A 1959 Science Fiction novel by Stanisław Lem. A routine flyby by a human exploratory spaceship ends with the crash of the ship on an uncharted planet. The crew survive, but find themselves stranded in a strange and clearly inhabited world. They then face two tasks: the first is repairing their mangled ship and technical equipment to hopefully return to space and ultimately home. The second is to find out as much as possible about the inhabitants to determine whether they pose a threat and ideally, make contact. But the society of the inhabitants of Eden, the “Doublers”, is strange and troubling, and making contact might be harder than initially thought.
Eden contains examples of the following tropes:
- Awesome Personnel Carrier: The Engineer takes great solace in finally getting the Defender, their armored exploration vehicle, working, which is armed with an anti-matter beam.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Not surprising for Stanisław Lem, but the Doublers really deserve special mention. Their name derives from their bodies appearing to consist of two parts: a big, bear-like translucent section which is similar to a shell or coat, but which is also used for walking, and a small, thin brownish torso with arms and a head which is connected to the inside of the shell and can be retracted into it.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The crew has some uncomfortable discussions over whether this is in effect for the Doublers, as some of the things they witness are reminiscient of atrocities from mankinds past, but as the Doctor points out could just be a result of this trope in action.
- Badass Bookworm: The Doubler scholar that eventually meets the crew. He saw the rocket come down while working in his observatory, and decided that this was a chance he could not miss. He risks everything to make it to the rocket and meet the visitors from the stars.
- Deadly Euphemism: The translation computer ends up choosing the term “Procrustes” to describe the method of government control the Doublers are subjected to. Procrustes was a giant in ancient greek myth who waylaid people and forced them to fit into a bed, either by stretching their limbs or cutting off their legs.
- Designer Babies: The ruins of facilities are found where great experiments were carried out by the Doubler ruling class to create better beings. This did not go as planned. Some of the resulting Doublers are preserved in epoxy-like blocks while others are living in small pariah communities.
- Downer Ending: The Doubler government makes it clear that they want the humans gone by starting a bombardment with actual artillery shells. The rocket takes off successfully, but the two Doublers who met the humans prefer to be vaporized by the rocket exhaust rather than return to Doubler society.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The crew consists of the Coordinator, the Doctor, the Engineer, the Chemist, the Physicist and the Cyberneticist.
- First Contact: The crew is quickly aware that Eden is inhabited by intelligent beings, but the things they see first bewilder and then appall them. They end up sneaking around the edges of the Eden civilization trying to gather information on their culture and technology. For their part, the Eden government does not take long to realize that they have visitors from outside.
- Government Conspiracy: The Doubler powers-that-be end up cordoning off the landing site, claiming that the creatures that came down are dangerous and horrifically mutated by cosmic radiation.
- The Great Repair: The ship is still basically spaceworthy after the crash, but getting it in any shape to fly means working off a long, long list of repairs. And the crew starts off with nothing but a flashlight and some improvised tools to accomplish this...
- Internal Retcon: The Doubler ruling class has become frighteningly good at this. They not only erased the evidence for failed state-run genetics and industrial projects, they not only erased the names of the rulers, they erased the fact of their own existence.
- Monowheel Mayhem: The Doublers use tall, shiny discs to get around. The driver sits in the hub, and the disc extends legs to stabilize itself when stationary.
- Murphy's Law: After the initial crash, anything that can cause a mess in the ship has caused a mess: the electrical system is busted, the robot assistants are unreachable, a horrible radioactive brew is filling up the lower decks and the ship’s library got thrown off the shelves. To make things worse, the ship has drilled itself into the ground, and the crew might not be able to open the hermetically sealed hatches before the oxygen runs out.
- Nuke 'em: The crew makes repeated use of the Defender’s cannon to shoot holes in the black wall. In a chaotic situation on one of the expeditions, the Engineer panics and makes use of said beam to kill a large number of Doublers. He ends up deeply shaken by the experience.
- Polluted Wasteland: With much of their technology being nuclear powered, and their only way through the black dome being a radioactive antimatter explosion, the landing site tends to get contaminated fast. However, the humans do everything they can to minimize the effects and even take irradiated soil along with them rather than leave it behind.
- Poor Communication Kills: Once again, communication with truly alien beings in a Lem novel proves to be an incredibly difficult undertaking, with consequences for both sides. Unlike in Fiasco however, there does appear to be something deeply wrong with Doubler society.
- Scenery Porn: The lakeside town of the Doublers is described in great detail, and the crew is struck by how beatiful Eden can be.
- Riddle for the Ages: Like the crew, we are left with a lot more questions than answers about Eden and its society. Why did the Doublers in the city only move around in groups? What was the deal with the statue of the human-like figure seen carried around in the lakeside town? What was happening in the gorge village that put the Doublers there into such a panic?
- Ridiculously Fast Construction: Once the Doubler government has taken a good look at the rocket, they decide to wall it off using artillery-fired seeds which over the course of a few hours sprout into a black wall and then after a day or two grow into a black dome enclosing the landing site. The material is extremely hard and durable, and self-repairing, so the crew has to resort to the Defenders antimatter cannon to blast holes through the barrier whenever they want to leave.
- Rube Goldberg Device: The factory the crew comes across works like this, involving some fully automated, convoluted production line where dozens of machines create products, reshape and modify them, only to eventually melt them down again to start the cycle anew. The Engineer does not take this apparent insanity well.
- Token Non-Human: After their visit to the valley village, they find a Doubler desperate to join them and get away from there. They adopt it, but it proves of little help in understanding Eden society, only communicating by gestures and spending most of its time sleeping.
- Translator Microbes: Completely averted. Only after much effort and the incredible luck of meeting a Doubler scholar, is the crew able to assemble a translation machine. But because mathematical logic was the easiest common ground to be found between the two species, the machine translation is extremely basic: the vocabulary is limited, the grammar is non-existent and complex concepts such as feelings, cultural and political terms can’t be translated at all. In desperation, the crew switches the translator over to a more improvisational mode, which uses jumbles of earth words to approximate Doubler terms.
- We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill: Despite their best intentions, the human actions must come across as strange, threatening and unpredictable from the Doubler perspective.
