Interviewer: Is the space series going to continue?
Lessing: Yes. I haven't forgotten it. If you read the last one, The Sentimental Agents (1983)—which is really satire, not science fiction—you'll see that I've ended it so that I've pointed it all to the next volume. The book ends in the middle of a sentence. In the next book, I send this extremely naive agent off to... What's the name of my bad planet?
Interviewer: Shammat?
Lessing: Yes, to Shammat, in order to reform everything. It's going to be difficult to write about Shammat because I don't want to make it much like Earth! That's too easy! I have a plot, but it's the tone I need. You know what I mean?
Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102, 1988 interviewed by Thomas Frick, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
Lessing: Yes. I haven't forgotten it. If you read the last one, The Sentimental Agents (1983)—which is really satire, not science fiction—you'll see that I've ended it so that I've pointed it all to the next volume. The book ends in the middle of a sentence. In the next book, I send this extremely naive agent off to... What's the name of my bad planet?
Interviewer: Shammat?
Lessing: Yes, to Shammat, in order to reform everything. It's going to be difficult to write about Shammat because I don't want to make it much like Earth! That's too easy! I have a plot, but it's the tone I need. You know what I mean?
Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102, 1988 interviewed by Thomas Frick, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
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