Word: planet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After the nuclear explosion that atomized the planet Doris, the scientist named Mimarobe was seized by the space cadets and thrown into Captain Chefone's dungeon, accused of fouling the 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...
...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...
...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...
...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 the only paradise he will ever know. A late survivor sings mankind's epitaph...
...human attainment in biology and medicine (see SCIENCE). But far beyond that lay a plain but wondrous fact: if a pair of monkeys, subject to the same physical stresses as man, could return safely from space, so could man. The first human to break the chains of the planet might be named Glenn or Carpenter or Schirra or Shepard or Cooper or Grissom or Slayton. These were the U.S. Astronauts, one of them to be selected as their nation's first space traveler. But whoever the man who returns from space, the way had been broken...