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Title: Eden (Helen & Kurt Wolff Book) by Stanislaw Lem, Marc E. Heine ISBN: 0-15-627806-5 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (16 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: fine alien description
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: Throw out your preconceptions about science fiction
Comment: 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
Rating: 3
Summary: Culture shock
Comment: This one is sort of a forced hybrid-- a stereotyped sci-fi space crew (mostly without names, as I recall) dealing with an alien civilization based on lies and linguistic distortions. Who says that aliens have to be immediately understandable? What would have happened if some spacefaring race were to have plopped down in the middle of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia? That's the situation our protaganists are faced with; they don't even know what the aliens are normally like, let alone what they're like under the situation in which they find them.
The story is told in a very straightforward manner, leaving the readers to draw their own moral conclusions; something that Lem does very well. Lem is also very good at drawing the details of alien worlds without telling us too much about them and destroying their mystique and fascination.
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Title: Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem ISBN: 0156306301 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1988 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem, Michael Kandel ISBN: 0810117312 Publisher: Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.37 |
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Title: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem, Christine Rose, Adele Kandel ISBN: 0156585855 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1986 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem ISBN: 0156027593 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 16 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, Joanna Kilmartin, Steve Cox ISBN: 0156027607 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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