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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A quiet masterpiece of speculative fiction--sadly o.o.p., February 13, 2003
This is one of those books that you read, put down, read again and then find something that is scarily predictive of not the far future, but of recent times. Very odd indeed. The plot of "Return from the Stars" is just that: space travelers from Earth return, but much time has passed. They are essentially visitors to their own future. But the Earth has taken trendy ideas such as non-violence and translated these ideas in ways no one could fathom. Man has not evolved, but society has evolved a way to tame Man; for example, when a man visits a woman, and the woman decides that no sexual intimacy should be the outcome of the encounter, she offers the man a drink of Britt. This substance, which is stocked in every young woman's refrigerator and looks like a bottle of milk, renders the man incapable of desire or acting upon that desire. How presumptive! Every man is a rapist. Yet, this book was written long before much radical feminist writing that asserted much the same idea. Women dress oddly, painting their nostrils red and wearing bells in their shoes. The tiny details point out the fact that the returnees are foreigners to what was once their home and is now in no way their future, though it is their heritage. Lem makes some interesting extrapolations. Some of them even came true in his own lifetime. This is actually one of the few Lem books that stuck with me, and it is a darn shame it is out of print. It is really a quiet masterpiece of speculative fiction.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lem himself, October 15, 2006
For all those readers who may have difficulties penetrating the complexity of Lem's book, I would like to recommend a chapter in Peter Swirski's The Art and Science of S Lem which talks about Return From the Stars in a way that made me see this story from a startlingly different perspective that bears on the most intimate aspects of today's world. By the way, the Art and Science of S Lem is an international collection of essays in which everyone is bound to find something to their liking, also it includes a previously unpublished chapter by S Lem himself!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You can't go home again - or can you?, October 25, 2006
This is a relatively contemplative work by Lem - he saved his blatant humor for other works. Instead, it's a relatively sober story about how thoroughly isolated one can be, even in the midst of a crowd.
The "one" in this case is Bregg, an astronaut returned from an interstellar misson. Perhaps he never hoped to be a hero upon return, but it never occurred to him that no one would care. In the hundred-plus years since his departure, humankind had remodeled itself into a people that could not understand why anyone would venture into space, after an era in which such trips were declared pointless expenses. The returning voyagers are welcomed by their gentle hosts, but largely ignored.
The first part of Lem's story imagines Bregg's utter disorientation in the physical world, filled with unfamiliar words, sounds, and sights; where even a wall isn't necessarily a wall. He's intelligent and adaptable, so moves on to the second level of disorientation: simply having no idea how to have a conversation when so very few concepts or values are shared. This isolation appears most clearly in his attempts at inimacy. Betrization, the process that made this world the gentle idyll that it is, makes him seem like a ravenous beast to the generation around him, an object of fear no matter what he does or says. The danger inherent in his un-betrizated state appeals to some, of course, but it's an appeal that Bregg does not want to hold. After a time, he finds a woman of this brave new world that can accept him. Then, the deepest level of his isolation surrounds him: he simplay has no place in this society. There is no need for his skills, no interest in the heroism and tragedy of his star travel, and no job that he's competent to do. One or two personal ties are simply not enough to anchor him in this alien place.
The very end has a different tone, one that I'll let you discover for yourself - I'll just say that I found it worth the wait. The trip there passes through Lem's evocative writing, including a poetic moment describing the peace and permanence to be found in studying mathematics: "New roads arise, but the old ones lead on. They do not become overgrown." There's also an oddly prescient desciption of Emil Mitke, "... a crippled genius who did with the theory of relativity what Einstein had done with Newton." Back when this book was written, there was no way to forsee Stephen Hawking, today's asymmetric icon of scientific brilliance.
This might not be the best intro for someone new to Lem. I'd recommend his lighter writing to start with. Still, it's a good one.
//wiredweird
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