Aniara was acclaimed both by critics and the general public, and is generally considered to be the key factor in Martinsson receiving the Nobel Literature Prize in 1974.
The poem has been adapted for stage several times, most notably as an opera in 1959. In 2018, the movie Aniara premiered at Toronto Film Festival.
Aniara provides examples of the following tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Double Subverted. It is the humans' requests of recalling the fate of Dorisburg which causes mima to self-destruct.
- All for Nothing: Everyone dies in the end.
- Benevolent A.I.: The mima. It's a machine that allows people to re-live their memories and dreams, providing the only semblance of escapism aboard the ship, which can also communicate and is considered by some to have free will. Shortly after the ship is knocked off course, the greatly increased workload and lack of downtime, combined with the abject despair of the customers, burns the machine out, culminating in its "suicide".
- Burial in Space: The chief engineer.
- Cargo Cult: Most notably the cult that springs up around the mima, but several others pop up as well.
- Colony Ship: The goldonders, miles-long ships designed to provide a luxury travel experience for a few thousand people for the three-week journey to Mars.
- Conlang: Martinsson plays with this. For example many of the titles take their roots from a variety of languages. The Captain of Aniara bears the title "chefone", combining the French word for "boss" with the Italian augmentative suffix (in essence the captain is called "big boss") and the narrator is called "mimarob" after "mima", Martinsson's name for Aniara's Master Computer, and the Slavic word "rob" meaning serf or slave.
- Deadly Distant Finale: The end of the 2018 film cuts ahead to year 5,981,407, almost six million years after Aniara began her voyage, and shows the ship finally reaching a planet orbiting GM-54, a (fictional) star in the Lyra constellation. Of course, the Aniara is now derelict and frozen, and everyone on board is long dead.
- Despair Event Horizon: An important theme of the story is what happens when a group of humans are stranded on a spaceship in the vastness of space for the rest of their lives. It’s not pretty.
- Deus est Machina: The mima is an arguably sentient, feeling machine that provides comfort to those under its care. It's a warm, inviting golden light emanating from the ceiling, requiring specialized technicians to communicate with and maintain it. After its self-initiated destruction, a fertility cult forms in its name, with mass orgies held in the room where the mima once stood.
- Downer Ending: The 2018 movie adaptation ends with the Aniara finally arriving at a celestial body after a whopping 5,981,407 years. The planet is lush and green and looks livable for humans to settle on, but the ship has become derelict, and everyone has died and turned to dust.
- Driven to Suicide: Exceedingly common after the Aniara is knocked off course, especially after the mima breaks down.
- Dwindling Party: The ship’s population gradually dies out over the years and by the end, the Aniara is abandoned. The last scene with living humans, in the movie, is less than ten people telling stories around the last remaining lamp.
- Earth That Was: Aniara left Earth when it was still technically habitable, but on the way out due to radioactive fallout and pollution. however, during the tale, Aniara intercepts a message form Earth, indicating that what was left is now completely destroyed.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: It's stated outright from the start this ending will happen, and there is no Deus ex Machina to make things right.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: The last canto.
- Future Slang: Daisy the dancer speaks a slang which the narrator finds both a comforting reminder of Earth and completely incomprehensible.
- Gaia's Lament: The Earth has become ravaged to the point of uninhabitability.
- Gender Flip: The narrator, male in the original, is a lesbian in the 2018 movie.
- Generation Ship: One of the cruelest aversions in the sci-fi literature. While the Aniara was never intended for inter-generational travel, the captain insists that the mimarob teach science and engineering to what few children are unfortunate enough to be born on the ship. If any of the second generation survive to adulthood, they can't do anything to save themselves or improve their lives in any meaningful way.
- Ghost Ship: What Aniara eventually becomes. The penultimate section of the film is titled Sarcophagus.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: The evasive maneuver on asteroid Hondo and the ensuing collision with space debris and break-up of the steering gear sends the goldonder into interstellar space, with no hope of return.
- The mimarob spends years creating a way to project photos of Earth's greenery and natural beauty outside the windows of the ship. While pretty, it's strongly implied that this reminder only serves to drive the surviving colonists further into despair, possibly including Isagel's Murder-Suicide of her infant child.
- Hope Spot:
- The crew detects a probe launched towards them and believe it contains fuel and supplies to help them. When this news is announced to everyone, morale soars. But when the probe finally arrives and brings it onboard, they are unable to find anything of use.
- The 2018 movie has a scene six years in where MR and her team successfully gets the beam projector working to replace the mima with pictures of nature in the ship windows, only for her to come back and find Isagel and her baby dead from a Murder-Suicide.
- Layman's Terms: Deconstructed. After the death of the mima, the narrator is hauled to court to explain what happened... only to find that he can't. He knows exactly what happened and can explain it clearly in the jargon the mimarobs use, but when he tries to simplify it for public consumption his analogies collapse or his thoughts become muddled and incoherent to the point where they have no relation to what happened at all.
- The movie exclusively describes the mima as an anthropomorphic creature, with the machine's disrepair and eventual destruction only ever referred to as an intentional act of suicide by a grieving bring.
- Machine Worship: Many of the colonists take to viewing memories of Earth from the mima to dispel their angst and ennui, and some even take to worshipping the mima as a deity. Needless to say, they don't take the mima's death well. The movie shows the establishment of a fertility cult in the mima's name after its death.
- Meaningful Name: Aniara is a modified version of an Ancient Greek word meaning "grieving" or "in despair".
- Mile-Long Ship: 16,000 ft, to be exact.
- Murder-Suicide: As explicitly shown in the 2018 film, Isagel, who has long since crossed the Despair Event Horizon, kills both herself and her child.
- No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The mima.
- Offing the Offspring: Isagel murders her own son in a Murder-Suicide.
- The Scapegoat: After the Mima commits suicide, the blame is put on the Mimarobe even though she warned Captain Chefone the A.I. needed a rest and tried to stop people from entering the Mima room, but no one would listen.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Heartwrenchingly averted. Martinson was a personal friend of Niels Bohr, and perfectly aware of the nature of the interstellar space. One of the things that breaks several of Aniara's inhabitants is that, in spite of the fact that they have travelled for twenty years, they are still only sixteen light-hours, within spitting distance in astronomical terms, from Earth, but still have no chance to get back to it, even with working engines.
- Shown Their Work: Martinson consulted Bohr in many scientific aspects to get it right.
- The Stoic: The space pilots.
- Tyrant Takes the Helm: The Chefone is the captain of the ship from the start, but even after the incident sets the ship off course with no hope of rescue, he retains an iron grip over the entire civilian population for at least twenty years.
- Wagon Train to the Stars: Unbuilt Trope: Aniara is possibly the single most depressing example in existence. It has none of the hope of the rest of the genre; it is implied that the Mars-colonies were a desperate last-ditch attempt to save anything of humanity, and the colonists on Aniara are well aware from the get-go that there is no way for them to do anything other than live out their lives and then travel through nothingness forever.
