Not surprisingly, this forced the Earth crew to make a concentrated effort to retrieve the rocket, which had been slanted into the ground, set it upright and escape from the planet ruled in this manner. Their escape became more urgent as a circle of compact structures began to tighten around their haphazard landing site, erected by the Edenian robots with the intention of trapping them forever. Thus began a murderous race against time for both sides.
‘Listen,’ said the Captain. ‘This is getting us nowhere. What do we do now? Repairs? Yes, of course, but I was thinking…’
‘Of another expedition?’ said the Doctor.
The Engineer smiled ruefully. ‘I'm always game. Where? To the city?’
‘That will mean war,’ the Doctor said. ‘Because the only way you'll get there is with Defender. And with its antiproton launcher, before you know it, you won't be gathering information, you'll be blasting away.’
‘Defender’ in this case is the camouflaged name of an armoured self-propelled vehicle equipped with various guns and launchers. In this euphemistic term, one can clearly see the influence of Orwell, then still known by few in our country because his writing was banned. As there are places in the human cosmos where ‘names and relationships presented as true are in fact masks’.
The six Earthlings were amazed that no one in Eden rebelled against this state of affairs. In a word, that the community here does not show any aspirations for liberation. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of an all-powerful propaganda or ideology comes into play: ‘The monstrous mutations amongst them are called a disease, a plague. It must be that way with everything. In order to control the world, one must first name it. Without knowledge, weapons and organisation, and in isolated groups, there is little they can do’.
The case of Eden is so special that Stanisław Lem hardly ever commented on this book. Wojciech Orliński, the author of the biography Lem: Życie Nie z Tej Ziemi [Lem: A Life Not From This Earth], puts forward a hypothesis that the writer probably ‘exposed’ himself too much in this novel, weaving his memories from the Lviv ghetto into its plot. It is true that his autobiographical novel Highcastle concerns only his childhood and school years spent in this city in the interwar years.
It is known from Lem’s post-war life that he was very well-received in the USSR. When the ritual of official conventions of the representatives of literary circles was exhausted during his visits, he was usually surrounded by the most prominent Russian scientists. This kind of adoration of the Polish writer by academics stemmed not only from the appreciation of his versatile knowledge but from the simple fact that to them, forced by the party officials to make ever more intensive efforts to catch up with and surpass the West, Lem, like no one else, was able to show the deep humanistic dimension of their work.
Originally written in Polish by Janusz R. Kowalczyk. Translated into English by PG, Aug 2021. All quotes are from the translation by Marc E. Heine