The pioneers of Sigma Draconis

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The Pioneers of Sigma Draconis is a utopian novel by the Englishman John Brunner , which appeared in 1968 in English under the title Bedlam Planet by Ace Books and in German in 1971 in translation by Walter Brumm by Wilhelm-Heyne-Verlag .

action

After disappointments with regard to colonizability, among others at Tau Ceti, Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, space probes with settlers in the Sigma Draconis star system come across a planet that is only slightly larger than Earth . It is almost entirely covered by an ocean and the only land masses are extensive archipelagos. The planet has a moon , whose gravitational influence made plant and animal creatures jump ashore. This world is called "Asgard" by the settlers. Four of them, including Dennis Malone, travel to the planet in one of the probes that is being converted into the spaceship “Argo” and, during their stay of several months, discover that the planet is habitable for people without protective suits and breathing masks. Thereupon 180 settlers in the three larger spaceships “Pinta”, “Niña” and “Santa Maria” are flown to the planet Asgard in order to colonize it.

The Pinta, and with it important experts, devices and laboratory animals, shattered on Asgard's moon. Several corresponding weather satellites are deployed in orbits around the planet to explore climatically favorable settlement conditions. A medium-sized island is selected as a suitable site for a settlement to be built.

For a while after the settlement was established, the settlers began to experience epidemic symptoms of scurvy . Due to their associated lethargy, they reject all measures to change their situation and thus endanger their survival on the foreign planet. Only a small group, including the psychologist Parvati Chandra, the geologist Ulla Berzelius, the doctor Tai Men, the political head of the colony, Abdul Hassan, and the head of the construction projects, Dan Sakky, recognize the danger to the young colony.

The group has discovered that a bacterium from the planet breaks down the ascorbic acid of the earthly plants grown by the settlers in greenhouses in their digestive organs and makes it unusable for nutrition.

She realizes that the only way out of the dilemma is to feed on Asgardian plants, which the bacterium cannot harm.

But the settlers have now developed a kind of phobia against the life of the alien planet and are sickly clinging to the technology and habits of their home planet.

In order to force the lethargy colonists to feed on Asgard's plants and adapt to the alien world, the group destroys the greenhouses and the spaceship, thanks to which the settlers have been able to survive on Asgard so far.

As a result, the members of the group, who are spared from scurvy because they feed on native plants, are imprisoned by the community of settlers. However, the group can escape.

Meanwhile, Dennis Malone searches for diamonds by boat on the surrounding islands and eats parts of psychoactive native plants at a greater distance from the settlement. He wanders around deliriously for ten days, feeds in the wild and also overcomes scurvy. After his return, he encourages the others, who are increasingly losing their will to live due to the illness, to an improvised reconstruction. He arranges for the prisoners to be released and expelled from the village, and after a few days he discovers them on a neighboring island, where they use a narcotic that occurs there in order to move flora and fauna from the depths of the subconscious to their usability for humans explore.

Parvati Chandra convinces Malone and her other companions that during their first getting used to the local food they feverishly put the legends of their respective homeland on earth into a beacon to surrender to the essence of the new home planet, which in the visions z. T. emerge as a transformed moon. As a result, she and her friends need to kill all of the earthly inhabitants left on Asgard ; That is, to put the other members of the community into a holy madness by means of biochemical measures and thereby to assimilate so that they too can overcome death through life.

When, after five to six generations, a third manned expedition enters the Alsafi system, it is registered on earth that the people on Asgard have now spread out vigorously and over 736 islands and that some of them are the direct descendants of a small group of god-like beings consider, in which one can probably see certain members of the group around Parvati Chandra, who are still known by name. Scientists suspect that a culture here has already left behind all cultures known on earth.

Salary of the work

The novel The Pioneers by Sigma Draconis , together with Brunner's novel The Whole Man, is valued as a work that focuses entirely on the innermost questions of human individuality and traces its limits. According to John R. Pfeiffer, this opens up new horizons with regard to Brunner's ideal of humanity . The inevitable and inevitable spiritual maturation shown here goes hand in hand with the fact that the colonists on Asgard are forced to contract down to the molecular level, completely renouncing what they have been used to as a culture consider.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Brunner : The Pioneers of Sigma Draconis. Utopian novel. German first publication. Heyne , Munich 1968, p. 4
  2. ^ John R. Pfeiffer: John Brunner (1934-1995) . 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. 119-129; P. 123
  3. ↑ Pfeiffer 1999, p. 123