The tremendous social realities of our time are ghosts, specters of murdered gods and our own humanity returned to haunt and destroy us. The Negroes, the Jews, the Reds. Them. Only you and I dressed differently. The texture of the fabric of these...

Byline: Chris Riemenschneider; Staff Writer Honky-tonk bars are supposed to be born of hard times, but lately the troubles at Lee's Liquor Lounge have gone beyond normal. Louie Sirian, the resilient owner of the downtown Minneapolis watering hole and music club,...

[In The Sirian Experiments, the third novel in her Canopus in Argos: Archives sequence,] Doris Lessing attempts once more, but obliquely, to make us examine our world and its preconceptions. The 'Martian' technique is sometimes heavily obvious … and sometimes bitterly pointed…. When Ambien sounds most human, the voice of her creator rasps through: 'I could not help feeling myself undermined by the familiar dry sorrow at the waste of it, the dreadful squandering waste of it...

In The Sirian Experiments we are given the Sirian version, narrated by a woman named Ambien II, of experiments carried out on earth (Shikasta/Rohanda). Ambien is one of five leaders of Sirius, and for all intents and purposes immortal—a circumstance, by the way, that ultimately undermines the dramatic potential of the novel, at least in the few instances that Lessing abandons a rather dreary expository style and shows characters in action. To know that a character is immortal is to be aware that, lik...