Dimensions of Lem
The greatest science-fiction writer of his era understood that the universe is unknowable, and that this was quite funny
English-language science fiction has always, one regrets to say, suffered from a certain poverty. While there are exceptions, such as H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, and Arthur C. Clarke, the rule has generally held true, and continues to do so. Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy, for example, will likely prove to be one of the great novel cycles of the 21st century, and there has been little from the West in recent years that even approaches it.
Part of this is due to a lack of literary ambition. American sci-fi, for example, almost universally tends toward a small collection of fairly simple-minded themes: the spectacular, the optimistic, the epic, and the heroic. Its heroes are usually fearless astronauts and explorers, or in works such as Dune, emperors of the universe. Quite often, the imagery of the space opera is pervasive, and the laws of physics are regarded as an irrelevant nuisance. Nonetheless, American sci-fi does reflect Americans’ general approach to space, which is the belief that it is a vast playground of infinite possibilities, to be explored, settled, perhaps exploited, and certainly understood. At its extreme, this results in products like the Star Trek franchise, which views space as the stage on which human utopia can be realized on a galactic scale; or the Star Wars films, which see the universe as the setting of epic battles between good and evil, in which good always triumphs in the end despite the inevitable hardships.
Non-Anglophone — and especially non-American — writers, on the other hand, tend to take a less triumphalist approach. Liu, for example, contemplates the vast spans of relativistic time that define the universe, in which mankind can only strive to overcome infinite distance and dilation, which always, in the end, crush its highest hopes. In Liu’s work, the universe is a tragedy, and man is condemned not by fate but by the laws of physics to a Greek destiny, in which the end is, at best, ambiguous and uncertain.
There have always been a few exceptions to this rule, of course. Dick, for example, exploited the trappings of the sci-fi genre to explore the fragility of human consciousness and its inevitable derangement via what is colloquially called “the mindfuck.” The British writer J.G. Ballard sought to assert the essential psychopathology of the human relationship with technology and the erotic possibilities it offers. And Arthur C. Clarke implied quite often that the inanimate and the infinite may be more beautiful, tragic, and perhaps alive than human beings. As a result, they stand above more conventional practitioners.
But the greatest sci-fi writer of his era, and perhaps of the entire genre, was the Polish author Stanislaw Lem. Lem, while quite popular in Europe, particularly his native eastern Europe, remains largely unknown to Anglophone sci-fi fans, and is particularly obscure in the United States. The reason for this is fairly obvious: he had little interest in such things as galactic wars, interstellar conquest, and attractive if juvenile gadgets like lightsabers and ray guns. As a result, he could be withering in his assessment of American sci-fi (though he admired Dick, interestingly enough) and disliked both film adaptations of his novel Solaris, which he saw as needlessly obsessed with romantic discontents irrelevant to his original intentions.
More than anything else, however, Lem stands apart from his peers due to the nature of his particular obsession, or at least the obsession that defines his greatest work. Lem’s great theme is the unknowable. That is to say, he posits that there are things about the universe — perhaps the most important things — that we not only do not understand, but can never understand. This is an almost unique theme in sci-fi, and all but non-existent in its American form. Since it is a literature of ideas, sci-fi, generally speaking, is all about knowledge and the quest for knowledge. Asimov’s legendary Foundation series, for example, is an epic tale of a small group of adepts who convey knowledge across the centuries in order to save human civilization.
To Lem, such a project would be absurd, because he posited throughout his work that there are aspects of the universe that are so alien to us that our simian minds are inherently incapable of comprehending them, and that the greatest of these may be the universe itself. In effect, Lem was sci-fi’s great pessimist.
Pessimism is endemic to eastern European culture, of course, likely due to its dire history, but almost unheard of in the sci-fi genre. Wells had a touch of it, and Dick occasionally thrived on it, but by and large sci-fi is an optimistic genre, and even Ballard, with his tales of global apocalypse, was optimistic by transgression, positing that catastrophe might offer a richer and more intense life to its survivors than a vanished normality.
A pessimistic assessment of our capacity for knowledge permeates Lem’s work, but is most striking in his greatest novels, which generally deal with the theme of “first contact” with alien civilizations. His Master’s Voice, for example, tells the tale of a group of scientists who seek to decipher a mysterious message from the stars. Lem’s striking non-conformity to the norms of the genre can be easily seen by comparing his novel to the American book and film of Contact by the perennially optimistic scientist Carl Sagan. In Contact, the quest to decipher an alien message results in the heroine’s fantastic voyage to the infinite reaches of the universe, where she meets a facsimile of her dead father in a moment of emotional redemption that repairs her semi-broken life. In His Master’s Voice, by contrast, the message is never deciphered, aspects of it threaten mankind with a nuclear holocaust, and the protagonist — who is hardly a “hero” — ultimately wonders whether humanity is worthy of such a message at all. The alien civilization that sent the message remains, in the end, as unknowable as the message itself, and mankind is left as alone as it was before.
Lem’s even more pessimistic novel Fiasco also posits a first contact scenario, though in this case humans travel to the planet in question to meet with the alien civilization, and contact is fleetingly achieved. But through a series of miscalculations, contact escalates into a military confrontation that ends in planetary genocide. Due to the inadequacies of our capacity for knowledge, Lem posits, galactic-scale atrocities may well result. Given mankind’s history of encounters between its own terrestrial civilizations, the point is well taken. Indeed, one can well imagine a Lemian version of Star Trek, far more realistic than the original, in which the mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before” always ends in disaster and mass death. Perhaps, Lem implies, the Enterprise ought to stay home, or at least adopt more modest ambitions.
While not his greatest work — that title belongs, I think, to His Master’s Voice — Lem’s Solaris is probably his most thorough exploration of this theme of the unknowable. The best known of his books due to its extraordinary if unfaithful cinematic adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky and the lesser remake by Steven Soderbergh, Solaris deals with a contact scenario of quite a different kind. “Contact” has already, in a sense, been made, but communication has proved impossible, due to the utter alienness of the alien in question. Solaris is a planet covered by a vast, living ocean that periodically throws up enormous structures that could be anything from random eruptions to vast works of art. A group of scientists in a small station hovering above the ocean have striven for decades to communicate with the alien, to no avail, until the ocean suddenly materializes figures from their lives that arouse their deepest fears and emotions. Through interaction with his “visitor,” the main character attempts to comprehend and perhaps contact Solaris. In the end, however, this attempt proves futile, and the character is left alone on one of the ocean’s constructions, contemplating whether Solaris may be a child god that, in its loneliness, is attempting to reach out to the scientists in an effort as futile as their own.
Solaris, however, goes farther than Lem’s other contemplations of the unknowable by questioning mankind’s search for knowledge itself. Near the book’s conclusion, one of the scientists ponders the issue in a passage worth quoting in full:
We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos; we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races; we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it anymore.
This soliloquy has long put me in mind of a statement by James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia Hypothesis, which holds that the Earth is a vast living organism — shades of Solaris itself — of which human beings are an essential part. “For the very first time,” Lovelock once said, “the planet has been able to see itself through our eyes … and see what an incredibly beautiful planet it is, compared with, for example, Mars or Venus, which are just deserts writ large, and horrible deserts at that.”
Lovelock’s point is well taken, especially given the current obsession with visiting and colonizing Mars on the part of scientists, astronauts, politicians, and eccentric billionaires. Lem’s work, in many ways, posits that Lovelock’s statement begs a question: why on earth would anyone want to travel to, let alone live on a place as horrible as Mars? It is a planetary desert in which nothing can survive, bathed in radiation, horrifically cold, and in every other way violently hostile to human life. This is even more striking given the larger context, which is that we waste trillions of dollars on sending men to outer space when much cheaper robotic probes are perfectly capable of exploring it in a safer and in many ways more thorough manner. Humans have evolved over literally billions of years to live on Earth, and yet, for some bizarre reason, we want out.
Lem’s answer is a fascinating one: “we want mirrors.” In effect, Lem states that not only is the universe unknowable, but we ourselves are unknowable. And we are unknowable to ourselves. We hope that our quest for knowledge of the universe will salve the pain of not knowing who we are, but this is a futile quest.
Did Lem believe, then, that the search for knowledge is itself futile? It is possible that he did. But Lem’s work is so clearly in love with science and technology that it seems unlikely. No one who writes sci-fi can dislike knowledge in and of itself. Lem may have simply sought to posit other possibilities, to point out our essential limitations, and urge us not to get ahead of ourselves, not to torture or destroy in a quest that will always be inherently limited and frustrated. Lem, perhaps, wrote cautionary tales.
His ultimate answer to what we should do about this dilemma may be, ironically, set out in a book about non-humans that is probably the funniest piece of sci-fi ever published, outdoing even The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Lem had a mordent sense of humor, and he displayed it with great aplomb in The Cyberiad, a collection of short stories about two robots who travel the universe as “constructors,” building abnormal things for absurd rulers and civilizations, and generally getting themselves into trouble from which they extricate themselves by various innovative and hilarious means. The constructors, the crotchety Klapaucius and the hapless Trurl — who is known throughout the universe for creating the galaxy’s stupidest computer — may be the closest Lem ever came to creating an alter ego. Like a C3PO and R2D2 as written by Franz Kafka in a fit of pique, Klapaucius and Trurl wander their unknowable universe, perennially amused by the silliness of their fellow robots and especially their rare encounters with humans. They by and large accept the absurdity of their situation, but remain attached to knowing what they know, figuring out what they can, and engaging in constant acts of creation that may come to naught, but are nonetheless, on some level, fulfilling, if only by getting the best of their fellow beings. They don’t know everything, and they don’t mind it, but they like knowing things, and seek to know more, if only to serve their own selfish ends. The universe, and our quest to understand it, Lem seems to say, is a comedy and not a tragedy.
In the end, however, Lem’s great contribution to sci-fi is the concept of the unknowable itself. If sci-fi is the literature of ideas, Lem was the greatest idea-miner. He went deeper and farther than his peers, and as a result his work has a certain courage to it. It takes a degree of bravery to acknowledge the unknowability of the universe; that the mind has its limits; and that by a certain point, the only knowledge we may gain will come from quantum computers or an even more advanced information processing technology. Our meager brains will prove inadequate, and our artificial creations will likely do so as well.
This requires courage to face because, while we may never know everything, or indeed anything, we do know that the universe is what it is. Its nature pervades and permeates us, we are a part of it, and yet we do not understand it, nor do we know if there is anything beyond or outside it. Yet whatever it is exists, out there in the impossibly vast cosmic spaces. This can be a terrifying thought, but Lem’s work proposes an antidote to fear, which is that, so long as we observe a certain modesty, it is perfectly alright that both we and the universe are unknowable. His tragedy deals with the hubristic attempts of human beings to deny this essential fact, but his comedy emphasizes that, while they are amusing, our attempts to know at least something about ourselves and the universe are nothing to be ashamed of. We may, after all, succeed in creating the galaxy’s stupidest computer.
Photo courtesy of Stanislaw Lem’s secretary, Wojciech Zemek. Resize and digital processing by Masur.