I bought this book, The Making of the
Representative for Planet 8 - Canopus in Argos: Archives by Doris Lessing, in a second hand book shop in the lanes in Brighton. North lanes maybe? I can’t remember which lanes are which.

What an amazing cover! How could I resist? A lovely clash of black and white minimalism with 80s font abuse. By the time I got to the till and discovered it was going to cost me £15 I was too much in love to put it back.

So it was an impulse purchase, Doris Lessing had just won the Nobel prize and appeared entertainingly on the news and I’d just finished my epic trawl through Ursulsa LeGuins Ekumen books so this seemed like a good place to go next.

It’s not an easy book but its short and it stays with you. It’s a very simple story about a planet dying by glaciation but it’s the telling that sets it apart, intensely impersonal and quite alien, time and space are not treated with the reverence that sci-fi normally affords them and the sense of dislocation this engenders is quite profound.

By the time I’d finished, the whole thing had made me quite depressed, in a satisfying way though, if that makes any sense. Despite the feeling that what I was reading might be entirely symbolic (in the after-word Lessing suggests it might really be about the death of her friend but she doesn’t know) the reaction of planet 8’s population to their dying world seemed utterly convincing. The recently coined concept of solastalgia seems to me a perfect fit for the novel.

… the more quickly environmental change occurs, the more intense the solastalgia. The mental-health effects can be powerful. In the Australian outback, industrial activity — notably open-pit coal mining — has turned verdant areas into moonscapes seemingly overnight, and the suicide rate in the region has skyrocketed.