Time Machine

Betrization is a revolutionary medical procedure posited by Lem in Return from the Stars, a rarely discussed novel from his golden period. Published in 1961, the same annus mirabilis that produced the universally acclaimed Solaris, the enigmatic Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, and the popular story collection The Book of Robots, it may have been overshadowed by this literary cornucopia. This is a pity since at the heart of Return from the Stars lies one of the most farreaching and controversial of Lem's scenarios: a model of society in which aggression is surgically inhibited to the point of being almost entirely erased.

To many, if not most, readers such invasive surgery, performed at birth on every member of our species, will smack of utopian (not to say dystopian) fantasy. I would like to contest this view by examining what it would mean for this prima facie science fiction to conceivably become science fact. In what follows I thus identify and analyze the range of sociocultural and technological conditions that could make betrization or its kin—some more, some less benevolent—possible in our world.

In Return from the Stars a space expedition returns to an Earth that, due to the relativistic time dilation (the spacecraft has travelled at a significant fraction of the speed of light), has aged 127 years in its absence. The range of technological, social, economic, cultural, sexual, and artistic changes that have taken place during that period make the new Earth almost unrecognizable. The most perplexing novelty, however, is universal betrization.

As Lem spares no effort to underline, at first few took seriously the project of making over Homo sapiens into a better species on the operating table. The original proposal had languished with the United Nations for many years before its eventual adoption ignited a storm of controversy and violence. Many parents refused to allow their children to be betrizated, with operating centres around the world coming under attacks. As is frequently the case with radical social revolutions, the “new order” (119) took real effect only with the second generation of de–aggressed humanity.