Conjuring a Tense Future, Imperfectly

Dogs can sniff the humanity that was there: carnal essences, clothes, sweat and other bodily emanations, and the emotions that tincture them. They cannot sniff the humanity that will be there.

The absence of a sniff factor tends to dilute the artistic energies of all but the best science fiction. Realism transposed into the future is not enough. A dream-knack of near-genius is required, the kind of impalpable infusion that gives nighttime visions the power to haunt weeks or years of our daytime reality, and even deflect its course. Think of Stanislaw Lem, Philip Dick, Walter M. Miller and, at their best, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke.

Lacking such a knack, prophecy will serve in its place at a thinner though sometimes memorable level, and only if it is furious, ingenious or preferably both. Think of “Brave New World” and “1984.” (Funny would work too, I imagine, though I can’t think of an example, unless it is Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court”--the present as the science fiction of the past.)

As prophecy, Doris Lessing’s “Mara and Dann” has some interest, though no great vigor. It is almost entirely lacking in dream-knack, though, as it relates a long trek some 15,000 years in the future, when a protracted new Ice Age is beginning to retreat. The drastically transformed circumstances of this imagined future furnish most of the interest to the story of the sister and brother who make the trek. They themselves are largely contemporary and untransformed, and flat even in their bumpiest adventures.

Glaciers had long covered Europe, driving the belt of moisture and forests into what is now the Sahara desert and beyond, and establishing a dryer but viable climate in Equatorial Africa. For centuries the Mahondis, tall, slender and intelligent, had held royal sway over much of the continent.

(The old names have survived, distorted: Ifrik for Africa, Yerrup for Europe, South Imrik for South America. In cultivated circles the storytellers still recite Mam Bova, Ankrena and Mam Bedfly from the multi-millennially transmitted works of Flaubert, Tolstoy and Puccini.)

When Lessing’s novel opens, the climate is moving the other way: The desert is creeping back north, and the population has begun to migrate. The Mahondi royal dynasty is shattered by feuds: Two of its children are spirited to safety in a bleak desert village. There, in grim hardship, the two grow up, cared for by a devoted Mahondi woman who dies, leaving them 50 gold pieces. With this, the siblings begin their own trek north.

It is a hegira of hardships and dangers, intervals when the two are held captive or welcomed by societies along the way, estrangements and reconciliations between the siblings. Other migrants, starving and desperate, alternately beg and threaten. Mara and Dann brave water dragons, giant scorpions and murderous brigands. They use the crippled remnants of Western technology: airplanes without engines turned into gliders, a railroad car pushed by hand.

They are made prisoners in Chelops, a prosperous city ruled by the decadent Hadrons, where the real work and power is in the hands of an elite slave class made up of gifted Mahondis like themselves. Mara becomes the lover of one of them and is tempted to remain. The Mahondis are civilized and gentle but blind to the changes that will bring the drought north and destroy their privileged world.

Mara and Dann continue through other dangers and other havens until they reach the northwesternmost tip of Africa, still lush, green and fertile. There they find a provisional happy ending in the company of a few of the most beloved of those they have met along the way.

Despite the picaresque detail, too much of this long book is a repetitious chronicle of ordeal and ordeal survived. At times, in fact, it suggests half a dozen Oz books back-to-back. Mara is a resolute Dorothy, despite weaknesses and susceptibilities; Dann, though occasionally dangerous and mean, has a touch or two of Button-Bright.

Lessing is not at her best in science fiction. (She is the author of the six volumes of the “Canopus in Argos: Archives” series.) True, her themes can be provocative and stimulating. Here she sets out the notion that the real protagonists of the human drama are not human at all: Mara and Dann are valorous and sentient, but they are minor players. The big players are Nature’s: geography, climate and time.

This may recall Lessing’s powerful evocation in her memoirs of the 1919 flu epidemic as a phenomenon more important than World War I. It is not enough, though, to propel this protracted trek of two modestly imagined characters through the abstractions of a distant future.