Shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize.
The Sirian Experiments is the third volume in Doris Lessing's celebrated space fiction series. 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. In this interlnked quintet of novels, she creates a new, extraordinary cosmos where the fate of the Earth is influenced by the rivalries and interactions of three powerful galactic empires, Canopus, Sirius and their enemy, Puttiora.blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.
The Sirian Experiments chronicles the origins of our planet, the three galactic empires fight for control of the human race. The novel charts the gradual moral awakening of its narrator, charts the charts the gradual moral awakening of its narrator, Ambien II, a 'dry, dutiful, efficient' female Sirian administrator. Witnessing the wanton colonisation of land and people, Ambien begins to question her involvement in such insidious experimentation, her faith in the possibility os human progress itself growing weaker every day.
Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 and was taken to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when she was five. She spent her childhood on a large farm there and first came to England in 1949. She brought with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was published in 1950 with outstanding success in Britain, in America, and in ten European countries. Since then her international reputation not only as a novelist but as a non-fiction and short story writer has flourished. For her collection of short novels, Five, she was honoured with the 1954 Somerset Maugham Award. She was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1981, and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 1982. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark and Memoirs of a Survivor. Her short stories have been collected in a number of volumes, including To Room Nineteen and The Temptation of Jack Orkney; while her African stories appear in This Was the Old Chief's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. Shikasta, the first in a series of five novels with the overall title of Canopus in Argos: Archives, was published in 1979. Her novel The Good Terrorist won the W. H. Smith Literary Award for 1985, and the Mondello Prize in Italy that year. The Fifth Child won the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy, an award voted on by students in their final year at school. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 was made into an opera with Philip Glass, libretto by the author, and premiered in Houston. London Observed, her latest collection of stories and sketches, was published to wide acclaim in 1992.
