The Lotus Eaters

“On the tenth day, our squadron reached the land of the LotusEaters, people who eat the lotus, mellow fruit and flower… who had no intention of killing my companions, not at all, they simply gave them the lotus to taste instead. Any crewman who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit, lost all desire to … return, their only wish to linger there with the Lotus Eaters, grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home dissolved forever.”

                                                 (The Odyssey, Book 9, extracted from Lines 93-110)

The Lotus Eaters by John William Waterhouse

          The first planet our heroes come upon in their quest for the knowledge necessary to defeat the evil Fenachone is watery Dasor, a world without any land whatsoever, being completely covered by one unbroken ocean. Here the amphibious porpoise-like inhabitants dwell in idyllic floating cities, perfectly content with their lives - other than a wistful desire for more sources of energy, with which they had come to terms generations ago. Their metal-poor and elevation-less planet provided little opportunity to generate electrical power other than by means of solar panels and tidal generators. Without falling water, hydroelectric generators were out of the question. Nuclear power was unobtainable in the absence of heavy elements. Geothermal sources had aeons ago died out as their planet gradually became geologically inactive. Untold thousands of years of such existence had resulted in a culture perfectly adapted to absolute stasis – no great dreams of progress, no thirst for exploration and adventure, only a vague unsatisfied ache for the ability to populate the uninhabited waste areas which constituted the bulk of their watery world.

Skylark 2 hovers next to a Power Plant on Dasor

     Dasor is the first world visited by Seaton and company in their travels which does not prove to be either unremittingly hostile or in some way positively hazardous to one’s health. The Dasorians in turn prove themselves to be a race with absolutely zero interest in either conquering or exterminating anyone not of their own, unlike literally everyone else to this point encountered in the trilogy. So far, the Milky Way has not turned out to be a particularly Peaceable Kingdom. Here by contrast, there do not appear to be even any natural enemies – no dangerous creatures, no natural calamities.

     Smith makes no mention of what the Dasorians actually do with their utopian existence. Perhaps the details were beyond even his fertile imagination. This ought to come as no surprise. For as long as Humanity has thought, wrote, painted, and sung about the Heavenly Realms, far more attention has been focused on either the journey to or the threshold of the Kingdom, rather than to the Kingdom itself. A Pilgrim’s Progress takes us on Christian’s laborious journey to the Celestial City, but leaves us at the gates, watching Christian enter within while we stand outside. Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, after five gut-wrenching movements, culminates in a Blaze of Glory as Paradise reveals itself, but then the curtain immediately falls – ditto for his Eighth Symphony, where the Soul is at last led before the presence of the saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary almost immediately before the music ends. The same goes for Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Heck, it holds true for no less than The Bible itself, which ends with the descent of the New Jerusalem and a most perfunctory tour of its splendors. Even Dante’s Divine Comedy, which ostensibly devotes a full 33 cantos to the Paradiso, turns out to be only a lead-up to the Beatific Vision, of which we catch but the merest glimpse in the 100th and final canto of the Commedia. We seem as a species to be more than eager to leap into Paradise, despite the fact we really have no idea about what we will find there.