On Another Planet They Can Save Me
A moving examination of living with illness, death and hope
In 2017, poet and novelist Lieke Marsman was diagnosed with a rare type of bone cancer. After enduring various rounds of chemo, she was told her illness was terminal. Still, she is continuing with treatment – radiotherapy, immunotherapy, operations. Living for years with death has changed Lieke’s worldview, and On Another Planet They Can Save Me is a poetic and philosophical exploration of the need to embrace the unknown.
Marsman combines short essays with diary fragments in which she recounts learning of her cancer’s recurrence, meetings with harried doctors, an arm amputation and everything that makes life worth living. She has her first religious experience, though it soon becomes clear that this is not about religion per se, but about the severe limits of a pragmatic and rational Western worldview when faced with death. Marsman weaves the arguments of Christian thinkers with quantum physics, and the ideas of Wittgenstein and William James with the stories of Lucian of Samosata and ancient Greek gods. She studies scientists who turned religious, while personally wrestling with loneliness, meaninglessness, and cowardice.
Her intellectual journey transforms into an obsession with UFOs – and the manifold implications for us on earth if life does, in fact, exist somewhere out there. For Marsman, dying with hope, no matter how far-fetched or unrealistic it might be, is still always better than living on without it: ‘And in moments when everything here feels unexpectedly hopeless, I’d like to think: On another planet they can save me.’
Associative, literary style that mixes essay with intimate experience
A frank account about fighting a metastasized cancer – and a moving plea to live
A follow-up to the highly-acclaimed The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes
“A haunting, poetic account of an otherworldly journey through the here and now, shadowed by death. But also: a heartfelt call to live and a socially critical essay on the imagination and letting go of old certainties.”
