[In the following review, Clute offers a positive assessment of Eden, but notes that archaic qualities in the novel may be attributed to its original 1959 publication date.]

Of all the writers of science fiction who work in languages other than English, only Jules Verne has been more translated than Stanislaw Lem. This may seem remarkable. Verne fabricated his planetary prospectus for an audience as universal as he could conceive, while Lem seemingly directs his barbed deconstructions of the world to an audience of daunting peers. An Eden built by Verne would be a safe haven for the many; Lem's Eden (as now translated by Marc E. Heine) is a planet of snares for the unwary human mind, a maze of disinformation, a hell.

It is a book whose deep premises contradict (as so often in Lem) an innocently clear-cut surface tale. Six human space explorers have crash-landed on an unexplored planet, called Eden on their charts. In this strange environment, certain demands—of a sort familiar to any reader of science fiction—are made of them. They must stay alive, they must explore the planet, they must repair their ship. But the six explorers are an untoward lot; Lem addresses them almost exclusively by function (as the Captain, the Engineer, the Physicist, the Chemist, the Doctor and the Cyberneticist), and describes their frenzied activities in terms which make them seem more like specialized social insects than individual humans. As icons they are blank, polished, alien; they generate in the reader a wary torpor, a sense of foreboding.

Nor does the damaged ship they swarm over seem any less odd. As a symbol of man's technological fist it seems all too cumbersome and primitive, like one of the cardboard rocket-ships that have made the Flash Gordon movie serials (1936–1940) so hilariously memorable. To a certain extent this is an effect clearly designed to estrange the reader, though just how precisely Lem calibrated it may be difficult to trace through translation; moreover, his English publishers, by concealing the fact that Eden first appeared in Poland in 1959, have managed to make it almost impossible for the unwarned reader to assess its archaisms.

Warned or unwarned, however, no one familiar with the famous Solaris (1961) will fail to recognize in the land of Eden a slightly earlier lesson in the unknowableness of the Other. Beyond the destruction of a few aliens, the Captain and his crew fail to make much impact on the Boschian biologies and artefacts that proliferate in every direction, the choked graves, the transparent eggs in which skeletons are embedded, the alien creatures who see (but do not see) and act (but do not). Finally, one alien seems to address them, telling them that its society can be defined as an “equilibrium based on anger,” but that Procrustean lunacies of perception and command have transformed Eden into a nightmare, a blind and contagious information-phage.

Whether or not they understand is moot. They do know, however, that Eden is a quagmire from which they must escape, or they will no longer be humans driving through space. They soar upwards in their Flash Gordon prop, becoming themselves less alien as they do, and the reader-trap of Eden releases a hint of flaring beauty, a touch of the addictive joy Lem has so often given. From afar, Eden has appeared like a delightful marble. But now, at the end, the crew sees that disinformation is poison to humans. Only now do they see that the planet was justly named.