The world of two moons
The world of two moons is a utopian novel by the Englishman Edmund Cooper , which was published in 1964 under the title Transit and in German in 1970 in the translation by Susi-Maria Roediger in Wilhelm-Heyne-Verlag .
action
Small brown alien hermaphrodites are scientifically a million years ahead of humans and have overcome aging, but are still irretrievably disappearing due to accidents. They want to determine their successors as rulers in the edge sector of the second linear quadrant of the Milky Way. To do this, they put two groups of four of the two races in question on each other on twenty islands of an uninhabited planet. One consists of humans, the other of very human-like inhabitants of a planet near Alpha Centauri . Small crystals are leaked to the test subjects, through which they can be remotely guided in their actions and later forget the relevant time periods. They then equip themselves with certain basic equipment and unobtrusively climb a spaceship, which they carry to the test site in the Achernar system . Four such victims are teacher Richard Avery , television actress Barbara Miles , advertising man Thomas Sutton, and secretary Mary Durward . They are first subjected to intelligence tests in mysterious metal booths and introduced to one another, while communicating with the kidnappers via telex. On the lonely island intended for them, seventy light years from Earth, they fight against wild animals and the other four puzzling to them, who are tall and daring and appear to them as a kind of golden supermen. They discover their love for one another, father children and ultimately reject the offer to be returned to earth. At Barbara's insistence, after the end of the experiment, the kidnappers reluctantly appear in makeshift visible form, in which they first shimmer for a while between the characters of the four and their four opponents from Alpha Centauri. After humans have shown themselves to be more usable psychologically than the Centaurians, no Centaurian groups remain on the experimental planet, but nine earthly groups. Their tormentors and secret observers justify their choice with the fact that during the attempt the people “[drew] strength from the community” and in the course of it possess the only necessary thing, “compassion and [the] desire for creative work”.
Role in Cooper's oeuvre
Gary K. Wolfe counts Die Welt der Zwei Moons as one of a group of Cooper's novels whose expressiveness is weakened because the author uses them as motifs from science fiction - here the clash between people and representatives of a rival culture in an extraterrestrial setting - takes up that had previously been intensively designed in the works of other creators. Cooper manages here, however, to modify such an already known object in his own way. The character of the four heroes and the growth of their mutual relationships are portrayed with empathy. The world of two moons is counted among Cooper's best novels. It is one of a series of works by the author in which the inhabitants of a crisis-ridden future world “have retained a sense of the ironies in life”.
Cooper used the name Richard Averys , the main character of the novel, as a pseudonym when he wrote the four-volume space opera series The Expendables .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Edmund Cooper : The World of Two Moons. Utopian novel. Heyne , Munich 1970, pp. 3-4
- ↑ Cooper 1970, p. 153
- ^ Cooper 1970, p. 154
- ^ Cooper 1970, p. 150
- ^ Cooper 1970, p. 154
- ↑ Cooper 1970, p. 149
- ↑ Cooper 1970, pp. 149-150
- ↑ Cooper 1970, p. 27
- ↑ Cooper 1970, p. 27
- ↑ Cooper 1970, pp. 152-153
- ^ Cooper 1970, p. 154
- ↑ Cooper 1970, pp. 154-155
- ^ Gary K. Wolfe: Cooper, Edmund . In: Jay P. Pederson (Ed.): St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers . 4th edition. St. James Press , New York et al. a. 1996, pp. 207-208
- ^ A b Hans Joachim Alpers : Reclam's Science Fiction Guide . Reclam , Stuttgart 1982, p. 106
- ↑ David Pringle : The Ultimate Science Fiction Lexicon . Battenberg , Augsburg 1997, p. 190