Lagrange. Listy z Ziemi in Zew Zajdla

Aug 03, 2024 Oleksandr Zholud rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: polish, zajdel

This is a Polish hard SF debut novel published in 2023, the English title is "Lagrange. Letters from Earth". It is one of the nominees for this year’s Polish equivalent of Hugo Awards - Nagroda Fandomu Polskiego im. Janusza A. Zajdla. For the last few years, I have taken part in an informal reading club for the nominated works named Zew Zajdla (Call of Zajdel, after the Polish SF author from the 1970s-80s Janusz A. Zajdel).

The novel starts in 2069 with a man called David. He is recuperating aft This is a Polish hard SF debut novel published in 2023, the English title is "Lagrange. Letters from Earth". It is one of the nominees for this year’s Polish equivalent of Hugo Awards - Nagroda Fandomu Polskiego im. Janusza A. Zajdla. For the last few years, I have taken part in an informal reading club for the nominated works named Zew Zajdla (Call of Zajdel, after the Polish SF author from the 1970s-80s Janusz A. Zajdel).

The novel starts in 2069 with a man called David. He is recuperating after a fire on the space station, called simply the Station. As readers find out, our planet is in very bad shape. Firstly, in 2033 there was a virus that killed perennials, bushes and trees of all angiosperm species except the solanaceous family. Therefore there is no more wheat or rice, no flowers… luckily potatoes survive, but the whole environment falls apart – mass extinction of insects, animals, and famines significantly decreases the human population. This led to wars and the usage of nukes, which of course hasn’t improved the situation.

The Station is governed by Elon (I guess a clear hint of who he is in his name) and its goal is to send humans to Alpha Centauri hoping that there is another habitable planet (to plunder?). David got severe burns, including boiling out of eyes (as you can guess the rest of his face isn’t pretty either) and moreover, his exo-cortex was destroyed. Exo-cortex both controls its owner’s reactions (like anger or nausea) and overlays (‘polishes’ is the term used) everything the owner sees according to the owner’s wishes. The lack of the device made David insufferable, so his girlfriend left him and got a one-way ticket to Earth (now there is no tech to get from Earth to space). While recovering, David created and trained an AI ‘Narrator’, which was able to deduce the reason for the fire that crippled David. The Narrator uses Wolfram foam (a chaotic cloud of data, unreadable to humans but understandable to programs) to tell plausible stories, including about one’s possible future.

David is taken on a Saturn mission to recover a sarcophagus with a collection of Earth DNA, sent there for a safe keeping a few decades ago on three of Saturn’s moons. The spaceship Steropes has a crew of six, most of them in deep hibernation. It also has something called Plejone (Pleone, a “thought-growth” that constructs non-symbolic representations of reality available for exploration by researchers) that can understand the world but because it has no eyes or ears, its descriptions of what it found are like poetic gibberish.

As if it is not enough for the setting, there is an abandoned Russian station on Saturn’s orbit, sent by mad orthodox fanatics to destroy ‘causes-consequences’ causation and create an alternative present for Russia that encompasses the whole Earth…

What follows is even more bizarre, for it seems that Russians were partially successful, therefore the text because illogical, with characters appearing and disappearing, dying but living again. I understand that the author attempted to insert a lot in his debut novel, but for me he overdone it. ...more

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Dec 01, 2023 Anna Siemomysła rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2023, favorites, sf

Dobre. Od intrygującego początku, który nie pozwala odłożyć książki na zbyt długo, poprzez splątane wersje wydarzeń odbierane przez poszczególnych bohaterów i listy z Ziemi, aż po końcówkę, która dla mnie znaczy tyle, że człowiek nie chce być sam wobec pustki kosmosu.
Skończyłam z tym samym uczuciem nieśmiałej nadziei, z którą zostawiały mnie do tej pory książki Arthura C. Clarke'a.
Polecam. ...more

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Jul 15, 2024 Pawel rated it liked it

Resztki ocalałej ludzkości żyją na stacjach orbitalnych i rozpaczliwie szykują się do ucieczki na Alfę Centauri. Główny bohater „Lagrange…” wyrusza z misją treningowo-badawczą do księżyców Saturna. Oczywiście po dotarciu na miejsce oczywiście zaczynają się problemy i zostajemy skonfrontowani z TAJEMNICĄ.
Dawno żadna książka mnie tak nie zaangażowała. Możecie się w tym zakochać, może wam się nie spodobać, ale z pewnością warto to przeczytać.

Pełna recenzja w wersji wideo:
https://youtu.be/ZKlb5jHKI ...more

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