The sons of space
Die Söhne des Alls is a utopian novel by the Englishman Edmund Cooper , published in 1960 in English under the title Seed of Light by Ballantine Books and in German in 1965 in translation by Wulf Bergner by Wilhelm Heyne Verlag .
action
In a nuclear war, the decisive urban centers of the world have been wiped out or condemned to a slow death, the US lunar station destroyed and Russia reverted to communism after a liberal turnaround. Michael Spenser and the other professionals involved see the five billion underground cubic meters of Base One in the Australian desert as a refuge with dormitories, workshops, offices, laboratories and "surface control devices" that are intended for them in the event of another nuclear war may not seem the only one of its kind. The English Prime Minister Sir Charles Craig , under the influence of his scientific advisor Lord Drayton, was the first to successfully push ahead with the launch of an artificial satellite after the backlash of the war, and calls on television to call for the satellite to control an international satellite Subordinate to this body in order to secure peace with its help. Under the American President Hudson and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Boris Marienkow , further satellites are rapidly approaching their completion. Professor Dennis Bollinden , the creator of the satellite and father of Spenser's great love Mary Bollinden , arrives with his Austrian colleague Dr. Otto Rehn to the conviction that the race, like last time, must lead to a devastating world war again this time. In fact, the earth is now permanently contaminated by a world war after Bollinden threatened from the satellite to destroy the English test site Rocket City and the corresponding facilities of the Russians and the Americans, whereupon the strategically different thinking Rehn shot him and the The satellite eventually ceased to exist in a detonating American atomic bomb.
In a few cities, protected by plastic domes, anarchy and violent subversion unfold, while the instinct for the preservation of the race leads people to build spaceships and send selected people out into space with them. The city of Europe III appoints the astrophysicist and sociologist Newton , the chemist and geologist Lavoisier , the surgeon, general practitioner and psychiatrist Jung , the biologist Rilke and the electrical engineer Socrates and their partners, the biologist and ecologist Roma , the hydroponist and pedagogue Troy , the anthropologist and historian Vienna , the librarian and photographer Alexandria, and the nutritionist Athene , who are all between twenty-three and thirty-one years old.
When panic announces itself in the city and a storm breaks out on the spaceship, the Solarian takes off through the dome earlier than planned, so that Europa III has to perish physically and socially even faster. The crew practiced voluntary or involuntary euthanasia on themselves and their children . The interpersonal relationships on board are becoming more and more important to them. Socrates murders Rilke, who has fallen in love with Athene, disguises the journeyman's death as an accident and is hypnotized and purified by him in an unrealistic scene when he tries to get Jung aside. Survivors of different sexes discover their love for one another. Death occurs (with Socrates and others also as suicide) when one has exhausted one's powers psychologically, namely when one realizes after nineteen and a half years of flight that Alpha Centauri does not have a planetary system, and in later similar disappointing moments.
In the third generation of astronauts, Odessa , Granada and Kepler turn out to be natural telepaths , which others will follow later. The three cannot hide anything from each other and enter into a ménage à trois, which is primarily based on the spirit. From the precognitive memory of the new expedition leader Faraday, Kepler deduces in advance a shadowy danger that lurks in the planets orbiting Sirius and that ultimately actually calls for the death of seven members of the second generation. Kepler internalizes that he does not foresee the predestined , but only the possible , but, like Odessa and Granada, dies in what he calls multiple catheterization , which lets him see the psyche of a newborn girl and her daughter, who is only living in the future, among other things. how the people of the Solarian trudge through the 60,000-year-old ruins of two cities that were destroyed in a nuclear war in the now uninhabitable twilight zone of a planet that is bound around Prokyon . During almost a thousand years, forty generations and thirty changes of the Solarian from star to star, a vast heaven of myths grew out of the memory of earlier generations; the film documented earth becomes an object of an almost religious character.
After the 25th generation has stoically devoted itself completely to inner contemplation for several decades , one then increases life expectancy by an albeit sterile series of entire centuries in an awakening directed towards this world through diet and concentration , whereby the now available so-called immortals and especially the Immortal Thales manage to equip the Solarian with a so-called selective cosmometer for immersion in space according to the general kinetics of the 27th generation Copernicus . This device transplanted - as it was programmed - the Solarian in the temporal and spatial proximity of the world determined by it with the best starting position for the maturation of human beings, in which Thales quickly recognizes the earth of the middle Würm Ice Age . Those arriving from space and time decide not to take another leap through space and time, but to support the prehistoric inhabitants of the earth in the name of their own ancestors of Europe III on the way to a peaceful future without rushing to do so to intervene in the action with modern technology, and in Eurasia met those walking through the forests and throwing spears at them in an indulgent spirit and armed only with bows and arrows, while members of another, chinless race initially went through alone for a long time The sight of the slender spaceship protruding over the treetops was so frightened that they immediately took flight.
Role within Cooper's oeuvre
Gary K. Wolfe sees The Sons of Space fading because it has an object with the motif of the generation-long flight of stars that has already been intensively designed by other authors. But the novel is considered Cooper's best work.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bibliography: Seed of Light . Isfdb.org, accessed June 24, 2010
- ↑ Edmund Cooper : The Sons of Space. Utopian novel. German first publication. Heyne , Munich 1965, p. 4
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 5-6
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 41
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 18
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 39
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 6-7, 47
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 38
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 30-32
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 56, 73
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 47
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 45, 56
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 73, 75, 76
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 62
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 71
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 72, 73
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 74
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 85
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 74
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 146
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 74, 78
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 79-80
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 80
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 83-84
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 81, 85
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 88, 98-99
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 103
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 104
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 94-96, 103
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 99
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 105-108
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 99-102
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 109, 121
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 109
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 109
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 110, 111-112
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 121-122
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 112-114
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 127
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 128
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 114
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 127
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 116
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 116-120
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 129
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 128
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 127-138
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 122
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 122-127
- ↑ Cooper 1965, p. 122
- ^ Cooper 1965, pp. 123, 139
- ^ Cooper 1965, p. 139
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 139-142
- ^ Cooper 1965, pp. 142-147
- ↑ Cooper 1965, pp. 147-157
- ^ Gary K. Wolfe: Cooper, Edmund. In: Jay P. Pederson : St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers. 4th edition. St. James Press , New York et al. a. 1996, pp. 206-208; P. 207
- ↑ Hans Joachim Alpers u. a .: Reclam's Science Fiction Guide . Reclam-Verlag , Stuttgart 1982, p. 106