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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful nightmare,
This review is from: Eden (Helen & Kurt Wolff Book) (Paperback)
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.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Throw out your preconceptions about science fiction,
By A Customer
This review is from: Eden (Helen & Kurt Wolff Book) (Paperback)
The first thing I read by Lem was _Solaris_, which is a unique book in his canon. It's a very serious, psychological novel in many respects. _Eden_, the second book I read by him, shares the sense of total alienness that seems to be one of Lem's main themes. The ship-wrecked space traveling scientists who function as the protagonists, basically try to figure out the world on to which they've crash landed. The exploration leads to all sorts of bizarre landscapes and situations that seem to have no logic. And, again, that's the author's point. This alien landscape is ALIEN. Saying more about the book's contents would be a cheat to the reader, and my slim description of the novel's main ideas certainly doesn't do _Eden_ justice. I wouldn't recommend this as a first book for someone who has never read Lem, but his writing is well worth sampling since he has used a number of different approaches (humorous, satirical, philisophical) and can't be appreciated from the reading of just one or two novels
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fun beyond Solaris,
This review is from: Eden (Helen & Kurt Wolff Book) (Paperback)
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.
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