Return from the Stars by MIT Press - Classic Sci-Fi Novel for Book Lovers & Collectors | Perfect for Reading, Gifts & Sci-Fi Collections

TL;DR: For the folks who stay far from home, imagine that feeling of slightly increased heartbeat you feel each time you are returning home after slightly prolonged period of time? Has everything changed, are my friends still there, do the people remember me? Will the old trees, walls, hangouts still be there? Now multiply this by a million. Now that's the story.Stanislaw Lem called "Return from the stars" his failed novel after he put it down in black and white in 1960. But as the foreward by Simon Ings reads, "It has become in 2020s, a better book than it was in 1960, but a more challenging one. This is because we have grown into the very future it predicted." Lot more has been said, can be said and will be said about the book itself but it was a welcome respite from constant stream of gloomy dystopian futures, I was kind of tired of that. It touches on stuff (other than the standard trope of engineered future) that may have a soon to be relevant social question for us-- for instance the book presentss a no hold barred back and forth about whether there is a need of space exploration; among all stakeholders: the explorers returning to earth after a 10 year interstellar journey (but due to time dilation 127 years have passed on earth, and societies have morphed and evolved away and now they themselves are a figment of the past bringing information that has since become redundant), the armchair philosophers (who appeared in the earth century when the interstellar expedition was inflight), and the indifferent genetically conditioned masses who have no opinion either way and may have only the feeble romanticism of space travel as it is also alien to everyone 120 earth years later. Does all risks and exploration and leaps of faith need to have an utilitarian objective? It asks you to think along with the titular characters, with them against them.But if everything is else is ignored, as we start the book with the dizzying chaotic description of a future earth that doesn't make sense neither to the protagonist not to us for the first 50 pages-- to slowly learning the ropes, and then finally getting the grips of home in the last line of the prose, it is still a book about Hal Bregg the interstellar explorer, a man misplaced in time. "About his impulse toward solitude and his need for company. About the nonheroic risk and beauty of exploration, and about what it means to carry wounds and beauty home to a world that does not care. It's about a kind and thoughtful bull in an emotional china shop, trying desperately not to break things. It's about men."