Doris Lessing's rapidly growing series of novels, "Canopus in Argos: Archives," raises certain compelling questions about the uses of fiction. Through her prolific work from 1950 to the early 1970's, Mrs. Lessing acquired a deserved reputation as one of the most intelligently discriminating of contemporary English novelists, her characteristic mode of fiction being a traditional novelistic one in which individual fates, caught in a tangle of social and political circumstances, were rendered with moral and psychological nuance…. Then, as she approached her 60th year, she conceived the idea of writing a "space fiction," which became "Shikasta" (1979).

Rather unexpectedly, as she explains in the preface to that novel, she found this particular mode of fantasy so exhilarating that she was drawn on to write two more volumes, "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five" (1980) and "The Sirian Experiments."…

The two previously published "Canopus" books—the first of which is...