And it's because Lem had the ability to transcend his genre and write about human interaction with an outsider's eye. It's these two chapters that make me want to read more by Lem, that make me understand why he's considered a science-fiction master. However, the last few chapters are utterly brilliant and made me change my mind from writing a review to an analysis. I spent a week wondering if I could finish the book or if I should have just turned it back in, as nothing seems to happen in 200 pages, other than problems in first contact. If I were to write a review of Eden, I would say that the book is quite dated. Playing with the escapist fantasy of traveling to a distant planet only to realize that it's a land defined by death. Leave it to Polish science-fiction author Stanislaw Lem to spin this idea on its head, with a title like Eden that promises dream fantasies but is the story of a complete and utter nightmare in the realm of communication.

The earliest of which, rockets shooting off into space, is pure escapist fantasy. Science-fiction and fantasy operate on dreams and nightmares which part is set in reality depends on the author. Over time, science-fiction has become a sign that merely hangs above a group of genres, some which are still debated: speculative fiction, paranoid fiction, cyber punk, slipstream, and usually, interspersed within the fantasy genre, as if to insinuate that both are the works of dreams. In science-fiction literature, often reality and unreality are forced together to produce a novel questioning the unknown. The other lies in our fantasies, disconnected from reality. For one part is set in stone, movable if only in the realm of theories. It seems like a paradox to force those words together by hyphen: science-fiction. At an earlier time, perhaps the term dictated certain ideas that we now identify as 'old school' science-fiction: rockets shooting off to space, alien contact that was often, especially in the 1950's, paralleled with communism scares, exploring the universe in search of unknown planets. Science-fiction is a difficult genre to map out.

Eden by Stanisław Lem