Aniara — The Space Dystopia That Generated a Nobel Prize
I first read about Aniara some fifteen years ago, in a brilliant essay collection about the Universe. The collection itself is worth a whole article, but the section about Aniara caught me off-guard and made me go look for the original work.
Aniara is something as odd as a space dystopia framed in the form of an Epic with 103 poems (or songs), written by the Swedish poet Harry Martinson. I am not much of a poem reader myself, but I must admit that Aniara is simply a masterpiece.
In Aniara, we get to follow the 8000 people traveling towards Mars onboard the Aniara spacecraft (a type called Goldonders). The passengers are forced to leave the home planet, damaged by environmental decay and nuclear war, and become refugees in cosmos when a collision with space junk throws the spacecraft off course, straight into the unknown space.
The Aniarapeople are then forced to see the Earth explode, which causes the Goldonder’s supercomputer to terminate itself, and this becomes humanity's last connection to Earth.
When the Epic was published in 1956 it got an enthusiastic reception from both critics and the public. It became the biggest news in national media (which is arguably the first and only time that this has happened). It later inspired new art pieces such as the opera Aniara and was the main reason that Harry Martinson received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974.
In 1991 it was voted as one of the 50 greatest collections of poems of all time and is part of the World Library covering the 100 greatest books of all time. In 2018 it was finally adapted for the screen and in 2019 Aniara won the “Asteroid” Prize for Best International Film at the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival.
Aniara can be said to be colored by the author’s strong interest in science, but is primarily to be understood as a metaphorical, existential consideration of the fate of the individual and humanity. One thing that is clear is that Martinson wants to ask the question why we have a tendency to use our knowledge and intelligence to do things that harm our environment and ourselves. In Aniara, Harry Martinson delivers a sharp critique of humanity.
Aniara was not just written in the shadow of the Cold War and the nuclear threat. Martinson had been reached by the rumor about the huge calculators built in the United States, machines that in a few seconds handled incredible amounts of data. They were called “mathematical machines” or “electron brains”. In 1944, Mark I started operation at Harvard University, a 16 meters long electronic monster that in one minute could calculate sine functions with a 24 decimal accuracy. Ironically one of the first programs to run on the computer was from the Manhattan Project.
Many other early computers followed at a high pace. ENIAC was launched in 1946 at Moore School of Engineering in Pennsylvania, an apparatus with 18000 vacuum tubes. Cambridge University built EDSAC in 1949 and MIT launched the Whirlwind 1 in 1951.
Martinson wrote his first poems in 1952, the song about Doris and Mima. Mima is the central computer of Aniara, pretty much like the MOTHER that served as a computer mainframe onboard the freight ship Nostromo in the first Alien movie. Mima was inspired by the first slow gigantic electronic monsters that could fill several rooms. When Aniara was completed in 1956, Alan Turing had already formulated the bold and epic question: “can machines think?”, and in Los Alamos the first chess playing machine was up’n running.
The story about Aniara would have been nothing without Mima. She is the main character and remains so even after her death. She is the witness of catastrophes and the eye of mankind. She is a machine with life and with a conscience. The passenger onboard considers her as a divine being. Mima was once built by human beings but then transformed into an intelligent living creature. She is superior and inaccessible, just like goddesses. She knows everything that has happened and what’s going on in the Universe, only the future seems blurred to her.
For a long time the Goldonder was crowded with people. Dictators seize power, prisons are filled and emptied, legions arise and die, discoveries are made, and people marvel at new insights. Sometimes they look at the stars. There is a huge observatory deck on the top of the spacecraft where one can view the distant supernovas, misty spiral galaxies and extinct stars.
They party and dance through the nights. Then the halls are slowly emptied as the years go by and it becomes quiet and desolate in the Goldonder. In the twenty-fourth year, everyone is dead. For fifteen thousand years, the Goldonder continues, with his load of human dust. At last it plunges into a star. And this is where Aniara ends.
70 years has passed since the first songs of Aniara were composed and the Universe has grown since then. Maybe the author got the numbers wrong or possibly he intentionally tweaked the reality to make the story more comprehensive. In the 82nd song we get to know how far the Goldonder has traveled in 20 years - 16 light hours. It corresponds to a Shuttle speed of 27 km/s, which is a reasonable speed. In the twenty-fourth year, when the last of the passengers have died, the Gondolder may have traveled a maximum of 19 light hours, or 0,0022 light years. In a cosmic perspective this is a tiny little bit.
After 15000 years, when the long dead spaceship plunges into a star, the maximum distance traveled is just above one light year. There are no stars within this distance. The Voyager probes have traveled for 45 years. They will exist for a much longer time than Aniara and, most likely, never crash into a star even after hundreds of millions of years. The real Universe is enormous even though sci-fi movies make it seem easy to travel between the stars. But in Aniara, it is not the space that is empty, it is the Gondolder. Humans symbolize the real void, ignorance, blazé and meaninglessness.
