BookRank

Reading order

Canopus in Argos reading order

Doris Lessing

  1. Shikasta1979
  2. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five1980
  3. The Sirian Experiments1980
  4. The Making of the Representative for Planet 81981
  5. The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire1983
5 volumes
Volumes
1979–1983
Published
about 25 h
Reading time
Completed
Status

Quick answer

Shikasta
Start withShikasta1979 · Volume 1 of 5
Open the volume →Buy the first volumeListen to the audiobook

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Publication order

5 volumes1979–1983Completed

  • Doris Lessing’s five “space fiction” novels, written between her realist books and long before her Nobel Prize, about galactic empires, chiefly the benevolent Canopus, the rival Sirius and the parasitic Shammat, and the planets they shape.
  • Shikasta retells Earth’s history as the colonial reports of Canopean agents watching a world decline; The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is a fable about a queen forced to marry a warrior king, often the best loved.
  • Philosophical, unconventional and uneven.
  • No book has enough ratings yet.
  • Any order works.

A plan for the whole series

5 volumes, 1,369 pages, about 25 hours. At 45 min a day that is about 5 weeks.

Stages

2 stages, with 1 short book from outside the series between them. You finish around December 11, 2026, 9 days later than in one go.

  1. Stage 120 habout 4 weeksby November 25, 2026
  2. BreakMaus · Art Spiegelman · 295 pp. · score 9.05 h, by December 4, 2026. A short book from another shelf, so you come back to the series hungry.
  3. Stage 25 h7 daysby December 11, 2026
  4. The end of the series
    December 11, 2026
In one goDecember 1, 2026about 5 weeks
In stages, with breaksDecember 11, 2026about 6 weeks · +5 h of other books

We count 1.1 min per page, the pace of an average novel reader. Faster? Move the slider.

≈ next to a page count: a volume with no page count in our data is counted at this series’s average.

How this plan is calculated

The plan comes from the pages and ratings of each volume: we split the series into stages of about three weeks’ reading, size each break to the stage before it, and read the chance of finishing from how many readers rate the last volume compared with the first. How we work out the plan →

Every volume in order

Read: 0 of 5

No volume in this series has enough ratings to enter a ranking yet, so the list carries no scores — the order and the volumes are still complete.

  1. Shikasta
    Shikasta1979 · 6 ratingsStart here
    –Not ranked yet
  2. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
    The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five1980 · 7 ratings
    –Not ranked yet
  3. The Sirian Experiments
    The Sirian Experiments1980 · 4 ratings
    –Not ranked yet
  4. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
    The Making of the Representative for Planet 81981 · 5 ratings
    –Not ranked yet
  5. The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
    The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire1983 · 3 ratings
    –Not ranked yet

Order checked by hand · Order and years: Wikidata (CC0). Spotted an error? Tell us. · Data updated October 28, 2026

Frequently asked questions

Which Canopus in Argos book is the longest?

“Shikasta” is the longest at 418 pages; the shortest is “The Making of the Representative for Planet 8” with 144 pages.