Eden

Rating:
Summary: An unkept promise.
Review: A crew of six survives a crash landing on Eden, a beautiful opalescent world. After alotting time for repair, they set off exploring the alien planet. Soon they discover artifacts left by an unfathomable civilization - an absurd factory where bizarre objects are produced only to be molten down again; giant translucent disks spinning on mirrored tracks; metal wreckage and stone cities - all weathered, abandoned. Soon they find the inhabitants of this strange realm - "doublers." Piles of them - all dead - in ditches, in graves, in wells. The explorers find a tower filled with glass eggs - a skeleton in each. Who built all this? Who is killing the doublers off? What happened - or is happening here?

What if Lovecraft wrote "Solaris"? "Eden" might have been the result. Tortuously, elaborately written - it seems twice the length it really is - "Eden" is a novel of man's total inability to understand what's alien and different. Lem sets out to awe and dwarf us, which he acomplishes easily enough, but then he goes on and does it again - and again, and again, and again, and again - in the course of one, then two hundred pages, then two and half, all without offering the briefest glimmer of logic or revelation. Really, the reader can instead glean all of Eden's illogical, mystifying wonders from the endpapers and not have to deal with the book's confusing descriptions, which are written (or translated) loosely enough to diminish the impact. Things run in parallel and perpendicular to each other, they double and intertwine, weave and vibrate, but there is little sense of place, of wholeness, of direction, of time. In the very first scene, I had trouble deciding which way the ship landed: on the side or upside down? In which direction are the spacemen climbing? Where is the door?

When the revelation finally does come - of Eden's nature and sociology - it is stated incredibly vaguely and can be barely understood, and what CAN be understood seems rather predictable and pedestrian - one of the characters keeps cautioning others from forming human preconceptions about Eden - but in the end those preconceptions turn out to be true. There is a mild sense of awe and that's about it.

Lem's unique style shows through on occasion - in the "standard-issue" characters, in his way with description, in the massive amounts of unobtrusive technobabble - but it is hardly one of his best works - that award goes for "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub", "Star Diaries", "Futurological Congress", "Solaris", and so on. Read "Eden" if you want a taste of Lem - it's modestly entertaining - but don't expect to be blown away.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful nightmare
Review: A spaceship with a six-man crew crash-lands on Eden, an unsurveyed planet. The first part of the book details the men's efforts to dig out and repair their ship, working at first with nothing more than their ingenuity and bare hands. Eventually, the crew begin to explore, and wander through a gorgeously evoked, haunting landscape - the first of many brilliantly conceived alien worlds from Lem's mature imagination. Amusingly, the three scientists on board - the Physicist, the Chemist and the Cyberneticist - are the minor characters, good mainly for emotional outbursts and comic relief, while the other three characters - the Captain, the Engineer and the Doctor - are the fleshed-out human beings who do most of the acting, thinking and arguing. The explorers come across an insane "factory" in which apparently useless products are manufactured and then destroyed; they witness what appears to be a horrific massacre; they film, from a distance, the activity in one of the aliens' cities; and they cause, quite inadvertently and with no intentions but the best, a fairly substantial amount of death, destruction and general harm. Finally, they are able to communicate with one of the aliens, who gives them some idea of the planet's social system and history. As you would expect in a Lem story, what's learned is far from certain and of dubious usefulness. Eden is a wholly original, beautifully written horror story that deserves to be far better known. The last line is one of the most moving, disturbing and subtly horrific I've seen, bearing out the grim irony of the novel's title and the planet's name. Written in 1959, two years before Lem's more famous book, Eden deserves to rank with Solaris as one of his greatest works.

Rating:
Summary: Great and Fabulous Weaving
Review: I read this book after I had read "Solaris" and found it truly extraordinary and so far from the science fiction which was being written by Americans at the time. It concerns the relationship between man and a planet which can not be comprehended. The writing is amazing and the descriptions of the bizzare world are really fascinating and unlike anything which has ever been described.

Rating:
Summary: Great and Fabulous Weaving
Review: I read this book after I had read "Solaris" and found it truly extraordinary and so far from the science fiction which was being written by Americans at the time. It concerns the relationship between man and a planet which can not be comprehended. The writing is amazing and the descriptions of the bizzare world are really fascinating and unlike anything which has ever been described.

Rating:
Summary: Fun beyond Solaris
Review: I've only read three books by Lem counting this one and while nothing so far has bypassed Solaris as his absolute masterpiece, for me it's a step up from the strangely dense Fiasco. As in those two books the theme here is the one that Lem seems to count as his favorite, that we should not assume that because we are smart and can get into space and across stars, that we can automatically "understand" any alien life that we come across, or even start to fit what we see into established human preconceptions. Fortunately this is an excellent theme to explore and one rarely dealt with in SF, so Lem easily finds new wrinkles to explore every time he writes about it, even if the conclusions wind up being nearly the same every time. In this novel, six explorers crashland on the planet Eden and while trying to fix their spaceship and get off they find that the planet is home to a civilization that seems to make absolutely no sense. They keep coming across odd artifacts, a strange factory, a graveyard, weird villages, all of which they try to quantify through human theories that they wind up discarding anyway because they can't hope to explain what they're seeing. Most of the book is just strange, unexplainable event piled on strange unexplainable event . . . perhaps because I read it in spurts this approach never becomes wearying, or maybe it's the constant combinations of interactions between the six characters, three of which comes across as fully rounded human beings (The Captain, the Doctor and the Engineer, the only one who seems to have a proper name, oddly enough) while the Chemist, the Physicist and the Cyberneticist mostly just take up space and are there for the main three to argue with, that keeps the plot moving along and engaging. In the end there are explanations of a sort, but they seem anticlimatic and feel a bit like a cop out, a concession to readers not really prepared for the honest answer that maybe there really is no way to understand something utterly alien. All told, Lem's imagination and presentation of his argument is impressive and mostly entertaining, even if you have to read Solaris to get a better idea of what he's trying to say.

Rating:
Summary: Strange, but well written.
Review: In this novel of Lem his carachters are very realistic and have their own feelings. I think that the robots are pretty cool. I think that Lem did a good job making the aliens not have lazer guns saying "take me to your leader". Some people think that I'm too young to read it but I think 10 year old kids can read this stuff. You have to take it a little at a time. I have also read Solaris and part of the Cyberiad. Eden was the best so far. I didn't like Solaris as much because all they did was stay in the station. I think Lem did a good job with this book and you should read it!!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER....UH, PLEASE?
Review: Instead of just making a fly-by of an unexplored earth atmosphere planet named Eden, a six-man crew spaceship crashlands with no hope of rescue. Lem doesn't even deign to give the characters proper names. Instead, in a Kafkaesque manner, they are simply called The Captain, The Chemist, The Engineer, The Physicist, the Cyberneticist, and The Doctor. It's not really clear to me why he chose this method, unless he wanted the universal everyman or stereotype of each profession. Who knows? The first problem the crew has to face is just getting out of the ship since the main hatch is resting underground and the only other exit has been flooded with radioactive water. It doesn't seem like they can contact anyone off planet either, and it will be impossible to move the ship without powering up robots. But one of the crew does seem to remember seeing a city before they crashed, and so the crew sets out on foot. They do find alien lifeforms and structures, but what results is the usual violence that humans seem to display when enveloped in fear and the unknown. The crew expects to be attacked or to be greeted by the inhabitants, but what happens when the natives act as if they're not even there?

Lem does a good job of portraying the aliens in his fiction as aliens. In works by other sci-fi writers, extraterrestrials seem to be humans in green skins, or animals with longer teeth. As he did in Solaris, the author hits the theme that like mortals comprehending God, humans would have an impossible time figuring out the behavior and mentality of a truly alien species. Yes, vastly different civilizations have collided through time on Earth, but what would happen if we truly faced and ALIEN consciousness? The crew in this book make the same mistakes we would make. Namely, comparing and contrasting alien behavior and buildings to human models. Of course, this leads to many wrong conclusions in Eden, even leading to death for some.

I think in the end Lem lets me down simply because there are some explanations of the Edenites behavior, and these explanations are ideas that humans could have. I guess no human can truly write a realistic encounter with an alien race simply because a human mind cannot think like a non-human mind. Well, maybe a flying saucer will land in my backyard tomorrow and I'll write a book about it.

If you liked this book I would highly recommend Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke.

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Experiment
Review: Lem creates a world so impossibly alien that the reader, while discovering so many new and wonderous things, cannot form a personal attachment to any of it. The novel is brilliant as an examination of a true 'alien' experience, but doesn't necessarily satisfy on either a strictly entertainment or academic level. An interesting experiment in sci-fi literature for those who are looking for something beyond the norm.

Rating:
Summary: Strange Worlds
Review: Much of Stanislaw Lem's writings are hampered by a wide number of translations of varying quality. The inherent problem with the translation of Eden takes place in the first half of the novel where there is a stiffness to the wording used. In the beginning of Eden the translator seems to have chosen the most obscure word or phrase possible to substitute for original Polish. Thankfully as the novel progresses so does its readability as the translator hits his stride about 1/3 of the way through.

Using the theme of alien contact, Lem's Eden is superficially similar to his classic Solaris. Scientists and crew from a ship crash land and are stranded. They survive in the midst of a strange world upon which is an even stranger civilization. The crew sets out to explore and decipher the culture of the planet and like Solaris it's not a question of misunderstanding but a more basic question of determining what it is they are observing.

Eden doesn't reach the heights of personal philosophical musings that Solaris does. And while the characters are one-dimensional they work well within the framework of a story whose central theme is less what makes us human than how that humanity shapes our perceptions. If you like Stanilslaw Lem or a fan of SF you'll find Eden a rewarding novel and worth your time.

Rating:
Summary: as always - not a good translation
Review: The eng. translation takes most of the mystery out of the book.