Immediately the issue of defense/weapons/violence comes up, with the Doctor cautioning his colleagues against aggression and trying to come up with an approach that wouldn’t put the humans in danger but still open communications with the aliens. In their short expeditions away from the ship, the humans come across spinning-flying silver disks (transportation devices), spider-like plants, energy fields, a broken-down bio-mechanical “factory,” burial pits that contain alien bodies with strange appendages, and small settlements filled with paired aliens.
What they find on their expeditions are disturbing mysteries that suggest that some apocalyptic event happened hundreds or thousands of years before. When the six humans crash onto the planet, their ship is badly damaged, but still repairable, and they alternate between exploring their immediate surroundings and trying to fix the ship. Indeed, each character brings their specific skills to bear on solving the multiple mysteries of Eden, a planet that seems like a cross-between a wasteland and a burial ground. Here, Lem gives his characters titles instead of names–the Captain, the Doctor, the Engineer, the Cyberneticist, the Physicist, and the Chemist–suggesting that we focus not on these people as individuals but as both representative humans and as six different but equally-valuable perspectives.
Humor gives way to profound philosophical, ethical, and cosmic issues that go to the very heart of how humans might someday make contact with an alien species and how we would even be able to interpret what we see. Reading Eden right after The Star Diaries gave me a kind of literary whiplash: while the former is an irreverent, darkly-comic joyride around the universe the latter is a grim and somewhat pessimistic story about humans crash-landing on an alien world.
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