Eden

by Stanisław Lem

Book Overview

A six-man crew crash-lands on Eden, fourth planet from another sun. The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger: a desert plain exuding acrid vapors, a greenish tinge at the horizon, a gray seven-foot tree that hisses and withdraws into the ground when touched, and thickets of vegetation like hanging spiders.

In a labyrinth of plant-shaped buildings are dead ends, passage-ways, domes, vaulted ceilings, and giant statues. And everywhere...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156278065
• ISBN13: 9780156278065
• Release Date: October 1991
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

A Trojan horse sci fi horrorshow

This is not just a standard sci fi book about crash landing on a strange planet, though a ten year old can (and has) read it on that level and enjoyed it on that level. It's also not just an examination of a "truely" alien society though it works on that level as well, and it may be more comfortable for some older readers who may prefer not to look much deeper.Most of the U.S. reviewers of this book don't really get it, the only review I read here which seemed to understand the point Lem makes was the reviewer from Germany.One have to understand Lem to understand his work. Most of his books were written from behind the iron curtain. Almost everything Lem wrote (when he was still writing novels) is both political and socially relevant, usually very bitingly so. One of the things which make him an especially interesting writer is that, in addition to being a brilliant futurologist and social critic, he was forced to write with great subtelty to escape the notice of censors and poltical watchdogs. He does not beat you over the head with the message in Eden, thats for sure. You have to read between the lines a little bit.But there is a scathing social message in Eden.... think about automated manufacturing plants which mindlessly produce worthless junk to the detriment of individual beings ... think about it the next time you are walking around a mall, maybe, or passing by a landfill.The beginning of the book, with it's odd, intermittently fleshed out characterization, is really a subtle parody of US science fiction of the time, socially and poltically "colorblind" science fiction. The naive good intentions of the "central casting" Astronauts is a chilling contrast to the creepy reality of the ironically named planet....

Great and Fabulous Weaving

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.

Fun beyond Solaris

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.

Beautiful nightmare

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.

Multi-layered futurology

The reviewer who wrote that this book is about first contact is, of course, right. But this is only the surface layer of the pearl - underneath it, Lem's EDEN unveils social critique as well as technical foresight. Five astronauts meet a strange world built with social lassez-faire and anonymous dictatorship, and a technology that is far advanced in terms of chemical manipulation - what else did the ingenious author have in mind than the former Soviet Union and the Western society, both projected some 50 to 100 years into the future? This clairvoyant prophecy - at least regarding technological developments, since nanotech cries out from every scenery on the alien world - is a must for everyone interested in global changes that might happen even now since most of Lem's ideas have become real in the past decades. Strongly recommended. And this applies also to all of his other works which I'm glad to have had the opportunity to get my hands on, in the German translations.