Doris Lessing's new novel ["Shikasta"] has this in common with its predecessors: it forces us to think about first and last things, about what we are, how we got that way and where we are going. It forces us to look into the depths of the apocalyptic tide washing around us. (p. 1)

My complaint … is not that Doris Lessing's new novel (the first of a tetralogy) is a forecast of doom. She has been forecasting doom for a long time now, ever more insistently these last dozen years or so. And she has had her reasons…. My complaint, rather, is that our Grand Mistress of lumpen realism has gone religious on us. Her reasons are no longer historical but astrological. The great diagnostician of what ails us has become a symptom of it….

[This] new novel is saturated with false hopes, and the ultimate truth is a system...