
In a distant future where humanity’s boldest experiment is a fledgling colony on the planet Eden, a routine communications hub becomes the stage for an unsettling mystery. When the scheduled report from Eden fails to arrive, a weary supervisor storms down the aisles of humming consoles, his irritation masking a deeper unease. The operator at the terminal, calm yet skeptical, watches his boss’s frantic guesses—lazy colonists, a rogue jump band—while the silent screens offer no clues.
Beyond the immediate crisis, the story invites listeners to contemplate the “seven doors” of thought that underlie every assumption, from blind acceptance of authority to the possibility that cause and effect might be reversed. As the crew of the monitoring station wrestles with technical glitches and their own biases, the narrative teases the complex personalities of the experimental colonists and the enigmatic Extrapolators who oversee them. The tension builds not from action alone, but from the subtle interplay of human error, philosophy, and the unknown forces that could be shaping Eden’s fate.
Language
en
Duration
~5 hours (298K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Greg Weeks, Geoffrey Kidd, Stephen Blundell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2008-12-23
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
1906–1963
A mid-century science fiction writer with a sharp interest in people as much as technology, he is best remembered for co-winning the 1955 Hugo Award for Best Novel. His stories often mix big speculative ideas with psychology, social pressure, and wry humor.
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