The Invincible Has Landed

One of Lem's core epistemological concerns is the concurrent inevitability and inadequacy of conceptualizing the world along anthropomorphic lines. The Invincible (1964) contains an illuminating development of this theme. This bestselling science–thriller dramatizes the vagaries of a typical scientific process of investigating the Unknown while reflecting on the patterns and limitations of human cognition. My analysis aims to reveal how Lem uses his fictions to model not only cognitive problems in need of inquiry, but also problems of inquiry itself.

The Invincible opens with the Earth space cruiser, the Invincible, landing on Regis III, a desert Earth–type planet in the Lyre constellation. Eight years have passed since the disappearance of its sister ship, the Condor, and the Invincible is on a military and scientific mission to investigate the mystery. Led by Horpach, the Commander, and Rohan, the Navigator, the crew commence the exploration of the alien planet.

From the very start Regis III abounds with unsettling mysteries. Flora and fauna are extinct, yet marine life teems in the ocean, although only below the depth of 150 yards. The evolutionists on board speculate that an unknown factor must be preventing life from going on land. Interestingly, local fish have a peculiar sense that reacts to minute variations in the magnetic field, allowing them to elude human probes with astonishing alacrity and accuracy. Another mystery is the menacing presence of a Black Cloud of metallic micro–elements (“flies”).

The exploratory sallies increase the scientists’ knowledge of the planet, but only deepen the mystery. At one point one of the satellites released into orbit around the planet discovers the lifeless ruins of what looks like a “city”. Although on inspection these geometrically regular structures do not resemble any terrestrial settlement, they are undoubtedly of artificial origin. Wild speculations surface, linking the metallic ruins with the extinct civilization of the star Zeta Lyrae.

All this turmoil pales, however, next to the horror found in the wreck of the Condor. Its super–durable hull is pitted in an unknown way and the interior is a scene of insane devastation.

“I'm a hard nut to crack for literary critics”, snickered Lem during a 1984 interview, openly dissatisfied with their incapacity to mete out cognitive justice to his works. In 1992, during two days of discussions that would eventually form the core of my A Stanislaw Lem Reader (1997), he let his frustration ring even louder. “I prefer to answer interdisciplinary inquiries from the borderline of philosophy of science and literature rather than get bogged down in questions concerning my own (science) fictional works”, he told me point blank. “The former approach is certainly more fruitful” (117).

It is true that humanists face a major challenge when entering the critical lists with Lem. They square off not only with a virtuoso storyteller but also with a science–savvy philosopher who, more often than not, saw his novels as narrative models of the sociocultural constants and statistical aberrations that bedevil our civilization in its inexorable technoscientific evolution. Given Lem's intellectual demands—exemplified by his lifelong mantra that not Kelvin, Tichy, or Pirx, but knowledge was the hero of his books—it is not surprising that few critics earned passing grades for their endeavours.

The example of Jerzy Jarzębski, the Polish editor of Lem's Collected Works (1998), is representative in this regard. Turning the tables on the critic, Lem did not pull punches when he panned him for being,

Listed chronologically by first editions, excluding books of interviews [English titles in square brackets for untranslated items]

Człowiek z Marsa. [Man from Mars]. Katowice: 1946.

Astronauci. [The Astronauts]. Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1951.

Sezam i inne opowiadania. [Sesame and Other Stories]. Warsaw: Iskry, 1954.

Hospital of the Transfiguration. Trans. William Brand. San Diego: Harcourt, 1988 [1955].

Obłok Magellana. [The Magellan Nebula]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1955.

Dialogi. [Dialogues]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957.

The Star Diaries. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Avon 1977 [1957; later stories from this cycle appeared asMemoirs of a Space Traveler].

Inwazja z Aldebarana. [Invasion from Aldebaran]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1959.

Eden. Trans. Marc E. Heine. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989 [1959].

The Investigation. Trans. Adele Milch. New York: Avon, 1976 [1959].

Księga Robotow. [The Book of Robots]. Warsaw: Iskry, 1961. [Stories from this cycle appeared asMemoirs of a Space Traveler].

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. Trans. Michael Kandel and Christine Rose. New York: Avon, 1976 [1961].

Return from the Stars. Trans. Barbara Marszal and Frank Simpson. New York: Avon, 1982 [1961].

Solaris. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. New York: Berkley, 1971 [1961]. Trans. Bill Johnston (audio book and e-book), 2011.

Wejcśie na orbitę. [Orbital Entry]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1962.

Noc księżycowa. [Lunar Night]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963.

The Invincible. Trans. Wendayne Ackerman. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1976 [1964].

Summa technologiae. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1964.

Mortal Engines. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Avon, 1982 [1964].

The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Avon, 1976 [1965].

Ratujmy kosmos i inne opowiadania. [Let's Save the Cosmos and Other Stories]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966.

Highcastle: A Remembrance. Trans. Michael Kandel. San Diego: Harcourt, 1995 [1966].

Tales of Pirx the Pilot. Trans. Louis Iribarne. New York: Avon, 1981 [1959–68].

His Master's Voice. Trans. Michael Kandel. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983 [1968].

Filozofia przypadku: literatura w świetle empirii. [The Philosophy of Chance: Literature in the Light of Empiricism]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1968.

Opowiadania. [Tales]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1969.

Fantastyka i futurologia. [Science Fiction and Futurology]. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1970.

The Futurological Congress. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Avon, 1976 [1971].

The Blink of an Eye

Is conclusive knowledge of the processes that led to the genesis of life on Earth possible? Will science bring us immortality? Are we alone in the Universe? What are the odds of meeting an extraterrestrial civilization? Is Nature an evolutionary monopolist? What do cloning and genetic engineering portend for our future? Will human beings produce artificial intelligence? What will be the consequences of the lightning–fast unfolding of communication technologies?

Found on the back cover of a 2000 collection, Okamgnienie [The Blink of an Eye], questions of this nature would normally bespeak a book by a physicist, biologist, or perhaps computer scientist. Yet Stanislaw Lem is none of the above. The author of this slender volume has achieved world renown as a writer of fiction, so much so that some of his science–in–fiction novels—including Solaris, The Star Diaries, Fables for Robots, The Cyberiad, Tales of Pirx the Pilot, plus the realistic wartime drama Hospital of the Transfiguration —are now featured readings in Polish schools.

Although he had forsaken writing fiction after releasing Fiasco (1986) and Peace on Earth (1987), until his death two decades later Lem remained an eagerly consulted literary and cultural critic, philosopher, futurologist, and not least a science–savvy polemicist.

Appropriately enough, from the threshold of the new com–tech and bio–tech millennium comes The Blink of an Eye, a collection of diagnostic and prognostic essays on the shape of things to come in Y2K and beyond.

Structurally, the book consists of an Introduction and 21 brief chapters of for the most part five to ten pages, though sometimes as few as three. In Hollywood someone might refer to these condensed overviews as treatments, were it not for the fact that Lem's precision of thought, scientific erudition, and palpable interest in sometimes diabolically complex issues stands diametrically opposed to whatever Hollywood stands for. Compact in size and set in an oversized font, The Blink of an Eye amounts to a distillate and a concentrate of thought, an impression enhanced by dense paragraphs that can run more than a page long.

Most of the chapters are occasioned by—and typically open with—polemical references to publications or scientific reports that provoke the ensuing reflections.

A Master of Thrills and Chills

How does a writer of science fiction become a literary movement and a cultural phenomenon in himself? How does an indefatigable innovator, who at times makes stern demands on his readers, sell close to 40 million books in more than 40 languages? How does a master of thrills and chills earn plaudits from litterateurs like Arthur Koestler and Anthony Burgess, critics like Leslie Fiedler and Susan Sontag, and literary taste–makers like the New Yorker and, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement ?

How does a storyteller get invited to Carl Sagan's brainchild, the first Soviet–American Conference on Extra–Terrestrial Intelligence (CETI), held in September 1971 in the middle of Armenian nowhere called Byurakan? How does he get to be the only nonscientist so honoured? How is it that scientists and philosophers continue to prospect his literary make–believes for conceptual nuclei to advance their research programs? How is it that, among his numerous honorary doctorates in literature and philosophy, there is also one in computer science?

Although there are no straightforward answers to these puzzling, perhaps even paradoxical questions, any attempt to time–lapse the life and career of Stanislaw Lem into a single chapter must begin with the fact that he was one of the most creative, playful, cerebral, empirical, analytical, syncretic, and prolific writers ever to put pen to paper (in reality, shying away even from word–processors, he banged out almost all of his books on a clackety manual Remington Underwood received from his father at the age of 12).

Lem has stamped his name on twentieth–century letters as a neologist extraordinaire, capable of oscillating like a sinusoid between crazany and ultranalytical in the space of a single paragraph. This is corroborated by more than 1,500 entries—chiefly from The Star Diaries and The Cyberiad —selected for the 2005 Polish–Russian Dictionary of Lem's Neologisms. Scores of other Lem's linguistic gems found their way into the 1998 Polish–Russian–Russian–Polish Phrase Dictionary and the 2004 Polish–Russian Phrase Dictionary.

His range as a stylist, from rococo archaic to hypermodern, plus everything else in between—from science fiction and utopias to crime mysteries, horror stories, gothic novels, fairy tales, techno–thrillers, grotesques, historical epics, philosophical contes, experimental writing, confessional memoirs, and academic and pseudo–academic reviews—would make Paul Mitchell raise a brush in his honour.

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.

Ariadne's Thread

What is game theory? In the simplest terms, it is a theory of decision–making involving more than one agent (player), where the results (outcomes and payoffs attached to the outcomes) of players’ actions (moves) are at least to a certain degree interdependent. When it comes to the study of literature, game theory can be of help in two ways. On the one hand, it can help us model the reading process as a nonfinite, two–person, nonzero–sum, tacit bargaining process of incomplete and imperfect information between the author and the reader.

On the other hand, game theory can assist us in the analysis of story contents. With its help we can model and thus make sense of characters’ actions, the motivations for these actions, as well as their consequences. We can explain strategic choices by exploring links between characters’ moves and the structure of the plot. We can even tackle interpretive questions, such as whether the inner calculations of a Hamlet can account for his actions. Fertile as game theoretical applications can be, one must not, of course, automatically assume that they are universally applicable. On the contrary, their validity should be judged only post facto when the story in question can be shown to be analyzable, especially if one can suggest a solution to a conflict.

Consider any novel involving interactions of actors in a social drama. It could be the far–out scenario from Bernard Malamud's God's Grace(1982) in which the sole human survivor of atomic annihilation interacts with irascible God while trying to jumpstart civilization with a posse of talking chimps. Or it could be the mad, mad, mad world of Cold War espionage, counter–espionage, counter–counter–espionage (and so on) depicted by Lem in one of his most enigmatic, not to say Kafkaesque, novels—Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961).2 In either case, game theory can help us analyze multiplex decision nodes: those of the unlikely group of the meek who inherit the Earth or, in Lem's case, those who wield the military means to destroy it.

Effective as it can be, game theory offers, of course, no foolproof Ariadne's thread to navigate through textual indeterminacy.

You'll See the Quintans

Fiasco, a bitter and tragic novel of humankind's lost innocence, is in many ways a fitting culmination of Lem's career. Disconcerted by our growing potential for waging mass–destructive wars on an unprecedented—because planet–threatening—scale, Lem had long been contemplating the odds that our civilization will not extinguish itself in the course of the third millennium. Now, linking the carnage sown on an alien planet to the self–destructive potential dormant in our species, he warns that an accidental wrinkle in the global political–military balance of power can escalate into an all–out devastation, whether on the faraway Quinta or on the familiar Tertia: the Earth.

In a symbolic moment a third into the book, the protagonist Mark Tempe finds himself looking in a mirror, only to murmur, “You'll see the Quintans” (110). Lem's aliens are, indeed, only an allegorical reflection of ourselves. This only adds poignancy to the tragic conclusion in which the planet to which the astronauts have travelled for so long across space and time ends up blasted by their super–weapons. By that time, proclamations of neutrality aside, the Earth's emissaries allowed themselves to be drawn into a strategic cul–de–sac of the local Cold War. The only role left for them to play is that of military dictators who overrule the wishes of the Quintans to be left alone.

Much like in Eden or The Invincible, the sparsely drawn allmale astronauts collectively embody the spirit of our united and enlightened future. Technologically seemingly omnipotent, ready to embrace their cosmic brothers in intelligence, they arrive on Quinta armed with the noblest intentions. But none of their rational calculations and game–theoretical strategizing can get them past the white noise spilling from communication channels, past the threat of stealth weapons systems, and past the Quintans’ indelibly alien character.

As the Earthmen find themselves under attack and as the other side stubbornly refuses to follow the script of enlightened encounter between cosmic brothers in arms, disaster is only a matter of time. Amidst pious moralizing, Hermes unleashes a series of ever more destructive shows of force to coerce Quintans into yielding to the astronauts’ more and more belligerent demands for direct contact.

A Novel of Ideas

In 1984, when asked to sum up his breakout novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy answered without hesitation that it was “a novel of ideas as well as, I hope, a good novel in its own right”. Few words could better describe Lem's own novel of ideas, The Chain of Chance. As gripping today as it was in 1976 when it appeared on Polish bookstands, it fuses nail–biting suspense and science–smart philosophy—in this case, the philosophy of chance—to deliver a quintessential beachbook for intellectuals.

Considering the acclaim and respect Lem commands worldwide, this major novel from his mature period should have by now received its share of critical analyses and learned debates. This is, however, not the case. When I asked him in the first months of the new millennium why this might be so, Lem only shook his head, manifestly mystified by the limited circulation of his nobrow masterpiece. In the age of prepackaged niche marketing that separates literature from bestsellers, could it be the fact that Lem's gory thriller serves as a nobrow vehicle for a cerebral novel of ideas?

Towards the end of the 1960s, a significant mutation began to take effect in Lem's fiction. Until then the author still populated his stories with relatively conventional characters—if you can call mortal engines or clouds of cybernetic micro–symbionts conventional— and charted their narrative progress in relatively linear plots. Now his stories would undergo major transformations of a twofold variety. In the variant maximum, individual heroes would more and more often cede the spotlight to that belligerent and self–destructive species, Homo sapiens. In 1983 Lem spelled out his rationale in this way:

In the variant minimum, wholly hero–less narratives would serve him as vehicles for ideas, hypotheses, and theories of a decidedly non–literary character. The plots, too, would diverge on either side of conventional, becoming either radically thinned out, sometimes to the point of non–existence, or else baroquely whimsical on a planetary or even cosmic scale.

Ariadne's Thread

The most frustrating—or, conversely, the most rewarding—thing about Julio Cortazár's Hopscotch is that, goaded by the author, the reader can rearrange the book's 155 chapters according to an interpretive Ariadne's thread of his own liking, producing new semantic wholes and narrative holes that dramatically alter the meaning of this novel–without–a–genre. In fact, Cortázar himself suggests two main narrative sequences, before opening the door to an interpretive free–for–all by declaring no less than 99 chapters dispensable.

Caught up in his quasi–Lemian game of U–Write–It, most readers may not realize that the numerical explosion lurking in the wings is a Trojan horse on a cosmic scale. This is because the number of unique chapter rearrangements, i.e., the number of all possible Hopscotches, equals the number of all possible permutations of all chapters. This amounts to 155 factorial, or 155!—far, far, FAR more than the number of all the atoms in the universe.

As a bestselling writer and groundbreaking philosopher, Lem published more than 40 novels, story collections, and multivolume monographs. As I mused only half in jest in a 1992 essay, “A Literary Monument Revisited”, in an analogue to Cortázar they can be viewed as one monumental lifebook whose “chapters” can be ordered and re–ordered to produce a shape–shifting kaleidoscope of antecedents and descendants, precursors and epigones. In fact, Lem's lifework invites being approached as 40–plus fugues on a handful of themes—intellectronic automata, evolution of life and thought, the relation of culture and technology, and probability and chance—revisited with persistence that borders on obsession, all stitched together by his view of science fiction as realistic literature and of literary realism as sound prognostication.

But, shuffle and reshuffle his narrative deck as long as one might, it will still continue to exhibit three coeval trends. Over the decades, on the thematic level Lem returns from the stars to preoccupy himself with the concerns of our here–and–now. On the narrative level, he gradually trades in characterization for macroanalyses of sociocultural and technoscientific trends and patterns.And on the stylistic level, he progressively pushes all genre conventions to the limit in the 1960s before taking a quantum leap into the metafictions of the 1970s and beyond.