Björn recenserade Aniara av Harry Martinson (Delfinserien ; D79)
None
5 stjärnor
A spaceship hurtles towards a distant constellation, going faster than anything in human history but essentially standing still from a relative point of view.
That wasn't the point, of course. They were just supposed to be temporarily evacuated to Mars and Venus while Earth "recovers". All of humanity being shipped out on spaceships - each one just making a routine trip, just on a much grander scale. Except for the Aniara which gets hit by a meteor shower. Her steering gets knocked out, her SOSs go unanswered, her AI kills itself after it sees Earth be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, and the Aniara and her thousands of passengers are sent hurling on a 15,000 year journey towards Vega, with only their memories for company.
It's staring. It's staring cold outside.
It sounds like a potentially cheap sci-fi movie, it is actually a pretty fucking great sci-fi story except told …
A spaceship hurtles towards a distant constellation, going faster than anything in human history but essentially standing still from a relative point of view.
That wasn't the point, of course. They were just supposed to be temporarily evacuated to Mars and Venus while Earth "recovers". All of humanity being shipped out on spaceships - each one just making a routine trip, just on a much grander scale. Except for the Aniara which gets hit by a meteor shower. Her steering gets knocked out, her SOSs go unanswered, her AI kills itself after it sees Earth be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, and the Aniara and her thousands of passengers are sent hurling on a 15,000 year journey towards Vega, with only their memories for company.
It's staring. It's staring cold outside.
It sounds like a potentially cheap sci-fi movie, it is actually a pretty fucking great sci-fi story except told in verse. Martinson tells it through the eyes of the AI operator whose job it is to keep the systems running as the years pass, the systems fail, and all the distractions - virtual reality and social media (yes, in 1957), religion, sex, music, science, even suicide - lose their allure and only the impossible vastness of space remains. He switches style from canto to canto, examining different characters, different aspects, different ways of trying to cope with the uncopeable.
Myself I questioned, but gave no reply.
I dreamt myself a life, then lived a lie.
I ranged the universe but passed it by -
For captive on Aniara here was I.
This book is 50 years old this year. It's lost absolutely none of its power.
