Eden by Stanisław Lem
Eden is an unexplored Earth-like planet where a spaceship crew of six, identified only by their professions—Captain, Doctor, Chemist, Engineer, Physicist, and Cyberneticist—crash-lands due to a navigational error. The crew faces the dual challenge of repairing their spaceship and exploring the planet, which is teeming with peculiar and often unsettling life forms. Among their discoveries are bizarre spiderlike plants that bleed a thick, yellow sap, and gray trees that retract when touched. They also encounter enigmatic creatures known as "doublers," which exhibit signs of intelligence but cannot be communicated with effectively. As they delve deeper, the crew uncovers signs of a dark side to Eden, including evidence of mass executions or hunts involving the doublers. Strange machinery and cities reveal a society marked by chaos and fear, with hints of a failed genetic experiment that has led to the creation of these mutants. Despite their growing concerns about the planet's inhabitants and the unsettling environment, the crew decides to leave Eden after completing repairs to their ship, uncertain of the true nature of the planet's turmoil. This narrative raises questions about autonomy, ethics, and the responsibilities of explorers in unknown territories.
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Subject Terms
Eden
First published: 1959 (English translation, 1989)
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Science fiction—alien civilization
Time of work: An indeterminate time in the future
Locale: The planet Eden
The Plot
As a result of a navigational error, a spaceship crew of six crashes on an unexplored Earth-like planet that they have called Eden, in recognition of the beautiful view that it offers from space. The members of the crew have no names; they are denoted by their professions: the Captain, the Doctor, the Chemist, the Engineer, the Physicist, and the Cyberneticist.
The crew members are faced with a double task. They must try, with the help of their robots, to repair their spaceship, which is partly buried in the ground; and they are eager to explore the planet, which is populated by strange beings that exhibit social phenomena that puzzle the earthlings.
The crew encounters a bizarre, spiderlike form of vegetation with bulbous growths that resemble abdomens. When nicked, the bulbs bleed a bright yellow sap that immediately coagulates in a thick resin, which gives off an intense odor that the humans find sickening. The crew members also discover gray trees that hiss and withdraw into the ground when touched. They encounter an abandoned factory that automatically produces objects of various forms and sizes, which are then melted down and brought back into the production process in an endless loop that produces nothing and serves no recognizable purpose. Elsewhere they find deserts, cities, and giant statues. They also find creatures they call “doublers,” small beings with no face, often without eyes or ears, that sit in the kangaroo-like pouches of a half-ton gray mass. The doublers apparently are intelligent, but attempts at communication prove fruitless. When the humans dissect a doubler that has found its way into the spaceship, they find a needle in its liver; others have small tubes inserted in them, for purposes the crew cannot determine.
The landscape of Eden that the humans explore becomes more nightmarish. The crew discovers ditches and wells containing dead doublers. These show a number of variations: Some have one eye or more, mouths, or ears, and others do not. Crew members wonder if they have found evidence of mass executions or hunts.
During a nightly foray, the humans enter a city in which all lights go out on their arrival, concentrically from a center. They are surrounded by a throng of frightened doublers that seem to be unaware of them. The landscape is crisscrossed by thin, narrow lines. These are grooves in which disks resembling semitransparent wheels with spokes travel at high speed. The crew also observes a much larger type of vehicle. The humans themselves travel in one of the disks. From afar, they observe life in a busy city.
For the most part, the earthlings are ignored by the citys inhabitants, and there is no attempt at communication, but sometimes the spaceship is surrounded by rotating wheels that seem to observe. The ship is attacked by artillery shooting a kind of mechanical spore with cogs and wheels, from which grows a high mineral palisade. The humans are uncertain whether these attacks are meant to keep them inside the ship or to keep the population from contacting them. The humans get the impression that terrible things are happening on Eden, but they do not know for certain.
Finally, they are approached by a doubler scientist. Communication is vague, but it appears that on Eden, an experiment in autoevolution—an attempt to genetically re-create the population—went wrong. Many failures are judged to be unfit to live and are killed. The unknown rulers of the planet maintain the fiction that there were no experiments, that the mutants are the result of a sickness, and that nobody is responsible—in fact, that there is no government at all. The humans resist the urge to intervene because they do not understand what is going on. They take off into space as soon as they have repaired their ship.