Brothers under a strange sun
Brothers under a strange sun is a utopian novel by the American Chad Oliver , which was published in 1960 in American under the title Unearthly Neighbors by Ballantine Books and in German in 1964 in a translation by Werner Kortwich by Wilhelm Heyne Verlag .
action
In 1991 the UNO received individual film and sound recordings of a people on the ninth planet of Sirius who are at the stage of development of rock climbers and who speak a fully trained language . First contact with intelligent beings from outside the earth seems to be possible, and Mark Heidelman , the indispensable assistant to the UN Secretary-General, calls on anthropology professor Monte Stewart to assemble a team of scientists to establish peaceful relations with the people of Sirius 9 . His wife Louise , the linguist Charlie Jenike and his wife Helen , the ape and ape expert Ralph Gottschalk , the psychologist Tom Stein and his wife Janice and the archaeologist Don King travel with Stewart . Admiral Bill York and his men steer the spaceship Ghandi (called the son of Sirius by the crew ); Ace Reid acts as the pilot of a small exploration sphere, with which he often stays close to the researchers while they walk around the strange planet.
Until the arrival on Sirius 9 it is not possible to understand the language of its residents. Stewart and Jenike give the shy and silent old man Volmay a knife and food. The terrestrials sniff around in a tree where one of the natives has been buried. Her unearthly brothers, who use no weapons and almost no tools at all , seem somehow able to work towards the fact that the trees spare habitable cavities as they grow, and they use the word Walonka to refer to their planet and the whole world .
While Stewart, Jenike and Stein get into close and linguistic contact with women, children and elderly of the Merdosi in a village, drunk with joy, their fighting men with their wolf-like animal companions attack the other part of the team. Stewart's decision to consciously set up camp so that strangers can see it costs Gottschalk, Louise and Helen their lives. Stewart kills a Merdosi man with Jenike that same evening in a flurry of uncontrolled hatred.
In a desperate second attempt, the two murderers, protected by their space suits, expose themselves to further attacks by the Merdosini , the fighting and hunting animals of the Merdosi, on the old storage site . When midday torrential rain pelts down in the oppressive heaviness of the hot world, they physically attack each other. After a suicidal escape over a torrential mud stream, they settle in a cave where old Volmay pays them a peaceful visit on his own. Jenike completely loses her mind and drowns herself, but Stewart faces a purifying inspection by the Merdosi, who do this by the means that they unlike the people of the earth and their astonishing expansion of tools and machines into a decisive one Part of their everyday life: telepathy .
When a gigantic spaceship arrives four years later from Earth on Sirius 9, soldiers protect themselves in front of Bob Cotten , who has since become Stewart's successor as chief anthropologist for relations with the natives, and a commission for alien relations with representatives from the United States of America, Russia, England, China and India. While the representatives meet in an almost everyday way, Stewart is overcome by the feeling that he has finally mastered his task and can return home happy.
Role in Oliver's oeuvre
Brothers under a strange sun , together with The Monkey Station, is considered one of Oliver's two best novels. Similar to the novel Die neue Menschheit from 1985, the work is stylistically particularly close to Oliver's short stories . As is often the case with these (especially in Rite of Passage , Between the Thunder and the Sun ), the big background here is that people encounter an alien race for the first time on their own planet. Richard Bleiler is particularly well known for the way in which Oliver, in Brothers under a Stranger Sun, shows the individual minor and major difficulties and successes that arise when trying to establish contact with strangers.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bibliography: Unearthly Neighbors . Isfdb.org, accessed June 21, 2010
- ↑ Chad Oliver : Brothers Under Strange Suns. Utopian novel. German first publication. Wilhelm-Heyne-Verlag , Munich 1964, p. 4
- ↑ Oliver 1964, p. 9
- ↑ Oliver 1964, p. 83
- ↑ Oliver 1964, p. 154
- ↑ Oliver 1964, p. 156
- ^ Richard Bleiler : Chad Oliver (1928-1993) . In: Richard Bleiler (Ed.): Science Fiction Writers. Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. 2nd Edition. Charles Scribner's Sons / Macmillan Library USA / Macmillan Publishing USA 1999, pp. 575-582; Pp. 580-581