#134 = Volume 45, Part 1 = March 2018
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, and American Science Fiction. In “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans” (SFS 2.1 [1975]), Stanislaw Lem denounced popular US science fiction as “a domain of herd creativity.... [B]ooks by different authors become as it were different sessions of playing at one and the same game, or various figures of the selfsame dance” (56). Taking him at his word, critics have ever since assumed that Lem had little interest in American science fiction apart from Philip Dick. Yet The Futurological Congress (1971; English trans. 1974) suggests a certain fascination with popular American writers. Largely an hommage to Dick’s vertiginous plotting, Lem’s short satirical novel adds a scattering of accent diamonds, tiny micro-allusions to a range of American writers, from stars of Golden Age sf who came up from the pulps (Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov) to stylists notable for wordplay (Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury). Lem fiercely critiques US science fiction’s “can-do” plots, but evidently is open to writers, Dick and others, who rethink and reshape—not just repeat—sf’s shared tropes and storylines.
In a short fulmination first printed, like “A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” in SFS, Lem attacks popular science fiction’s “domestication” of space and its reliance on violence for plot resolution:
Thanks to time travel and ... [faster-than-light space travel], the cosmos [of American sf] has acquired such qualities as domesticate it in an exemplary manner for story-telling purposes; but at the same time it has lost its strange, icy sovereignty.... The fact that a domestication of the cosmos has taken place, a dimunition that whisked away those eternally silent abysses of which Pascal spoke with horror, is masked in SF by the blood that is so liberally spilt in its pages. (“Cosmology” 109)
In Lem’s view, popular sf’s triumphal endings were rooted not in speculation but in “onanistic” dreams of powerful new technologies (109), often wielded by improbably super-competent heroes. Lem was drawn to Dick’s disquieting storylines and insightful yet hesitant protagonists, and in The Futurological Congress he constructs a series of Dickian downward-spiral scenarios while infusing some comedy by choosing Ijon Tichy, the cranky, folksy narrator of Star Diaries, as his viewpoint character. Nothing ever disconcerts Ijon Tichy, although almost everything irritates him. He could hardly be less like a character in Philip K. Dick.
Dick, suggests Lem, was unique among his American peers in recognizing the “impossibility of civilization’s returning to Nature,” leading to “the pessimistic conclusion that looking far into the future becomes such a fulfilment of dreams of power over matter as converts the ideal of progress into a monstrous caricature” (“Philip” 64). Dickian gloom haunts the concluding scenes of The Futurological Congress, but other US writers enter the story in the lively mid-novel scenes. Lem was not uniformly hostile to popular writers. He did dismiss all but PKD as “charlatans” in 1975, but he walked that back two years later: “The sins of individual authors have always been relatively small” (“Cosmology” 109).
Lem is generally allusive, once commenting in an interview that “[s]ome of my texts I would consider to be ‘metafictional,’ for their domain is not the world directly, but rather other texts” (Csiscery-Ronay 244; emphasis in original). While he does not mention The Futurological Congress among these, he could have, for this short satire may be, as Robert M. Philmus has contended, “without parallel in the rest of Lem’s opus, not only in the degree to which it is generically self-reflexive but also in the way it depends upon that reflexivity” (313). Philmus’s discussion reveals links between Lem and H.G. Wells, among others.
In The Futurological Congress, Tichy, awakened after decades of cryogenic suspension or cold sleep, explores life in the apparently utopian year 2039 in a plot line that echoes but revises Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer (1957). Both novelists move back and forth between two near futures set some thirty years apart (1970 and 2000 in Heinlein’s; 2000 and 2039 in Lem’s). Both employ a limited-viewpoint, first-person narrator (Tichy in Lem; Daniel Boone Davis in Heinlein). In both, each protagonist arrives in the future as a recently defrosted “grandfather-stiff” out of step with changing times (Lem 71). Dick’s Ubik (1969), much admired by Lem, also uses cryogenic suspension as a plot element, although in Ubik it becomes a grotesque means of stabilizing, for a time, the fading brain waves of people who have died, allowing limited telepathic contact. Lem’s novel, as mentioned, most often echoes Ubik in later dystopian scenes.
Other US writers including Heinlein make their cameo appearances during Tichy’s happy interlude at mid-story, which describes his cold-sleep transition from 2000 to 2039 and his early explorations of New York City. Danny Davis’s nightmares during his first cold sleep in The Door into Summer (“I was complaining to the bartender about the air-conditioning—it was turned too high and we were all going to catch cold” [73]) mark the transition between Davis’s 1970 and the year 2000. Ijon Tichy too includes an account of a long dream (chiefly of “Nothing,” which becomes “Almost something” before culminating in a final dream-thought just before awakening: “I am a winter cauliflower basking in the rays of the sun. Spring at last!” [62-4]). Both authors’ awakened sleepers are startled by the future’s gaudy fashions. Davis reports that “[t]hey brought me modern clothes right after breakfast the next morning .... I had never worn cerise bell-bottoms before” (Heinlein 87), while Tichy’s first clothing purchase is “a lapis lazuli caftan with a white breast, silver sides, vermilion ribbon, gold-embroidered collar. It was the most conservative thing I could find” (Lem 69-70).
Both novelists convey the future setting by inventing new words or revising the meaning of familiar ones. Davis and Tichy both study newspapers-of-the-future as they reorient themselves, and both are perplexed by a story that seems to involve surrogate child-bearing (the reference is to a “host mother” in Heinlein; “demimother” is Lem’s word [as translated by Michael Kandel]). Tichy’s journal reports seeing the puzzling title “I Was a Demimother” ... in the city edition of the Herald .... Something about an eggman who was yoked on the way to the eggplant” (71). Although Heinlein’s coinages can be inventive (“slidewalks,” “grok,” etc.), in this novel they are perfunctory. In Lem, who may have been the best coiner-of-fantastic-words since Lewis Carroll, they offer sparkling absurdist touches in an ever-darkening plot.
Tichy learns that the perpetually smiling multitudes of 2039 are under the influence of “mascons” (reality-masking drugs) in the air (113), and that those seeking individually tailored delusions can procure psychotropic drugs for free in pharmacies (79) or subscribe for membership in antisocial enterprises like “Procrustics, Inc.,” which allows people to fantasize that they are tormenting their friends: “It is not enough that we are happy—others must be miserable!” (97). On virtually his first day out of custodial care, Tichy discovers that in the future everybody will be able to vie for high honors at the “Registration Center for Self-Nominating Nobel Prize Candidates” down on the corner, either a mocking reference to Lem’s own perpetual candidacy or a comment on the winners of his day. Utopia is unmasked only when Tichy downs the contents of a vial said to dispel most levels of simulated reality: in the street scene he witnesses, robots unseen by human pedestrians wield sinister spray cans like those in Ubik: “robots predominated in the crowd .... Their job was to see that everyone got his share of aerosol” (140). Universal happiness, Lem suggests, can be achieved only in conditions of universal delusion and mass hallucination. Most people in the soi-disant utopia of 2039 are as ignorant of their real situation as the prisoners in Plato’s Cave, although as the novel proceeds to become more Philip K. Dickian in its final pages, “the number of people who suspect the authenticity of their surroundings is growing” (130).
Heinlein ends The Door Into Summer with its time-hopping hero convinced that he has found his happy place in Denver in the year 2000: “the future is better than the past” (186). Lem’s final pages also are set in the year 2000, but this is recursive since the story began there. Tichy learns that he has never left the violent scene of the novel’s opening chapters, set during a coup in Costa Rica. There has been no rescue from his “guardian sewer” deep beneath a Hilton hotel (99), and he has not endured catastrophic wounds, multiple surgeries and body transplants, or decades of cryogenic stasis to awaken in New York City. He has spent zero time either in 2039 or—a date mentioned later—2098 (147). Reenacting a Dickian motif, Lem’s protagonist learns that his memories are false. Tichy finally faces just another hazardous day (for the coup continues) as a delegate to the eighth Futurological Congress, while readers have been schooled in the chimerical nature of all reports from the future. We cannot foretell it, do not know it, and never will see it until its changes unfold as our present. In this way, although echoes of Heinlein mark the passages describing Tichy’s initial euphoria on arriving in 2039, Lem’s closing pages reverse Heinlein’s upbeat ending.
In an early entry of Tichy’s journal of daily life in New York City in faux-2039, Lem evidently refers to a story by Harlan Ellison. During an early tour, Tichy marvels at a little boy “floating down Fifth Avenue, high over the crowd, throwing jelly beans at the people walking underneath. They wave at him and laugh indulgently. An idyll! Hard to believe” (70). This gentle rain of jelly beans that delights an urban crowd recalls the scene in “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965) in which Harlequin, aka Everett C. Marm, hovers high above commuters in an aircar, showering workers with jelly beans: “the shiftworkers howled and laughed” [371]). The Orwellian trajectory of Ellison’s story—Harlequin becomes compliant after he is apprehended and brainwashed—lines up well with Lem’s austere plot preferences, but this scene also recalls Ellison’s exuberant style.
While Lem highly respected Karel Čapek, coiner of the word “robot,” as “entirely original in thought and vision” (Csiscery-Ronay 248), echoes of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories also mark Tichy’s testy account of his numerous run-ins with delinquent automata. In Čapek’s play R.U.R (1920), robots destroy the human race, but the laws of robotics (as laid down by Asimov in conjunction with John W. Campbell, Jr.) ensure that positronic brains are hard-wired to obey human commands and safeguard human welfare. Apparent skirtings and failures of these laws are central to Asimov’s own stories, but he stays true to optimistic pulp tradition in presenting any lapses as harmless idiosyncracies. In “Reason” (1941), for instance, Robot QT-1 persists in selective defiance of human instructions despite programming that “rigidly” excludes “permutations that might lead to anger and hate” (161). For censorious “Cutie,” coldly surveying his human supervisors’ glaring flaws, cannot be persuaded that humans had any part in his creation, choosing instead to worship the energy-converter on Solar Station 5. All the while, however, he runs the station with perfect efficiency. The robots described during Tichy’s sojourn in 2039 are similarly defiant without being menacing. Lem’s renegade “juggermuggers” not only decline to obey human commands but actively harass their creators. Tichy falls “flat on his face” after tripping over a wire strung across his path by a juggermugger (83). “Strayaways” are unemployed robots, resentful factory rejects: one invades Tichy’s apartment, interrupting his bath (84). Even computers ignore human authority: a “mimicretin ... is a computer that plays stupid, in order, once and for all, to be left in peace” (85).
Tichy’s journal describes the favorite home-entertainment device of 2039, the PV or physivision set, which may fleetingly recall Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” (1950), in which a nursery/virtual reality room is reprogrammed by super-bright children to generate real lions that devour their parents. Tichy briefly mentions the uncanny effect of having virtual lions in the home: “It takes some getting used to, to have strange people, not to mention dogs, lions, landscapes and planets, pop into the corner of your room, fully materialized and undistinguishable from the real thing” (73). When PV illusions go bad, they make trouble as “interferents.” Tichy reports that one such creature, “a seven-foot character [,] ... instead of disappearing with the rest of the image” when Tichy turns off his PV, strikes him on the head with a bouquet of flowers he has purchased for his fiancée, breaks the vase, and eats half a box of his crunchies before flaring “into a shower of sparks, ... burning hundreds of tiny holes in the shirts I had spread out to dry” (75).
There are too many non-sf echoes to cover here, but Lem’s reliance on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) seems important, especially Alice’s experimental consumption (in lieu of any rational instruction) of cakes, mushrooms, and mystery-liquid-in-a-vial. Like Alice, Tichy wonders why this new place so often tells him just to swallow cultural cues and stop being curious. Lem also revisits Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) when Tichy learns that in 2039, books are obsolete: “all knowledge is acquired now by way of the stomach” and just “four algebrine capsules” ensure that anyone can be “perfectly at home in higher mathematics” (80). The scientists of Swift’s Grand Academy of Lagado, “projectors” with big plans for a better future, take the same approach to teaching math: “[t]he propositions and demonstrations were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a cephalic tincture. This the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach” (2413).
The Futurological Congress is, in short, an echo chamber of voices from all over. Lem described his satire in self-deprecating terms: “a depressing tale, but told funnily—i.e., with black humor” (Csicsery-Ronay 255), wording that does not begin to hint at its richly inventive wordplay and bricolage. At the conclusion of a 1986 interview, Lem complained that “foreign” critics often “accused” him of “being familiar with the output of authors whom I have never read” (259). While not accusing him of generally fraternizing with popular American sf writers, I hope that this reading clarifies the sf genre’s impact, beyond the work of Philip K. Dick, on The Futurological Congress, a remarkable and understudied novel.—Carol McGuirk, SFS
WORKS CITED
Asimov, Isaac. “Reason.” 1941. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B. Evans et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2010. 160-76.
Csiscery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. “Twenty-Two Answers and Two Postscripts: An Interview with Stanislaw Lem.” SFS 13.3 (1986): 242-60.
Ellison, Harlan. “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” 1965. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B. Evans et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2010. 367-78.
Heinlein, Robert A. The Door Into Summer. 1957. London: Pan, 1974.
Lem, Stanislaw. “Cosmology and Science Fiction.” Trans. Franz Rottensteiner. SFS 4.2 (1977): 107-10.
─────. The Futurological Congress (from the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy). 1971. Trans. Michael Kandel, 1974. New York: Harvest, 1985.
─────. “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans.” SFS 2.1 (1975): 54-67.
Philmus, Robert M. “Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text.” SFS 13.3 (1986): 313-28.
Swift, Jomathan. “Gulliver’s Travels.” 1726. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton: 2006. 2323-2462.
Note to Readers. SFS invites further short articles (2000-4000 words) to appear in the Notes and Correspondence section. These, like the analysis of The Futurological Congress above, might consider how an individual sf text relates to other sf writers or to larger themes in the genre; they might explore a text’s relationship to another author or text, perhaps across cultures. The topic might be a currently neglected text but also might consider a new work; a story or novel that has been valuable in your teaching might be a good choice. Critics and scholars of science fiction so often are immersed in the big picture: the invitation here is to speculate in close-up, defining a single text’s relation to the field at large. Preference is for printed texts, as a kind of endangered species. If passed through initial editorial review, submissions will be sent for external review.—The SFS Editors
Research in the Octavia E. Butler Archive. Following up on our coverage in the November issue, we are pleased to share this update from a scholar who has been using the Butler archive to good purpose:
Fans, acolytes, students, scholars, and devotees of Octavia E. Butler have been blessed in recent years with the opening of her gigantic archive at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, near her birthplace of Pasadena. Research informed by the journals, letters, and unfinished and unpublished manuscripts that can be found there has already begun to be published, a phenomenon that will only accelerate in coming years. As I argue in the introduction to my Octavia E. Butler, published in Modern Masters of Science Fiction (U of Illinois P, 2016), the opening of this archive represents both a tremendous opportunity for Butler scholarship and a deeply problematic ethical minefield for responsible research. Butler passed away unexpectedly and was not able to prune or organize her papers, and because she kept everything she wrote, the Huntington now possesses an unfiltered and at times emotionally quite raw archive of Butler’s personal life dating as far back as the bound composition notebooks in which she first wrote stories as a girl. She wanted us to have these papers, that much is certain—but she did not get to choose the manner in which we received them, and it is up to us now to control our own worst impulses towards graverobbing while still doing the important work of scholarly excavation that needs to be done. The Butler archive has already become one of the Huntington’s most popular and well-traveled collections just a few years after its opening, but the complex ethical questions of how to respect the privacy of a truly beloved author that are raised by the archive will be with our scholarly community for many years.
The archive itself is truly immense; no amount of time in San Marino will allow a person to see all of it, and the close contact with Butler’s mind offered by her private papers (her actual handwriting) is so enrapturing that I found my month-long stints at the Huntington simply flying by. In order not to lose themselves in the face of so much material, scholars will need to focus on what is most important to their research, knowing that they will not be able to look at everything. To help with that preparation work, I have posted a short page on my blog with a running list of published material that draws on the archives in some way, from links to the archive’s huge 500-page finding aid and the Huntington’s Tumblr blog to interviews with scholars such as Moya Bailey (currently holding a postdoc at Northeastern) and Ayana Jamieson, a remarkably generous scholar local to Pasadena who is, simply in her own being, a tremendous resource for Butler scholars passing through the Huntington. The page also links to a longer write-up on the archive I produced for the Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction, an excellent open-access journal housed in the Science and Technoculture Studies program at UC Riverside. I wrote this mini-Cook’s tour of the archive to give people some sense of the kind of materials and types of media formats to be found there. It represents my sense of the “major” unfinished work in the archive alongside other important resources I became aware of during my time there. My website about the Butler Archives may be useful: <https://gerrycanavan. wordpress.com/2016/11/19/octavia-e-butler-archives-resources/>.
Study at the Huntington requires advance preparation: you must apply for reading privileges (given somewhat automatically for people with academic positions, requiring somewhat more effort for PhD candidates and independent scholars: see <https://aeon.huntington.org/aeon.dll?Action=10&Form=79> for details). Of course you must work around their business hours (9 AM-5 PM most days, closed major holidays and Sundays). On the plus side, their photography and reproductions policy is unusually open, allowing you to manage your research between “read on-site” and “read when I get home” modes of gathering information as necessary. The retrieval of materials is quick and easy. Best of all, the Huntington offers fellowships that can support both short and long stints in the library. For details, see <http://www. huntington.org/ fellowships/>.
On the question of publication of materials from the archive, I found my dealings with the Butler estate (managed by Merrilee Heifetz’s Writer’s House group in New York) to be quite pleasant—but like any literary estate they do guard the writer’s material carefully, and quotation and reproduction from unpublished material can be a problem. Sometimes they did tell me no. Unpublished material is subject to a different fair-use standard than published material, as copyright law in the US gives the copyright holder the right to decide the time and form of first publication. So the habits and assumptions that guide our work on already published material can lead us astray when working in an archive. Prepare your notes in the archive, as well as your eventual chapters and articles, with this in mind; it is likely that you will neither be able to quote from the manuscripts nor reproduce as many as you might like from your position as an economically disinterested scholar and/or enthusiastic Butler fan. Be sure to give yourself the necessary lead time to contact the estate and secure the permissions.
Happy hunting! The Butler archive is a tremendous resource, nearly unique in our field, and something that will continue to transform the study of Butler’s work for decades to come.—Gerry Canavan, English, Marquette University
Exhibition Review: “Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas,” University of California, Riverside, ARTSblock. The Mundos Alternos exhibition (16 Sep., 2007–4 Feb. 2018) presented a wide range of contemporary artworks by over thirty US Latinx and Latin American artists who imagine alternative futures through their engagement with sf iconographies, science and technology, and visual culture. If science fiction has usually been situated within literature and film, Mundos Alternos showcases visual artists who are contemplating the role that indigenous, Latinx, and Latin American people play in building alternate worlds. Working across a variety of media in their treatment of histories of violence, these artists contemplate the catastrophic repercussions of colonialism and capitalism in the Americas. Some artists, such as ADÁL and Claudio Dicochea, employ satire and humor in order to undermine dominant discourses of militarization, racialized hierarchies, and xenophobic “alienation.” In many cases, the works articulate a critical utopian impulse to develop ethical and sustainable possibilities for living in the world. Collectively, these artworks enact a gesture toward the Zapatista vision of “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” (a world that accommodates many worlds).
One of the major works in the exhibition is a community-based art project, Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program, a collaboration between artist Rigo 23 and the Zapatistas. The project transforms the white cube into a completely immersive space by filling it with baskets, quilts, paintings, videos, slogans, and ambient sounds created by the Zapatista artists. A corn-shaped spaceship, filled with detailed dioramas, is the centerpiece. The “Alien Skins” section of the show features two exhibits of otherworldly costumes. A selection of work includes L.A. David’s wearable Dayglo chronicle of extraterrestrial visitation, Guadalupe Maravilla’s techno-shaman headdress, and Mundo Meza’s prize- winning space-age haute couture. Located on the second floor, the two sections of the exhibit are connected by a suspended catwalk. The artwork here playfully converts the museum space into a spaceship a la Barbarella, with all the essentials for interstellar travel: movie projector, fabulous wardrobe, and future-fashion runway.
The exhibition also included a program of scholarly talks and performances by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, La Pocha Nostra, and Carmelita Tropicana. For the opening, Rubén Ortiz-Torres and Salvador “Chava” Muñoz staged a performance of their futuristic lowrider, Alien Toy. This remote-controlled, kinetic car-sculpture disrupted the conventional solemnity of the museum space when it hydraulically disassembled itself, its doors, flatbed, and hood spinning in a frenzied mechanical dance.
Mundos Alternos was co-curated by Robb Hernández, Tyler Stallings, and Joanna Szupinska-Myers, with Kathryn Poindexter as Project Manager. The exhibition is presented with a film series curated by Sherryl Vint with the support of Nikolay Maslov. The show represents a major contribution to the body of work concerned with questions of power, difference, and alternative modes of sf beyond literature and film.—Rudi Kraeher, University of California at Riverside
CFP: Worlding SF: Building, Inhabiting and Understanding SF Universes, Graz, Austria, 6-8 Dec. 2018. Inspired by Martin Heidegger’s notion of “worlding,” the “Worlding SF” conference seeks to explore three thematic clusters: world-building, processes, and practices of being in fictional worlds, from the point of view of characters, readers, and viewers/players/fans and also from the standpoint of the subtextual messages these fantastic visions convey. Keynote speakers include Mark Bould (University of the West of England, Bristol), Gerry Canavan (Marquette University, USA), and Paweł Frelik (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland). Selected conference papers will be published in the New Dimensions in Science Fiction series at University of Wales Press, to be edited by Paweł Frelik and Patrick B. Sharp. Interested scholars are invited to submit abstracts for individual papers on topics that may include transmedia storytelling and world-building (establishing coherence, explaining contradictions, embracing contradictions, etc.); the (im)mutability of sf worlds (retconning the operating principles of established universes); world-building and philosophy; human and nonhuman agents’ being-in-the- (fictional)-world; worlds as characters in their own right; engaging with sf storyworlds/universes—as in fan culture but also popular representations of specific sf worlds; movement and stasis in/of sf worlds; overcoming marginalization in sf worlds (race, class, gender, sexuality, species); non-western conceptualizations of sf worlds (e.g. indigenous cosmologies); and sf worlds and the “real” world.
Limited funding for independent scholars and graduate students may be available. The deadline for abstracts is 15 April 2018. Please use the submission form on the conference website (www.worlding-sf.com). Direct inquiries to contact@worlding-sf.com.—Stefan “Steve” Rabitsch, Michael Fuchs, and Stefan Brandt, University of Graz
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