Lessing leaves her million books on realism behind and instead files a planetary report.

Shikasta is presented as the first book in an interstellar archive — documents, reports, letters — concerning Earth (known here as “Shikasta”), a once-harmonious colony that has drifted into moral and ecological degeneration after losing contact with a benevolent galactic empire.

Colonialism gets reframed at cosmic scale, environmental collapse becomes a spiritual misalignment, human cruelty is rendered (not inaccurately really) as historical inevitability rather than individual failure. 

The structure is deliberately cool and bureaucratic. Sure, there's laser battles and spectacle; but this book is interested in decay, in collective amnesia, in what happens when a species loses coherence.

If The Golden Notebook fractures the self, Shikasta fractures the planet.