Report on the Threatened City
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From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a distinctive science fiction short story.
Unknown observers send reports on a city that is threatened with destruction. They gather information on the inhabitants and their behaviour. It soon becomes clear that this is far from an alien planet.
As in many of her acclaimed science fiction novels, in ‘Report on the Threatened City’, Doris Lessing uses the traditions of this genre to examine the world we know and human nature itself, from a completely new and often unforgiving perspective.
This story also appears in the collection The Temptation of Jack Orkney.
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.
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