Thoughts On The Astronauts A Book Review

After my last book review, I decided to do another one. This is about The Astronauts by Stanislaw Lem. Again, this is not a summary, but my personal opinion. Nevertheless, it may contain spoilers, so go read the book.

The book was written in 1951 and the main part of the book is set in 2000. It carries that typical Soviet optimism for the future. For me this is always associated with a nostalgia for a future that was never meant to be, even though that is probably unintended by Lem. You can encounter this in old Soviet propaganda, e.g., that even a son of a carpenter and a dairy farmer such as Yuri Gagarin can become the first person to journey into outer space.

There is a journey to Venus in order to analyze an incident that has happened in 1908 – the Tunguska event. I quite liked the description of the various expeditions that are performed: the white sphere, the Kangchenjunga expedition, the dead forest, and of course the proto plasma. No living Venusians are found, but the dead remnants of their civilization are encountered. The behaviour of the actors is very rational, in contrast to modern movies, where the actors put themselves in danger unnecessarily.

Nevertheless, the various expeditions and the encountered anomalies stayed singular and were not really linked, up to the last pages. On the last pages, there is the resolution. The Venusians wanted to conquer the earth. They armed themselves and built a massive armoury. But due to capitalism and them not being able to wield this responsibility, they destroyed themselves.

To me, this end was very underwhelming. It reminded me of The War of the Worlds, where we had these giant aliens that invade the earth and use humans as fertilizers by spraying their blood on the fields. And then they die because of our human bacteria and illnesses. This may have been an interesting thought back then in 1898, when The War of the Worlds was written, but now it is … well … underwhelming.