Eden (Helen & Kurt Wolff Book) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Because of a miscalculation, the craft dipped too low and hit the atmosphere with an earsplitting scream..." (more)
Key Phrases: navigation room, small torso, planetary revolutions

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After crash-landing on an alien planet known as Eden, the crew of a spaceship begins to explore--and hopelessly misinterpret--the strange surroundings. In this ``stylistic departure from his usual satirical, antic approach. . . . Lem creates an intricately detailed exotic environment in a thoughtful, often exciting story,'' said PW.

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

When their space ship crash lands on the planet Eden, six men confront their disturbing new environment and its unfathomable life forms. The author of One Hu man Minute (LJ 2/15/86) skillfully portrays an all-too-real encounter with a truly alien intelligence. This stark space parable by Poland's leading sf writer belongs in comprehensive sf collections.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 276 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 31, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156278065
• ISBN-13: 978-0156278065
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #628,725 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An unkept promise., July 2, 2001

By	Shadowfire (College Park, MD) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun beyond Solaris, December 21, 2001

By	Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Could we understand the truly alien if we saw it?, January 14, 2006

By	John Gossman (Seattle, wa USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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").