The first novel, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta, encompasses millions of years of Earth's evolution and uses several contrasting styles and manners to do it, from the manic stupidities of "the Devil," to the lofty ruminations of "the Gods," but Lessing is also able to write the simple and sorrowful story of a single teen-age girl, whirled out of her little limitations by the world's cataclysms.

This book is completely different from anything she has written before. The second novel in the series (to be published shortly) - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five - is again different, resembling a fable, a legend of the simplest and even the most classic sort. The third novel in the sequence, The Sirian Experiments, makes the most radical departure. It is told in the voice of a female official of the Empire of Sirius, a bureaucrat by nature and by thousands of years of experience, whose personal odyssey carries her into a new understanding of cosmic evolution.