m. c. de marco

It’s yet another school vacation week, judging from the absence of the crossing guard from the corner I cross every morning. In my head I’m also on vacation though I’ve occasionally showed up at work this week, and school vacations put me in mind of The Lord of the Rings. It calls to me like the One Ring itself from its place of honor on my bookshelves.

Some spoilers may follow, so read on at your own risk.

Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature is available on the Nobel site.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?”

At Newsday, Doris Lessing recalls the religion inspired by her space fiction series (the one she wishes more people would read):

My science fiction books. “Canopus in Argos” had a great readership way back when, and it even started a religion. “Shikasta” [the first in the series] was taken literally and they started up a commune in America.

Doris Lessing’s comments on winning the Nobel Prize have been immortalized, until Reuters complains, on YouTube. The short version, “Oh Christ”, will probably stay up longer. Thanks to David Baddiel for the heads-up.

Do you remember when you were in New Writers Class and your teacher told you what not to do once you were famous? That, specifically, you should never shop your latest novel around under a pseudonym to see if anyone will buy it on merit alone. Setting aside the risks to your ego, the number of people you’ll annoy this way is astronomical.

Well, when Doris Lessing did it, she intended to annoy:

For a reason Mrs. Lessing terms ”frankly if faintly malicious,” she wanted to settle a score with reviewers who she says hated her five Canopus novels - her visionary ”space fiction” series - and preferred that she once again write ”The Golden Notebook,” a novel about a liberated woman’s struggle to define her identity. Those reviewers were sent ”The Diary of a Good Neighbour,” she writes, ”but not one recognized me.”

The LA Times calls Doris Lessing’s Nobel prize a victory for science fiction because she sometimes writes it:

“What I would like to be writing,” Lessing wrote in 1983, “is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks.

The Times Online has more about Doris Lessing’s belated Nobel prize:

The Cleft received mixed reviews, reflecting the division of Lessing’s readers between those who love her straight novels and those who prefer her science fiction. The latter was said to be responsible for her early removal from the Nobel prize’s unofficial list, even though she regards her Canopus in Argos series of SF books as her finest work.