Except that this time the perspective has changed—it is that of the Sirian colonizers. The Sirian Experiments covers much the same ground as Shikasta—the history of the earth from prehistoric times to the twentieth century. But The Sirian Experiments highlights different 138 episodes; for example, the growth of the pre-Columban cultures and the invasions of the growth of the Mongols and the Tartars. The two galactic empires, Canopus and Sirius, have colonized the earth with various species and are constantly watching and intervening in this colonial development. Ambien II (one of the five Oligarchs of Sirius) finds herself much concerned with the relations between the two empires. What happens on earth is used as a testing ground for her own evolving attitudes; her growing doubts about the manipulation of species, and at the same time, her growing admiration for the trustworthiness and benevolence of Canopus. They are beings as superior to Sirius, as Sirius is to the various species it transports, dumps, cajoles and commands from planet to planet. Ambien II finds herself increasingly alienated from her fellow Sirians and at the end of the book finds herself exiled on Planet 13 of the Sirian empire. Compared to the two earlier books in this series. The Sirian Experiments is more specifically science fiction in that it offers staple science fiction fare. We get descriptions of various colonized plane.ts. For example, there is planet II which has two moons. One was a "reddish disc" and another a "smaller bilious green disc" (1981:123). The inhabitants are of two types—giants who are black or rich chocolate brown, and the insect people who were not very short... but seemed so, because they were so extremely thin and light in build, and of 139 a silvery-grey colour that made one believe them transparent when they were not. They had no hair on their tall domed heads. Each hand...had ten very long fingers, nailless, giving the impression of tentacles always in movement. They had three eyes, quite round, bright green, with vertical black pupils. There was a pattern of nostrils—simple holes—in the centre of their flat faces, three or four or even more. No nose, no mouth at all (1981:125). These creatures are telepathic and live on air. We are reminded of the strange creatures we meet in Star Trek, Flash Gordon, and Superman. The flora is also unfamiliar. For instance. Planet 3 has "animal plants" which reached out to eat insects, animals anybody who happens to pass by. Another reason for the distinctively science fiction tone of this novel is the fact that Lessing does not deal exclusively with earth's history. And even when she does deal with earth's history, the facts are transformed. For example, it is historically verifiable that the Central American empires of the Aztecs and Incas were closed totalitarian regimes which believed in human sacrifice but there is no knowledge of a city named Grakcontrapatl. Nor does the human predicament feature so much here as it did in Shikasta. Humanity is distanced in The Sirian Experiments and we see man behaving in the way he does because of the manipulations of Canopus, Sirius or Shammat. But this does not mean that Lessing palliates the blame for the way human beings behave. What she is trying to do is to offer suggestions, conjectures, as to why we do 140 so. As she clearly says in the preface to this books, she does "not believe that there is a planet called Shammat full of low grade pirates, and that it sucks substance from this poor planet of ours; nor that we are the scene of conflict between those great empires, Canopus and Sirius" (1981:10). Lorna Sage rightly comments that; These statements show her trying to put her fictions into a new focus. She wanted them to be disposable, emblematic and analogical, so that they convey imaginative moves (from the personal to the collective, from the rational to the intuitive) without getting too entangled in particular histories. Readers who suspect her of believing in diabolic space pirates are responding to something that is there in her tone; propaganda for 'wonder' for emigration into mental space (1983:83). Lessing does not offer us any escape from the contingent world in her fantasy. Her portrayal of the Sirian colonial attitude is close to that of real life colonizers. The galactic empires display many human tendencies and characteristics. As Gillian Wilce points out, Lessing is making "the familiar, unfamiliar" (1981:24). In her fantasy almost more than in her earlier realistic fiction, Lessing allows the "author and reader to wonder anew about the conditions of human life" (1981:24). The Sirian Empire, for instance, is a close parallel of the advanced Western countries of this world. The largest of all the empires, its "technological development had reached a peak" 141 (1981:27). But this achievement also brought about its problems, the major one being the fact that "there was nothing for billions upon billions of individuals to do" (1981:27). These hapless individuals offered by their triumphantly successful leaders "plenty of leisure, freedom from want, from fear, from effort, showed every symptom of mass psychosis, ranging from random and purposeless violence to apparently causeless epidemics and widespread neurosis" (1981:27). The solution offered to this problem is also very familiar and human. The Sirian administration evolved the idea of "invented usefulness" (1981:27). Innumerable people on Sirian colonized planets left their leisure and regressed to a long distant past, with families working sometimes on quite small plots of land and aiming at self sufficiency. But of course, they used technical advances when this suited them. Such a solution could only be indulged in by the rich and so was named derisively and with unconcealed resentment "pastimes of the rich" (1981:28). And as Ambien II herself points out "these movements had all the characteristics of the ^religions' that afflicted Rohanda in its period of decline and degeneration. To Hive simply', ^to get back to nature seemed to nearly everyone the solution to all our new problems" (1981:29). Both Sirians and human beings know, however, that this is just a pathetic regression and not a lasting solution. The root of the Sirian problems was its "existential doubts- 142 -who should use what and how much and when and what for" (1981:81) . At first/ the Sirian administrations decided to decrease their population. At the end of 50,000 Sirian years they were left with nearly empty planets but in fact, nothing had changed. As Ambien II says, "We still did not know how to look at ourselves" (1981:82). What governed the existence of Sirians was work or the * lack of it. This realization resulted in depressions, and psychological maladjustments of all kinds. This was especially true of women, who even went to the extent of agreeing to take part in breeding experiments to satisfy their urge for motherhood. Another problem central to the development of the Sirian Empire was that as soon as they had colonized a new planet, in a short time "these savages" (1981:35) would demand all the advantages that Sirians on the home planet enjoyed. But they continued colonizing because they "needed a reservoir or bank of populations whom they could use for ordinary, heavy, undifferentiated work" (1981:120).