THE SIRIAN EXPERIMENTS. The Report by Ambien II, of the Five

by Doris Lessing

First published in 1980

The reception of Shikasta and, to a lesser extent, of The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, suggests that I should say something in the way of clarification… if I have created a cosmology then it is only for literary purposes! Once upon a time, when I was young, I believed things easily, both religious and political; now I believe less and less. But I wonder about more… I think it likely that our view of ourselves as a species on this planet now is inaccurate, and will strike those who come after us as inadequate as the world view of let’s say, the inhabitants of Guinea seems to us. That our current view of ourselves as a species is wrong. That we know very little about what is going on. That a great deal of is going on is not told to ordinary citizens, but remains the of property of small castes and juntas. I wonder and I speculate about all kinds of ideas that our education deems absurd—as of course do most of the inhabitants of this globe. If I were a physicist there would be no trouble at all! They can talk nonchalantly about black holes swallowing stars, black holes that we might learn to use as mechanisms for achieving time-and-space warps, sliding through them by way of mathematical legerdemain to find ourselves in realms where the laws of our universe do not apply. They nonchalantly suggest parallel universes, universes that lie intermeshed with ours but invisible to us, universes where time runs backwards, or that mirror ours.

I do not think it surprising that the most frequently quoted words at this time, seen everywhere, seem to be J. B. S. Haldane’s “Now my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”