As Timothy Clark recently noted, ‘the intellectual challenges of the Anthropocene and its unreadability’ raise ‘the inevitable question of scale’: it ‘enacts the demand to think of human life at much broader scales of space and time’ (2015a: 13). Lessing's writing was essentially concerned with questions of scale from the very beginning, as Adam Guy's chapter earlier in this volume has shown: tracing how Lessing's attempts to use number to render the scale of political commitment in the 1950s were ultimately doomed. This chapter will follow Lessing's concern with scale through a later period, starting with The Four-Gated City (1969), the novel which marked both her turn to a science-fiction inflected non-realism, and the first full impact of the Sufism related by Idries Shah. A split response to the problem of scale determines how Lessing's fiction develops from this point, in novels such as Shikasta(1979) and Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999).It also makes her work an unusually eloquent intervention in debates about the relationship between criticism, literature and environmental crisis, as it encapsulates two divergent paths which emerge from this meeting.

Despite the breadths of time and space that this topic immediately invites, we start with the start of The Four-Gated City, and a teacup:

The passage anticipates environmentally engaged theorising by Donna Haraway and others in which categories such as natural and cultural, human and non-human are blurred.