This extraordinarily ambitious book [Shikasta] achieves real grandeur despite attacks of silliness. Lessing builds convincingly a standard, but here necessary, indictment of Western civilisation for selfish brutal short-sightedness and then extends it to the whole of humanity…. Lessing concentrates on the West because it is after all we who will read her novel. It is perhaps surprising how comparatively perfunctory is her treatment in this novel of sexual politics; we are told that it was not thus in the beginning but it is only implied in passing that the subjection of women is part of the disorder on which Shammat feeds. The ideas of these books are hardly new ones and certainly not new ones for Lessing but they are expressed impressively and cohcrently with a cold yet apocalyptic anger.

The directly fantastic elements are particularly magnificent, all the more so because of the matter of fact extracts...