Harry Martinson: 'Aniara. A Review of Man in Time and Space'...

Hammer

£440

Harry Martinson: 'Aniara. A Review of Man in Time and Space', London, Hurchinson, 1963, 1st UK edition, adapted from the Swedish by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert, original decorative purple cloth lettered in white, matching dust wrapper by Brian Russell (worn, 21s price intact). Very scarce first English translation of the book-length epic science fiction poem written by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson from 1953 to 1956. One of Martinson's most noted works, it narrates the tragedy of a large passenger spacecraft carrying a cargo of colonists escaping destruction on Earth veering off course, leaving the Solar System and entering into an existential struggle. The style is symbolic, sweeping and innovative for its time, with creative use of neologisms to suggest the science fictional setting. Written during the height of the Cold War - right after the Soviet Union announced that it had exploded the hydrogen bomb, the American book critic and cultural historian Geoffrey O'Brien concludes that "Aniara is an epic of extinction, conceived at a moment when extinction had begun to seem not only possible but perhaps imminent."