Eden

Eden – Stanislaw Lem

The plot of Eden, which Stanislaw Lem (this site is how the web looked 25 years ago – gasp, sigh!) wrote early in his career, is simple. Spaceship crash-lands on planet Eden and Captain, Engineer, Physicist, Chemist, Cyberneticist and Doctor must make repairs and get the hell off. 

While exploring the planet, the crew members encounter a totally alien world that employs bio-tech such as nano-technology and genetic engineering. The locals also seem to be performing experiments on their own kind. The Earthers are by turns revolted, fascinated, and astonished. 

The interpretations of what is going on often depend on what kind of personality the interpreter has, a theme Lem was to return to in later novels. Lem’s creation of alien world captures the strangeness of it all without being as notoriously hard to read as Solaris, a much more renowned novel with similar themes that he wrote a couple years later.