Dark Eden
Chris Beckett
404 pages
published in 2012
Dark Eden won the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award and was also a finalist for the BSFA Award, which is why I got it from the library when I saw it there. It won against fairly stiff competition like Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion as well, so I was curious to see if it was worthy of the win. To be honest, I was slightly disappointed. This isn’t a bad novel, but it’s a bit on the slight side for my liking.
To start with the positives, the world Beckett depicts in Dark Eden, a planet far out in interstellar space, a rogue wanderer without a sun, with life only possible through the presence of geothermal energy, which the local lifeforms have evolved to make use off one way or another. Trees grow out of the heat channels running from the planet’s core, the basis for a complex ecology that luckily for the people that crashed into Eden, turns out to be compatible with human life. Five people landed on Eden, three people decided to try and leave again, two remained behind and started a family. Twohundred years later their descendants number roughly fivehundred, still living in the same valley their ancestors landed in, having degenerated into hunter gatherers, losing most skills and knowledge of their ancestors in the process.