Read Return From The Stars (1989)

What do You think about Return From The Stars (1989)?

This books starts where most sci-fi books finish, a group of astronauts comes back to Earth after a long lasting 127 years cosmic journey. The main theme is that the astronauts are in their early 40s and the Earth they knew is no longer here. People left behind are no longer around and life has literally moved on. There are many themes here and as always with Lem's book every re-read will uncover something knew. The main theme is of belonging. Nobody waited and nobody cares. During the 127 years Earth become a place of peace and utopian community where there can be no aggression towards its cohabitants, it becomes a place of emotional emptiness, a stagnating society of dulness and tedium.This is the background where the main character Hal Bregg (what a great name!) cannot find peace.The book lacks some cohesion, it is a rather episodal in nature. Lem himself on many occasions expressed his dislike for the book calling it sentimental and one-dimensional. I guess it is up to the reader though to find out what they get out of the book they read and there is a lot here. Not as good as Lem's classics from this era but it comes close...
—Pacyfa

The middle of the last century – the time of dystopias, every thoughtful science fiction writer considered it to be his obligation to write one. Return from the Stars is a mutiny against the total conformity and insipid living in the entirely uniform society. “Beneath a dome supported by cracked, crumbling columns stood a woman, as though she had been waiting for me. I saw her face now, the flow of sparks in the diamond disks that hid her ears, the white – in the shadow, silvery – dress. This was not possible. A dream? I was still a few dozen paces from her when she began to sing. Among the unseen trees her voice was weak, childlike almost, I could not make out the words, perhaps there were no words.”Even in the kingdom of the uniformly blind there should be the one bold enough to dare…
—Vit Babenco

I agree with most of the positive comments by other reviewers here. In the hands of the right director, “Return from the Stars” would make an excellent film – more in the tradition of thoughtful, art-house sci-fi like “Gattaca” than as a blockbuster Hollywood movie (although someone like George Clooney would be ideal for the part of Hal – he should have filmed this novel instead of remaking “Solaris”). If you are keen on the Lem of “Futurological Congress” then maybe this book won’t be so much to your taste, as at least one other reviewer has found – but personally, I prefer Lem novels like “Solaris”,“His Master’s Voice” and “Fiasco” and for me, this one bears comparison with all of those books.Hal’s alienation faced with a population which has been “betrizated” (a process which removes aggressive, risk-taking tendencies) reminded me of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, but with betrization taking the place of eugenics. For a novel written in 1961, a time when space exploration still had a hold over the public imagination, it is eerily prescient – because even without betrization, we seem – like the civilisation depicted in the novel - to have largely lost interest in manned space missions. Instead we have become far more interested in networking amongst ourselves – and in that sense, we are (again, just like the world depicted in the book) a civilisation which is increasingly turned in on itself, rather than outward looking. That may sound like quite a negative characterisation, but one of the things I particularly liked about the novel was its readiness to acknowledge that things aren’t necessarily quite so black and white – that there are aspects of this future world which, although they seem alien and even somewhat repellent to us now, may well be superior to our current civilisation.For a longer review including some thoughts on how this relates to communism and whether it works well at a basic story-telling level (I think it does – it’s much more than just a novel of ideas), see:http://www.paulsamael.com/blog/holida...-
—Paul Samael