Briefing and Memoirs act, in retrospect, as forerunners for Lessing's next five novels, the series called Canopus in Argos: Archives. These works form a series rather than a sequence, because, although some characters do turn up in different books, the works do not develop sequentially as in the Children of Violence. Throughout, Lessing turns to space fiction to defamiliarize human history and certain areas of human cultures and experience. This is no departure into escapist fantasy: the novels address all of Lessing's now established concerns for social, political, and spiritual issues; for individuals either rejected or absorbed by the group; for experiment with form; and for the treachery, the slipperiness of words, particularly when they are most taken for granted. In each of the novels, Lessing shifts her focus so that the reader, as in Briefing and Memoirs, has to work for interpretations. Some equations (as, for instance, in the racial tensions between north and south on Shikasta, or the increasingly problematic relationship between the Canopean empire and the planets under its care) may appear irresistibly obvious at first, others less so. And there are echoes of the impact of The Golden Notebook: for, judging by the variety of response to the various works, what may seem obvious to one reader is far from obvious to another, while the very fact that Lessing has written space fiction has dismayed a number of critics.

In her preface to the first novel, Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta (1979), Lessing defends her choice of medium:

In Walking in the Shade she tells how she had been reading such works since the early 50s, and ‘was excited by their scope. The wideness of their horizons, the ideas, and the possibilities for social criticism’ (WS 30).