“THERE’S A PARADOX at the heart of science fiction. The most basic aspiration of the genre — its very essence, really — is to transcend time and place.”
“Not just to predict the future, but to imagine things that are totally foreign to human experience.”
“SF tries to imagine the unimaginable, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to describe the indescribable, and to do it all in entertaining, accessible prose.”
“Stanisław Lem, the Polish novelist, futurologist, literary theorist, satirist, and philosophical gadfly, tried mightily to free his work from the shackles of the present.”
“In dozens of novels, short stories, essays, metaliterary experiments, and futurological treatises, he attempted to imagine everything from a living ocean that could read human minds (Solaris) to a swarm of nonbiological mechanical insects (The Invincible) to a supercomputer many times more intelligent than its human creators (Golem XIV). In his 1964 book Summa Technologiae, Lem mocked writers whose works were merely historical fiction recast in the future — “corsairs and pirates of the thirtieth century.””
“It’s easy to find targets for Lem’s criticism; most SF movies are exercises in wish fulfillment, projections of a space-age Columbus in search of a final frontier. For Lem, science fiction meant thinking harder and imagining more.”
“But even Lem could not transcend his own history. Born in 1921 in Lviv (then called Lwów as part of the Second Polish Republic), he survived World War II, served in the Polish resistance, and lived for most of his life under Polish Communism.”
“In his work, he turned repeatedly to themes reflecting those experiences, including the role of chance in determining fate, the oppressive bureaucracy of authoritarian regimes, and the possibility of a runaway arms race that escapes human control.”
“Ironically, Lem’s effort to think outside of history often provides the best descriptions of the period he lived through.”
“Lem died in 2006, having lived to see many of his ideas come true. Yet today he has fallen into quasi-obscurity, at least in the English-speaking world. Not even in his heyday did he have the cachet in the United States of writers like Isaac Asimov or Robert A. Heinlein.”
“But Lem was phenomenally popular in Eastern and Central Europe. According to a recent estimate, his books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold almost 40 million copies, and he was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize. By all measures he was one of the most successful writers of the 20th century.”
“three new books on Lem have been published in the last two years, all of them written or edited by literary scholar Peter Swirski, the most prominent Lem expert in the world. These include Lemography: Stanislaw Lem in the Eyes of the World (2014), a collection of critical essays co-edited by University of Alberta professor Waclaw M. Osadnik; Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel (2014), a collection of Lem’s correspondence with his English translator; and Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future (2015), a collection of Swirski’s own pieces.”
“Among science fiction writers, Lem was one of the most creative and intellectually bold. But even he couldn’t escape his time.”
“In 1950, during a trip to the mountain resort of Zakopane, he made the acquaintance of “a rotund gentleman who turned out to be the director of a state press.” This chance meeting resulted in the publication of The Astronauts (1951), Lem’s first successful novel. The book — a small fragment of which is available in English in Lemography — is about an expedition to Venus in the early 21st century, following the discovery of alien remains at the site of the Tunguska explosion. When the astronauts reach Venus, they discover that the native population has mysteriously destroyed itself on the eve of launching an attack on Earth — a grim foreboding of species-wide self-destruction.”
“In his New Yorker essay, “Chance and Order,” Lem described his writing regimen from the period: “I usually get up a short time before five in the morning […] When I was younger I could write as long as my stamina held out; the power of my intellect gave way only after my physical prowess had been exhausted.” This work ethic resulted in an impressive output. Between 1956 and 1968, he wrote at least 17 books, four of which appeared in 1961. If Lem has become synonymous with Polish SF, it’s because for years he was a one-man industry, churning out a library’s worth of books all by himself.”
“Compared to most science fiction writers, Lem’s thinking was both disinterested and far-reaching. In works like the nonfictional Summa Technologiae, he explored the possibilities of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and genetic engineering, comparing technological advancement to biological evolution.”
“Just as evolution had no moral agenda, he argued, technological developments were neither inherently good nor bad, but followed their own internal logic. Unlike most would-be prophets, who predict the future with warnings of dystopia or promises of a better tomorrow, Lem approached the subject without a moralizing tone.”
“But in his fiction Lem did explore the pitfalls that the future might hold.”
“For Lem the crackdown on free speech was an obstacle, but not a life-threatening one. Early novels like The Astronauts and The Magellan Nebula were favorable to communism, predicting its success on both social and technological fronts.”
“Although he later disavowed those works, they were, he wrote, a product of their time — a choice of “historically untenable optimism” over “skepticism that was […] apt to turn into nihilism.””
“Even as he grew more daring, his books were rarely blocked from publication. Despite Soviet influence, Poland avoided the worst of Stalinist repression, and during the period of liberalization that followed Stalin’s death and Poland’s October Revolution, writers like Lem were increasingly free to publish what they liked.”
“That freedom had its limits, however, and Lem took care to present his criticisms as SF.”
“These ideas evoke comparisons to Orwell, and to the British novelist’s famous depiction of Stalinism in 1984 (1949). But in his letters to Kandel, Lem claimed that Orwell had gotten Stalinism wrong. Whereas Orwell described his dystopian regime as “a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” Lem argued that communist oppression was not a sadistic evil pursued for its own sake but a natural result of turning state ideology into dogma.”
“Similarly, Lem critiqued Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, writing that “she made out these systems to be fruit of strictly intentional evil.” Rather, he writes, “Stalin’s times concocted a myth, never concretely or cogently expressed, of the state as a machine that was not only perfect, but also omniscient and omnipotent.””
“For Lem, the tragic consequences weren’t the result of premeditated cruelty, but the logical outcome of turning politics into faith.”
“For Lem the world wasn’t divided between good and evil, but between bad and even worse.”
“Starting in the late 1960s, Lem turned away from conventional SF in favor of experimental works of literary and cultural criticism. These included books like The Philosophy of Chance (1968), in which he attempted to produce an empirical form of literary theory, and the Borgesian A Perfect Vacuum (1971) and One Human Minute (1986), in which he reviewed nonexistent books.”
“While Lem’s literary experiments displayed a playful dexterity, his cultural criticisms were often clichéd, focusing on the West’s supposed vulgarity, tastelessness, and excess. In a 1992 interview with Swirski, he commented on the exploding number of TV channels, calling them “simply appalling. It is like having two thousand shirts or pairs of shoes.” While Lem’s main argument was about the unmanageable explosion of media, neither TV channels nor an excessive wardrobe seems like humanity’s greatest crime.”
“If Lem didn’t think much of American popular culture, neither did he have much esteem for its literature. In his letters to Kandel he singled out books like Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), which he called “utterly worthless,” and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which he proclaimed a “demented dud.””
“But he reserved his greatest scorn for American science fiction, which he attacked as “pseudo-scientific fairy tales” and “hyped-up trash,” among other insults.”
“When the aggrieved Science Fiction Writers of America revoked his honorary membership in 1975 over an article titled “Looking Down on Science Fiction: A Novelist’s Choice for the World’s Worst Writing,” Lem expressed his satisfaction to Kandel, commenting that “to me the opinion of morons is worth exactly nothing.” Later it turned out that the English title of the piece was an inaccurate translation of the German, but Lem’s views were clear enough.”
“He foresaw dystopia not only in resource-starved wastelands, but also in technological prisons of pleasure and excess. “The idea would be to expand the gamut of pleasurable sensations to the maximum, and perhaps even to bring into being […] other, as yet unknown, kinds of sensual stimulation and gratification,” he wrote in His Master’s Voice.”
“This possibility became the premise for The Futurological Congress, in which humanity becomes trapped in a pharmacologically induced paradise, unaware of its own looming extinction.”
“The question of alien contact isn’t just about aliens, however; it’s also about humanity. As an intelligent species develops, Lem theorized, it eventually outstrips the capacity of its natural environment to sustain it. At that point, it reaches a crisis: either it manages to overcome its environmental limitations, or it collapses. If the reason we haven’t found other civilizations is because they’ve destroyed themselves, or have retreated into a dark age, that doesn’t bode well for our own future. But if it’s because they’ve passed successfully through the bottleneck — the “singularity,” if you will — and emerged transformed on the other side, who knows what our future may hold?”
“Lem considered any effort to make accurate predictions a fool’s errand — “Nothing ages as fast as the future,” he once wrote — but he did try to think rigorously about the paths our civilization might take.”
“At first technology is applied toward our environment, he argued, as we enter the Anthropocene era on Earth. But eventually it is turned toward the human organism itself, leading to a stage of existence that is as yet unpredictable. “Man remains the last relic of Nature, the last ‘authentic product of Nature’ for an indefinite period of time,” he writes. But “the invasion of technology created by man into his body is inevitable.””
“Most importantly, Lem viewed biological evolution and technological development as part of the same process. Following Norbert Wiener’s formulation that there exist in the universe “islands of locally decreasing entropy” — that is, areas of space-time that tend naturally toward greater complexity and organization — Lem posited that evolution was not just a biological process guiding life on Earth but a phenomenon that could include any form of matter or energy.”
“While these islands might sometimes result in biological life, they might also result in other kinds of complex systems, including our own creations. “Who causes whom?” he asked in Summa Technologiae. “Does technology cause us, or do we cause it?””
“Or, as he put it more pointedly in His Master’s Voice, “The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.””
“Of course, there is no guarantee that any Earth-based society will reach this point. Perhaps, as Lem suggested in The Futurological Congress, we will simply drug ourselves out of existence.”
“As Lem warned in an essay titled “Weapon Systems of The Twenty First Century or the Upside-down Evolution,” our tendency toward conflict may prompt us to invent ever more intelligent weapons, until they slip from our control and lead to ultimate disaster.”
“Instead of successfully exiting the window of contact — or entering a new one — we might die on the threshold, a victim of our own advancement. The possibilities for our demise are endless.”
“Ezra Glinter is the editor of Have I Got a Story for You (2016), an anthology of Yiddish fiction in translation. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.”