Customer Reviews

Eden

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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

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.

Almost all of Lem's science fiction centers around one or two variations of one theme. The theme is "What is intelligence?" and the two variations are "What would robotic life be like?" and "What would a truly alien intelligence be like?" "Eden" is in the second group. A party of explorers arrives on an alien world and wanders around trying to make sense of it. The subtext of "Eden" is that it could really be a description of Earth as viewed through completely fresh eyes. In a typical scene the explorers wander into a valley of flowers. When approached the blooms suddenly take flight. Lem leaves it to the reader to realize a visitor to Earth might make the same mistake about butterflys. Like many of Lem's works the book is really a work of philosophy and somewhat abstract: the explorers do not even have names, just job descriptions. By the standards of any other science fiction author this book deserves 5 stars, I only give it 4 because I prefer "Solaris" and "Fiasco" with which "Eden" should be grouped (along with the more difficult "His Master's Voice") as books about contact (Sagan's "Contact" is clearly based on "His Master's Voice").

This is only the second Stan Lem book I've read (Solaris being the first), and here, once again, Lem captures the utter strangeness of an alien world and its utterly strange inhabitants. As others have mentioned, Lem chooses to identify the crew members by profession rather than by name, with one exception. I'm not sure of his reason for this, but my guess is that he was trying to show the tendency of humans to comparmentalize, and, subsequently, to show how this could present a barrier to understanding alien beings. Here, Lem presents a well-thought-out alien atmosphere, with "doublers" living in a society that we can barely imagine. The most interesting parts of the story were the various planetary explorations performed by the men, both on foot and by ground vehicle. It is rare, at least in my experience, to encounter an author who can describe such strange places in such fine and honest detail. I also enjoyed Lem's take on the human contamination of such worlds. Recommended for those who enjoy exploratory, adventure-type science fiction with a philosophical twist.

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....

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.

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.

If you love stories where strange new worlds and new civilizations are explored, you'll love Eden! This planet is home to 6 astronauts who crash land in the opening pages of the book. Named only for their professions except for the engineer named Henry. Explorations start from a boring desert plane (where their ship has landed) to four separate expeditions. First a northward expedition discovers a strange factory of utmost complexity creating sophisticated items that are recycled , eastward gives them a first contact with an inhabitant in a very strange transport, South and west just give more and more mysteries. The theme here is how difficult it is to understand a totally alien society. They find that they have plenty of theories to explain the strange sites and occurences but are just unsure of the truth. Part of the problem they decide is that they base their explanations on what they know from earth and earth society. They concede that explanations based on from earth experiences should be disregarded. Well, have no fear as explanations do come at the end of the book, unlike Lem's other planetary exploration of "Solaris".

If you love stories where strange new worlds and new civilizations are explored, you'll love Eden! This planet is home to 6 astronauts who crash land in the opening pages of the book. Named only for their professions except for the engineer named Henry. Explorations start from a boring desert plane (where their ship has landed) to four separate expeditions. First a nothward expedition discovers a strange factory of utmost complexity creating sophisticated items that are recycled , eastward gives them a first contact with an inhabitant in a very strange transport, South and west just give more and more mysteries. The theme here is how difficult it is to understand a totally alien society. They find that they have plenty of theories to explain the strange sites and occurences but are just unsure of the truth. Part of the problem they decide is that they base their explanations on what they know from earth and earth society. They concede that explanations that cannot be derived from earth experiences should be consiedered. Well, have no fear as explanations do come at the end of the book, unlike Lem's other planetary exploration of "Solaris".