Eden

EDEN
Ken Wisman
Dark Regions Press (hardcover)
Authorhouse (paperback)
ISBN: 1-4140-8888-4 (paperback)

Seven artists reknowned throughout the interstellar Net for their work have been brought together to construct a glorious new bioengineered world called Eden. In Eden, according to the guidelines established by their wealthy patron Calif, predation (and insects, which he detests) will no longer exist, and all life will dwell together in beauty and harmony.

Alepha, one of the world-imagining artists brought to Project Eden by Calif, is eager to bring her dreamscapes to life. She appreciates Calif’s vision but wonders if he isn’t blinded by his life-affirming Ankh philosophy, a philosophy she abandoned in her childhood when terrible events stripped her of her innocent faith in peace. Can life thrive without competition?

Eden explores this question and others as Alepha interviews her fellow artists and finds herself falling in love with one in particular, a pacifist philosopher named Gammeo. But her interview with another peer, the brooding artist Iamoendi, concerns her. Iamoendi confesses to her that his imagination is slowly failing, becoming darker and more hellish, and that Project Eden is his last chance to create before his artistry fails at last. Although he tells her he is receiving psychopharmacological help, she cannot help but feel frightened for him.

In its philosphical and spiritual discussions, Eden draws on scientific concepts such as the universe as a self-organizing, emergent system with a structure that favors the development of life. The book addresses the ancient questions of “what is humanity’s purpose in the cosmos,” and “can life exist without suffering?” in its dys/utopian exploration of the future of human evolution and creative capacity.

These questions aren’t a side-product of the story, but rather its raison d’etre, and the three parts of this novel are bookended by three essays by Wisman that describe the story’s genesis and go into more detail about the ideas being explored. I decided to skip these Author’s Notes while reading the novel, returning to them only after I’d finished, and I suggest other readers do the same. The essays provide a curious glimpse into Wisman’s experiences and personal philosophy, but they are jarring interruptions in the story’s flow. No doubt some readers, especially those of shamanic bent, will find these essays the more interesting part of Eden, describing as they do a Castenada-like search for, and visions of, cosmic enlightenment. However, I found nothing in Wisman’s essays that struck me as profoundly original; rather, they affirm and repeat writings the spiritual explorer is likely to have already encountered elsewhere: there is a bias for creation in the universe, humans are the universe becoming conscious of itself, and the creative unconscious is the key to human transcendence. Wisman includes a brief description of his Ankh Philosophy in the book’s glossary.

Eden falls into the dys/utopian genre of literature, but gives it a transhumanist edge. Early Utopian writers had no choice but to suggest that human thought processes and morals must be changed through education in order to achieve Utopia. More’s Utopia, Campanella’s The City of the Sun, and Bacon’s The New Atlantis all emphasize justice, morality, and (to various degrees) equality, to be brought about primarily through education and science. Spirituality not always neglected in classic Utopian literature, of course — More was a great Christian writer — but in modern Utopian works it tended to be placed second to rational inquiry.

In contrast, Wisman, who writes at one point that “behavior is chemistry,” argues that Utopia can be achieved through developing synthetic foods and solar power, drug therapy and trauma erasure, nanotechnology and bioengineering. Terraforming permits dissident groups to simply move to their own planet instead of fight with each other over scarce resources, and the abolishment of systemic religion in the Religious Wars has wiped out, in Wisman’s view, the last bastion of prejudice and hatred. Yet Eden retains a number of religious concepts and terms, such as spiritus, ba-ka, Eden, Shiva, Tartarus, while relegating gods and goddesses to Jungian formations of the deep unconscious. Science and technology are necessary to resolve problems arising from scarce resources and damaged psyches, Eden suggets, but human imagination and creativity are what will allow humans to create paradise.

Not that Wisman praises technology blindly. There is a snake in the Eden Project, and as in the Biblical story, it must inevitably cause the destruction of paradise. Wisman, like Huxley in Brave New World, points to the ways in which technology, especially the artificial creation of life, might be misused by the psychologically damaged; on the other hand, Wisman, unlke Huxley, suggests that the answer to evil may be as simple as a strong dose of antidepressants.

Is it fair to discuss the writing quality of philosphical fiction? Eden is well-written, although in places the philosophizing gets heavy-handed. Wisman allows characters to doubt and question, and Alepha’s interviews of the other artists provides smooth exposition of other characters’ background and beliefs. Wisman’s description of the process of bioengineering, and his handling of questions of environmental viability and sustainability, are reasonable and well-thought-out, neither so technical as to make the reader’s eyes glaze nor so superficial as to seem magical. He does introduce and then forget one of the seven artists, though — we learn Kalpa’s name, but the artist is never otherwise brought into the story.

Eden follows the triptych formation suggested by Hieronymous Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Book One brings the artists and scientists to Eden to begin their work; Book Two describes their fanciful creations and the beginning of the fall from grace; and Book Three tracks the struggle between good and evil as each strives to control Eden. Wisman openly credits Bosch as one of his inspirations, making no attempt to disguise the fact that one of the artistic creations in Book Two is the pink fountain depicted in Bosch’s first panel, “Paradise” — the panel is reproduced as the book’s cover.

Eden wasn’t meant to be read for sheer entertainment, as the author’s notes and glossary make clear. Certainly, one can pick it up and read it like any other novel, but the book is really designed to set forth a philosophy of life, a theory of human development. Eden is an intriguing addition to the dys/u/topian genre, with the potential to become a cult classic among transhumanists.

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