Sunday, February 3, 2013

First Lines of Stainslaw Lem's "Eden"

"Because of a miscalculation, the craft dipped too low and hit the atmosphere with an earsplitting scream. Lying flat in their bunks, the men could hear the dampers being crushed."

- Stainslaw Lem, Eden.

Intriguing read so far. It's a early (1959) example of the "cold" Lem (as opposed to the satirical Lem of The Cyberiad) in that he refers to the characters by their titles - The Captain, The Engineer, The Doctor, etc. So far it feels like Solaris in that it's an attempt to describe the futile attempt by mankind to understand an alien world, but (in the first three chapters, at least) it doesn't have one-eighth of that novel's psychological depth.

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