Aniara
by Harry Martinson
Summary
Aniara is a poem, not a novel, one hundred and three cantos telling the story of a spacecraft that never reaches its destination. The ship carries colonists away from a ruined Earth toward Mars, but a meteor shower knocks it off course and destroys its ability to maneuver, and it continues, otherwise undamaged, at full speed out of the solar system and into nothing. Word eventually reaches the passengers that the ship's home port, a city Martinson calls Dorisburg, has been destroyed, and perhaps Earth itself along with it. From that point on, Aniara is a closed world with no possibility of rescue and no destination left to reach.
The ship carries a vast, half mystical computer named the Mima, which had entertained and consoled the passengers with projected scenes of far off times and places, other lives, other forms of consciousness, standing in for a home none of them will see again. After the Mima witnesses Dorisburg's destruction, she breaks down and effectively ends her own function, unable to bear what she has recorded. Without her, the passengers turn to whatever else might fill the emptiness: sensual excess, invented religion, nostalgia, dark comedy, cults built out of pure need. Martinson narrates most of this through the Mimarobe, the technician who once operated the Mima and now has nothing left to operate, and through Isagel, the ship's pilot, steering a vessel that no longer has anywhere to go. What remains, the poem makes plain without spelling out a final scene, is simply existence aboard Aniara, for however long the ship's supplies allow it.
Reading it means sitting with dread that never resolves into event, since nothing about the ship's course can change once the poem begins, and its cantos work less as a story moving forward than as one slow, accumulating realization. It suits a reader drawn to science fiction used as elegy rather than adventure, mourning a whole planet through the fate of a handful of people who will never see it again.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Harry Martinson the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos, sharing the award with fellow Academy member Eyvind Johnson. Aniara, published in 1956 and expanded from twenty nine cantos that had appeared three years earlier in the collection Cikada, made Martinson a household name in Sweden: it was the country's second best selling book of 1956, behind only Vilhelm Moberg's The Settlers, and had sold more than twenty thousand copies by 1958.
The poem became a 1959 opera composed by Karl Birger Blomdahl to a libretto by Erik Lindegren, staged in Stockholm, Hamburg, Brussels and beyond, and a 2018 Swedish feature film. Critics from Dagens Nyheter to The New York Times praised its inventiveness and its sadness. Martinson had gone to sea at sixteen and worked as a largely self taught sailor for years before returning to Sweden with damaged lungs. The criticism that followed the shared 1974 prize wounded him badly, and biographers link it to his death by his own hand in February 1978, four years after the award.