Science Fiction Studies

#40 = Volume 13, Part 3 = November 1986

ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

ON STANISLAW LEM

• L.A. Anninski. On Lem's The High Castle

• David Field. Fluid Worlds: Lem's Solaris and Nabokov's Ada

• N. Katherine Hayles. Space for Writing: Stanislaw Lem and The Dialectic "That Guides My Pen"

• Jerzy Jarzebski. Stanislaw Lem's STAR DIARIES

• Michael Kandel. Two Meditations on Stanislaw Lem

• Stanislaw Lem. Metafuturology

• Stanislaw Lem. On Stapledon's Last and First Men

• Robert M. Philmus. Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text

• Irina Rodnianskaia. Two Faces of Stanislaw Lem: On His Master's Voice

On Lem's The High Castle

Abstract.--Lem's autobiographical novel, The High Castle, appears on the surface to be a juvenile memoir in the realistic mode. It must instead be read as a philosophical novel narrating the story of a talented child of the technological era, who suddenly experiences the yearning for ideals. At the outset, the child is enamored of the "little wheels" of his toys and the mechanical "malleability of matter. " He fears the unpredictable and illogical world of living things. In his school years, the child "reconstructs himself" to fit perfectly into the construct of the school's social system. But the child retains individuality through his constant thirst for "the absolute"--a thirst satisfied by many disparate things, including a tower in his town (the "high castle" of the title) and an imaginary land for which he produces identity cards and documents. The obsession with documents leads him to experience "the tragic farce of existence."

This corresponds to Lem's adult view that humanity is playing a game with Nature, in which the latter makes only minimally sufficient moves. Humanity is therefore given a certain freedom to grow in "crevices" overlooked by nature. At the same time, Lem damns the "terrifying freedom" of technological civilization, in which the quest replaces revelation and identity cards replace the absolute.

Fluid Worlds: Lem's Solaris and Nabokov's Ada

Abstract.--Stanislaw Lem and Vladimir Nabokov, having shown a lifelong interest in science as well as art, both recognize the importance of imagination for knowledge: according to Lem, tomorrow's science can seem like fantasy today, and Nabokov acknowledges that the perception of all reality requires creative imagination. The role of imagination in all perception means that the boundaries between the observer and the observed are not fixed because the observer's imagination connects him or her to the natural world. The boundaries between observer and nature thus become fluid, and fluidity becomes an important metaphor for the nature of all perception. The risk of such fluid imaginative strength is insanity because as reality seems most fluid, the characters' imaginations can transform all reality into a self-reflecting mirror. Thus the more they are connected to the fluid world, the more they become isolated from that world and each other.

Lem's and Nabakov's major works, Solaris and Ada, both deal with fluid worlds--the sentient ocean of the planet Solaris, and the water-dominated world of the planet Antiterra. Solaris's ocean can penetrate the inmost thoughts of its observers and precipitate them out in strange formations or exact replicas of its observers' memories, and water serves as the chief source of power and communications on Antiterra. However, there is danger in these fluid worlds. The more intensively they study Solaris, the more the Solarists become mesmerized by the ocean's replicants of their own imaginations and see mere reflections of their own minds. They cannot escape anthropomorphizing the fluid planet, preventing contact with it, and making communication with each other more difficult. In a similar way, those characters with the most vivid imaginations on Antiterra find themselves remaking reality in their own images.

Lem and Nabokov join with scientists in recognizing the importance of some agreed-upon reality principle to make possible a sane world of communication. Lem emphasizes that a knowledge of scientific facts is vital to his fiction, and Nabokov claims that imagination without knowledge can only produce primitive art. In Solaris and Ada, we see worlds consistent on their own terms, worlds where certain hypotheses more nearly coincide with reality--however qualified that concept might be.

Nevertheless, the rational characters in both novels seem sane at the cost of a crippling inability to interpret what they see and to intuit the nature of foreign worlds. Only when the characters can achieve a tension-filled balance between certain shared principles of reality and the imaginative capacity to infer the existence of other worlds can they begin to understand nature or discover love. Lem and Nabokov thus join in their conviction that science, art, and love all depend upon a balance between imagination and a sense of reality.

Space for Writing: Stanislaw Lem and the Dialectic "That Guides My Pen"

Abstract.--Lem's writing is characterized by a curious division between closure and openness. His critical essays speak of literature as though it were merely the clothing used to dress up ideas, and seek closure through clear-cut, rationally justified judgment; yet his fiction is written with so little conscious planning of the ideas it will use that it gives him, Lem says, the feeling that he does not know what will happen next. The division has deep roots in Lem's past. When his secure and privileged childhood was disrupted by World War II, he turned as an adolescent to the invention of texts to give him "full power of authority. " Writing thus appears to have been a way to mediate between the secure enclosures of childhood and the dangerous but exciting openness of a war-torn country. Both Lem's criticism and his fiction manifest a consistent concern with creating spaces that are neither too open nor too closed. If closed too tightly, the space stifles creation; if open to the void, it is so loosely defined that creation cannot begin. The goal is to create a space which is paradoxically both open and closed, which can then become the space of writing.

To create such a space, Lem's employs a circular dialectic that operates to enfold openness into closure, chance into necessity, chaos into order. The richly configured spaces that result I explore through two representative texts, The Cyberiad and His Master's Voice. As a grotesque work, The Cyberiad foregrounds the emergence of its language from the void, emphasizing its creation ex nihilo. It then introduces successive constraints to help control this space and make ethical judgments possible. By contrast, His Master's Voice validates its language as a referential symbol system, appearing to locate its subject in reality rather than in language. But the closed system it begins with is successively opened until judgment has been so contaminated with hermeneutics that closure is impossible. Beginning at opposite ends of the open/closed spectrum, the dialectics of these two texts meet in the middle, resulting in the characteristic space of writing--a space at once open and closed, rational and intuitive.

Jerzy Jarzebski

Stanislaw Lem's STAR DIARIES

Abstract.--Lem's STAR DIARIES  have a special place among his story-cycles, since they span most of his career and reflect his changing concerns. Still, they have a common theme: the presumptuousness of the intellect. The cycle begins in the farcical mode of the Münchhausen tales, parodying the typical attitudes of Earthlings claiming the status of general truth for their subjective opinions. Ijon Tichy here is mainly the comic victim of these opinions; the true protagonists of the first STAR DIARIES is the spirit in search of a formula for defining reality. In the later "Memoirs of Ijon Tichy," Tichy discards the Münchhausen costume, becoming the passive witness mainly to misunderstood geniuses of cybernetic technology. Most of these tales revolve around the problem of the construction of artificial intelligence or the transference of humans personality to a machine. In its purest form as in "Professor Corcoran's Boxes"--the tales lead to the idea that human beings can only achieve self-knowledge by repeating the act of creation, constructing a reality in the inventor's own image, but absolutely separate ontologically from the creator's world. In the subsequent Voyages--the 18th, 20th, and 21st--Tichy himself participates in trying to create a perfect universe, only to discover that error is a necessary part of things. Lem develops this theme again in the later tale, "Professor A. Donda. " The crowning point of the whole cycle is the "21st Voyage," in which Lem writes a parable of the philosophical and civilizational consequences of technological omnipotence. Lem's main targets in the STAR DIARIES are positivism and Hegelianism, which he attacks from a "scientific" variation of Schopenhauerian pessimism, in which chance and error create a necessary indeterminacy in the order of things.

Two Meditations on Stanislaw Lem

Abstract.--Lem's fiction depicts the "human element" in two ways. Viewed optimistically (as in The Cyberiad, Solaris, and "The Mask"), human personality is a system sufficiently complex to be unpredictable and autonomous. Viewed pessimistically, the same system of consciousness is fundamentally flawed, since it is doomed to annihilation and enslaved by its physicality. (The resentment against Nature for creating humankind mortal and animal is something that Lem shares with the 18th-century Enlightenment.) In the past several years, Lem's pessimism has been winning over his optimism, a development exemplified by his catalogue of "ungranted wishes," A Perfect Vacuum--the text motivating this first meditation on Lem and one wherein the classical Enlightenment hopes for a full realization of humanness are represented ironically in a human world lacking any meaning-giving God.

Fiasco shows us the most pessimistic Lem to appear thus far. With it, he is returning to the space-adventure of the 1960s from his years of writing essayistic fiction. The novel follows the pattern of Solaris's and The Invincible's human-alien contact story, but with some significant changes. Fiasco rejects the sense of wonder and positive excitement of the encounter, for it is a story with a cruel twist and no redemption. Moreover, and in contrast to all of Lem's previous work, the artificial intelligence of the fiction is no longer invested with moral virtue, but instead has a bureaucratic character. The villain is human biology, and the novel can be read along Freudian lines (despite Lem's conscious rejection of Freudianism).

Metafuturology

Abstract.--Futurologists aspire to be experts "above the specialties," constructing their predictions by correlating the information provided by other disciplines. But contemporary futurology, especially in the US, is seriously compromised by three related flaws. First, futurologists are insufficiently neutral with regard to their prophecies; they confuse their role as describers of objective tendencies with their role as advisers to agents of power. As a result, they are often politically opportunistic and they construct self-fulfilling prophecies. Secondly, futurologists generally concentrate only on the material-technological base of civilization, ignoring the "imponderables," the values and norms that motivate authentic human action. As a result, the influence of futurologists' predictions contributes to the instrumentalization of cultural norms. Thirdly, futurologists have not developed a sufficiently rigorous theory to control their pragmatic tendency to value only what can be most easily measured.

There is a great need for a metafuturology--which will study the limits and possibilities of scientific prediction. Each discipline should have a branch to deal with its future, to counteract the instrumental-pragmatism of futurology with a humanistic counterweight. As a whole, metafuturology should deal with the two sets of factors that make the future indeterminate: the freedom of human collectives and the as yet unrecognized qualities of the universe. It should combine the work of conventional futurology with the work of the "second futurologists"--primarily astrophysicists studying the possibility of astrotechnical civilizations. Metafuturology must also actively imagine discoveries that might enable humanity to "leap out" of its antecedent history--as for example the breakdown of the "somatogenetic boundary" between the genotype and the cultural phenotype. Finally, metafuturology must consider the effect of actually existing norms on the development of material civilization.

Stanislaw Lem

On Stapledon's Last and First Men

Abstract.--Stapledon's monumental novel creates a fantastic model for the future history of humanity. The originality and greatness of the book lie in Stapledon's total design, in which the successive rises and declines of human civilizations are depicted as an aperiodic fluctuation governed by probability, not by an immanent law of historical evolution.

Although it is filled with prescient technological predictions, Last and First Men rises far above most works of SF that come after it. Most SF ignores the social-civilizational aspects of material-technical change and especially the dilemmas created for civilization by such changes. SF tends only to extrapolate existing trends. Last and First Men's superiority to most SF ultimately lies in Stapledon's individual conception of humanity as a whole: a unity of opposites whose potentiality is so great that each civilization can realize only a part of it. Stapledon shares with Borges the status of a master of fantastic philosophy. He has been unjustly ignored by serious critics of literature because of the essayistic character of his book and a certain stylistic crudeness.

The book has many flaws. The most dubious part of Stapledon's design is the way each human civilization is reduced completely to its bare biological seed, thus allowing only the genetic and evolutionary aspect of humanity to link the various evolutionary incarnations. Further, Stapledon is ignorant of the law that instrumental phenomena grow at an exponential rate, and that the discovery of a technology cannot be long separated from its application. Consequently, he does not describe civilizations in which global regulation of technological development is necessary to control "techno-orgiastic escalation." Instead, Stapledon views humanity as a lonely Sisyphus in the universe, constantly emerging from the void with great effort, only to plummet back again each time.

Stapledon's book also points out some of the inherent problems of futurological prediction. Stapledon envisions many socio-technical innovations over the span of two billion years which have already been realized in the few decades since the book's publication. At the same time, he was unable to appreciate some others. The book's value is ultimately not predictive, but retrodictive, depicting through ethical and aesthetic paradigms a humanity with all its characteristics intact. This image of human history is correct in that it asserts the openness of the world and denies the possibility of both an automatized utopia and a final decline into hedonism. Even so, finished historical paradigms will become less and less useful for prediction as more and more new information is injected into civilization.

Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text

Abstract.--Virtually all of Lem's fictions can be read as generically self-reflexive texts. Futurological Congress, however, stands out from the rest of them as demanding that kind of metageneric interpretation if it is to be understood in its integrity. By its self-examination of its own possibility as SF, it is perhaps the logical successor to The Time Machine. The latter, working on a principle of self-extrapolation, is finally what its title announces it to be: a vehicle for transporting the reader out of the ideological, or conceptual, prison of the present moment (dramatized in Wells's frame narrative). Futurological Congress is likewise a fiction which finally lives up to, or is governed by, its title as it presents as the type of all such symposia a particular gathering devoted to venting futurological speculation.

As Tichy's hallucinatory episodes elaborate upon the specific topic of the Eighth World Congress (viz., the problems attendant upon overpopulation), they are continuous with his waking perceptions; and in that way, among others, the text operates upon the distinction which it principally invokes: between the "real," or "actual," and the "hallucinative," or "oneiric." Futurological Congress's "actualytic" project is elsewise furthered through the gradual absorption of "reality" into Tichy's hallucinations. These, moreover, become increasingly self-reflexive once they noticeably begin to generate their successors. Tichy's "reality"--fundamentally associated with the sewer--does, to be sure, apparently return at last with his seeming realization that the 21st-century Utopia of Plenty psychochemically masks an Anti-Utopia of Scarcity; but that discovery, based as it is on his ingesting of a "dehallucinide," turns out to be as delusive as any of his (other) hallucinations. The revelation of the "truth" about 2039 thus proves to be a trompe-l'esprit, and one which again subverts the distinction between the real and the imaginary.

At its most basic, the process of "actualysis" takes place on a linguistic level, thanks to the neologisms mediating between the "real" Costa Rican present and the hallucinative future. It is unmistakable from Professor Trottelreiner's discourse on "linguistic futurology" that this neologizing is self-conscious. As such, it not only serves as another means (indeed, the ultimate one) for breaking down the distinction between the "real" and the "imaginary"; it also points--in effect if not in fact--to the principle generating this particular text (and perhaps SF generally), a principle which SF shares with futurology. Futurological Congress thus resumes (via Ubik) The Time Machine's project of investigating its generic origins; and pursuing that matter to SF's modular foundations in language, it extends Wells's discoveries in a way that confirms his original metageneric insight.

Irina Rodnianskaia

Two Faces of Stanislaw Lem: On His Master's Voice

Abstract.--His Master's Voice, one of Lem's most complex and personal fictions, reveals two aspects of Lem's art. On the surface it is an example of SF "pamphleteering," a cautionary tale. The tale of the project to decode the "message from the stars" is a realistic analogy for the situation of the contemporary scientist, compromised by being entangled in the military-political establishment. The inability of this establishment to turn the "letter" into a weapon indicates to the protagonist, Hogarth, that it was sent by a superior intelligence able to separate the life force from death. Yet Hogarth's agonized concluding words of the novel seem to betray this faith in the Senders' faultless ethics.

Although the conclusion is surprising, it is part of a design. Lem attempts to resolve the conflict between reality's lack of order and art's "excess of order"--and to depict the "philosophy of chance" in fiction. For Hogarth, a mathematician of probabilities, chance acquires the ethical connotation of death, destruction, and decay. His consciousness is split between his belief in statistical, scientific explanations and the mystery of his own person, which tries throughout his life to liberate him from evil.

Lem is not Hogarth, however, and His Master's Voice is not philosophy of science, but a philosophy of life. This philosophy is the familiar one of the "absurd." The hero's rejection of the absurdity of chance is a tragic expression of nonacceptance and minimal hope.

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