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...about favoritism, political influence, and dismay at a tendency to seek geographical distribution instead of international renown. This year the selection was a case of sweets to the Swedes. The 1974 winners: Swedish Poet Harry Martinson, 70, and Swedish Novelist Eyvind Johnson, 74. Martinson's best-known work, Aniara, published in English in 1956, is a narrative poem about a space voyage. Johnson's chef-d'oeuvre, a semi-autobiographical series called The Novel About Olaf, published in the mid-30s, was never completely translated into English. The two writers' fame is hardly international...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: People, Oct. 14, 1974 | 10/14/1974 | See Source »

...radiation apparatus that powered the electronic brain. As presented in Stockholm's Royal Opera House last week, this kind of interstellar meller was meant not for science-fiction escapists but for devotees of avant-garde music. Occasion: the premiere of Swedish Composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl's Aniara, widely hailed as the first operatic excursion into the world of outer space...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: Opera in Space | 6/15/1959 | See Source »

Based on a "space cycle" by Swedish Poet Harry Martinson, Aniara proved to be a lengthy allegory about man's journey through life "in the spiritual void" that sucks him at last to his own destruction. The curtain rises on the interior of a spaceship dominated by the towering electronic brain, a mechanism so advanced that it is nearly human. Ranged in front of it as ghostlike silhouettes, the passengers chant a lament for the planet Doris (actually the Earth) they just left behind...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: Opera in Space | 6/15/1959 | See Source »

...spaceship Aniara is one of several making the milk run between Doris and Mars, bearing loads of earthlings in flight from the threat of atomic destruction. A day's flight from Mars, Aniara's steering mechanism is jammed, and the ship wanders haphazardly out of the solar system ("We are always en route to infinity," sings the chief engineer); at the same time, the electronic brain reports the destruction of the planet Doris...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: Opera in Space | 6/15/1959 | See Source »

Mankind's Epitaph. From then on, the opera details the moral and physical collapse of Aniara's 8,000 travelers. The passengers seek to distract themselves, turning first to jitterbugging (led by a party girl named Daisi Doody), later to an atavistic sex cult called "Yurg," involving lascivious dances in a hall of mirrors. The chief engineer dies, and during a gaudy celebration is fired in a coffin to become a sun satellite. After 24 years of space travel, the remaining passengers die, aware too late that in the destruction of his home planet man had lost...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: Opera in Space | 6/15/1959 | See Source »

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