Paradyzja

Paradyzja (English: Paradise, the World in Orbit) is a 1984 science fiction novel by Janusz A. Zajdel.

It is a dystopian novel similar to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The space colonies are more or less federated with the Earth. Human rights are observed and respected everywhere, but Paradise has not been verified for sure.

The main hero, writer Rinah Devi, is sent from Earth to Paradise to research that and the tragic death of a Terran sent to Paradise ten years before. Officially, though, the purpose of his visit is to write about Paradise.

It was recognized as the best science fiction novel in Poland in 1984. In the Polish People's Republic, it was widely understood as a metaphor for the USSR: omnipotent state security services and propaganda, single state ideology and forced labour.

Paradyzja (from "paradise") is the story about the human colony on a space station orbiting a distant and mineral rich star system. The colony is controlled by a totalitarian regime. All human activity is tracked by electronic devices. It had been primarily devised as a ring in which the gravity force is simulated by the centrifugal force exerting upon all objects inside a ring tube in the direction opposite to the centre of the ring. The space station was built accidentally. The expedition had to settle on the planet Tartar in order to live there and exploit the natural goods. But General Cortazar, the leader of settlers, decided that Tartar was not suitable for settling because of a lack of good conditions for living, so the living place had to be built as a space station on the Tartar's orbit.

On Paradise, living rooms are made of transparent material and to get to some of them, one must pass through other living rooms. Personal watches are not allowed there; the only clocks are those in living rooms. Rinah Devi's first impression is that all people strictly adhere to the regime law, but he then discovers that they had devised various ways to work around the system. One of them is "the only language of truth", Koalang, an artificial poetic language invented by the inhabitants of Paradise to evade the electronic eavesdropping system.

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