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Title: The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 by Doris Lessing ISBN: 0-00-654718-4 Pub. Date: 1994 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A story of strength
Comment: The people of Planet Eight had happy, productive lives. They seemed born with knowledge of themselves and their visible environment. With Canopus' teaching, they were developing as a culture, strengthening their social structures and integrating new knowledge into their world-view. They knew that their whole people had a future planned among the stars, as citizens of star-spanning society.
Then their sunny, warm planet started to chill. Within a generation, tropical landscape became snowscape everywhere on the planet. Conditions changed so that the promise of their future could not be kept.
It takes some time for the stage to be set properly, but I think this where the real story begins. It is about a people struggling to adapt to increasingly harsh truths presented by the world around them. As conditions worsen, they harden themselves to successively more drastic steps that must be taken to survive. That, I think, is the tragedy of this story: the determination to survive, knowing that the only way goes against all that ever mattered to them. It is about the personal cost of sustaining faith and hope in the face of crushing realities.
More than the others in Lessing's Canopus series, I find this book ambiguous. It is as well written and well paced as the others, and it conveys the same serenity and certainty. This book, however, addresses especially complex issues. I do not share the view that Lessing expresses. I don't have to, though, to appreciate this as a remarkable, personal expression.
Rating: 4
Summary: Joining up
Comment: Planet 8, a promising outpost of the Empire of Canopus, undergoes a catastrophic climate change. Canopus had planned to move the people to a similar planet, Rohanda; but the wrecking of these plans, as detailed in Lessing's Shikasta and The Sirian Experiments, means that a more arduous course must be taken. As their home freezes with appalling rapidity, the people of Planet 8 must first adapt to the new conditions and then transcend them by forging a group identity which will preserve their society's heritage. They already possess the germ of this collective mind - most obviously in their custom of changing the names of individuals according to the social function they happen to be performing at the time - but there is still a long, hard way to go. Despite its science-fictional plot, The Making of the Representative is closer in style to the social/psychological myth-making of The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five; certainly the prose is equally lyrical, and although the characters are (perhaps inevitably, given the theme) less well drawn as individuals, it's still a vivid, poignant, sometimes visionary piece. Appropriately, given its choral potentialities, the book was the basis of an opera by Philip Glass.
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Title: The Sirian Experiments by Doris Lessing ISBN: 0006547214 Pub. Date: 1994 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Shikasta: Re, Colonized Planet 5 : Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (Grade 9) by Doris May Lessing ISBN: 0394749774 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 1981 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (Canopus in Argos--Archives) by Doris May Lessing ISBN: 0394723864 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1984 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five by Doris Lessing ISBN: 0006547206 Pub. Date: 1994 List Price(USD): $21.98 |
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Title: Shikasta by Doris Lessing ISBN: 0006547192 Pub. Date: 1994 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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