This was the Brauns' second science-fiction novel, an ironic space-travel epic that reminds us that there's nothing very new about climate emergencies, pollution, and genetic manipulation - some of us were already panicking about such things fifty years ago...

Some centuries ago, a dissident group calling themselves the Lumens left the Earth to carry on with their banned experiments into modifying the human genome on the world Omega XI. There has been no contact with them in the meantime, but recently Earth has received messages from Omega XI in which the Lumens report that their continued existence is threatened by "sinister manifestations" and ask for help. The authorities on Earth are worried enough to send a fact-finding mission to Omega XI: aboard the capsule for its journey of several years are our narrator, Merkur Erdenson, a young cosmonaut famous for his improvisational problem-solving skills, and his commander, Elektra, a woman who is notorious for doing everything by the book (the Brauns obviously had a passion for classical character names). Naturally, they start bickering the moment they meet, and of course we all know what has got to happen in any comedy when a man and a woman who dislike each other are forced to co-exist in close proximity...

On the face of it, the situation they find on Omega XI when they eventually get there is a textbook Marxist parable: the small Lumen community of dominant, unproductive consumers is supported by a large subject class of productive slave-workers, and the problem that is threatening the Lumens' existence is a climate catastrophe brought on by a ludicrous overproduction of consumer goods. Everything, down to items like furniture and bathroom fittings, is treated as disposable and replaced daily for reasons of "hygiene". But there's more to it than that - what the Brauns really want to explore is the way rigid, authoritarian and humourless patterns of thinking allow problems like this to multiply and inhibit our ability to solve them. It wouldn't have taken a huge stretch of the imagination for their readers to compare Omega XI with a planned economy where rigid norms lead to pointless waste and a ludicrous underproduction of consumer goods...

The authors' background in writing for children has given them a deceptively simple, very clear style, where they like to say exactly what they mean at exactly the moment when you're not expecting them to (the same trick that makes Roald Dahl and Erich Kästner, for instance, so much fun to read). The action passages sometimes come over as slightly-too-crude slapstick, but the more analytical parts of the book, where Merkur is reflecting on his experiences, work very well.

The handling of gender in the book is a bit mixed - on the plus side, Merkur never shows any sign of having a problem with working for a female boss - not at all a foregone conclusion in 1974, even in the DDR - and her role as commander is always carefully separated from her gender-identity in the narrative. But on the minus side, the part of the plot where Elektra's systematic analytical skills come into play is less convincing than the parts where Merkur playfully comes up with the unexpected solution. And he's the one who gets to tumble into bed with several different women, whilst she (as far as Merkur knows, anyway) has a rather less exciting time sexually.

Fun, and a lot less dated than I was expecting.… (altro)