Dynamite and Doris Lessing

Today we go on a journey. It starts in Sweden over 100 years ago; and then moves to London; and finally moves to future worlds and other planets.

But we start in Sweden. Alfred Nobel spent his life finding ways to blow things up. He was born in 1833 in Stockholm. As a young man he became very interested in nitro-glycerine, a highly explosive chemical. He saw straight away how useful nitro-glycerine could be – in mines, for example, to blast tunnels through the rock; or in civil engineering, to clear the path for new roads and railways; or in war, so that people could blow each other up more efficiently. But nitro-glycerine is very unstable. If you handle it wrongly, it will explode. Alfred Nobel spent several years looking for a way of making nitro-glycerine more stable. His experiments caused a number of serious explosions, including one in which his brother and several other people were killed. But eventually, he was successful. He called his new explosive “dynamite”, and we still use dynamite and similar explosives today.

And after that, Alfred Nobel became a very rich man, because of course there was and still is a very big market in the world for blowing things up. He was also a very cultured and well-educated man. He spoke several languages fluently and had a deep interest in literature and poetry.

Alfred Nobel died in 1896. He left a large amount of money to establish five prizes. These would be awarded every year to people who had done outstanding things in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and the promotion of peace in the world. (Later, a sixth prize was added, for economics). These prizes have been awarded every year since 1901.

Now let us jump forward 106 years. Yesterday, an 87-year old woman went out to do some shopping. She arrived back at her home in north London in a taxi. She was surprised to find a crowd of newspaper reporters and TV camera crews waiting outside her house. At first, she thought they were filming something for a soap opera. But the reporters told her that she had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The woman is Doris Lessing, who has been an important novelist for well over 50 years. She was born in Iran, where her father worked for a bank. The family later moved to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. She moved to London in 1949 and published her first novel in the same year. As a young woman she joined the Communist Party and strongly opposed white rule in southern Africa. (She was banned from entering South Africa for nearly 40 years because of her opposition to apartheid).
But her novels are not simply political novels. They are very personal; that is, they explore what people feel and experience. Sometimes you will see Doris Lessing described as a feminist; but she has always said that it is too simple to describe her in this way. Some of her later novels are science fiction – that is, they are set in imaginary worlds, distant planets, or worlds of the future. Many people do not like her science fiction novels. They say that they are unreadable. They argue that it is much more interesting to write about the real world than about imaginary worlds. But Doris Lessing’s supporters say that her science fiction novels are just a new way of writing about what people are like inside.

You may not have read any of Doris Lessing’s books, but I guess that many of my listeners have read science fiction. What do you think? Is science fiction a new way of writing about what people are like, what they feel, what they experience? Or is it what we call “escapism”, that is a way of running away from the real world to hide in worlds that we have invented?

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