From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a distinctive science fiction short story.

Unknown observers send reports on a city that is threatened with destruction. They gather information on the inhabitants and their behaviour. It soon becomes clear that this is far from an alien planet.

As in many of her acclaimed science fiction novels, in ‘Report on the Threatened City’, Doris Lessing uses the traditions of this genre to examine the world we know and human nature itself, from a completely new and often unforgiving perspective.

This story also appears in the collection The Temptation of Jack Orkney.