Microworlds

Introduction

It was toward the end of the 1960s that I began corresponding with Stanislaw Lem. I had been a voracious reader of science fiction for many years, although I disliked most of what I read and saw it as a waste of the form’s potential. Perhaps it was this similarity in our views that Lem found attractive.

Science fiction differs from other popular genres in that its readers are frequently articulate, eager to meet and talk with other science-fiction fans. There is a whole science-fiction subculture, with hundreds of amateur magazines, or “fanzines,” devoted to science fiction, its authors, and its audience. These magazines, most with a circulation of only a few hundred copies, are found not only in the United States, where they started, but all over the world, even in Communist countries. Since the early 1960s I myself have edited such a fanzine, called Quarber Merkur; it is devoted to the analysis of science fiction and fantasy writing and is rather critical of them. At that time I knew of Lem, but I considered him only one science-fiction writer among many, though perhaps the most important in Eastern Europe; I had read very little of his work. In Germany he was little more than a name; few of his books had appeared in German, mainly in East Germany. His first science-fiction novel, Astronauci (1951; The Astronauts), had been widely translated, and a few other works had appeared in France and Italy, mostly in atrocious translations. That was all.

In 1968 I published a review of an East German translation of Lem’s novel The Invincible in my magazine and sent the author a copy, without comment. In response, Lem wrote me a long and extremely interesting letter in German. That was the beginning of a long correspondence; by now Lem’s letters to me fill three large files. They constitute the most detailed documentation in the West of Lem’s thoughts, activities, and international career since 1968. From his letters I recognized a truly remarkable mind, and when I became a science-fiction editor in West Germany in 1970 I was able to publish him. Then it occurred to me that I might do more for Lem if I became his literary agent.

Early in our correspondence, Lem indicated that he was planning to write a study of science fiction but was having difficulty obtaining source materials. I sent him what I considered interesting and drew his attention to a number of writers, among them Cordwainer Smith, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, C. M. Kornbluth, and Philip José Farmer. Aside from supplying some works of science fiction and also some of the few then existing books about science fiction (especially the criticism of Damon Knight and James Blish), I made no attempt to influence the shape of Lem’s book, nor would any such endeavor have been successful with a writer like Lem. (Curiously, some science-fiction writers later implied I had unduly influenced Lem or even made him up.)

The result of Lem’s efforts was finally published in 1971 as Fantastyka i futurologia (Science Fiction and Futurology). It is both a rigorous investigation of the theoretical basis of science fiction and a detailed analysis of many of its major topics and literary themes. The first volume in particular contains some highly theoretical reasoning that is without precedent in other books on science fiction, most of which are historical, biographical, or bibliographical in character. So far Lem’s book has appeared outside Poland only in German and (in abridged form) in Hungarian. Two chapters have been published in English in the journal Science-Fiction Studies, “The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of Science-Fiction Structuring” and “Metafantasia: The Possibilities of Science Fiction.” Both give an indication of the freshness and originality of Lem’s approach and also shed light on his own science fiction.

While Lem was writing Fantastyka i futurologia, we corresponded a great deal, and in his letters Lem provided extensive explanations of what he was doing. Later I published some of these letters as separate articles. “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction” had its genesis in a lengthy letter; it is the most succinct statement of the aims of Lem’s book. Lem also wrote many reviews and essays for my magazine, and I translated many of Lem’s writings for Australian publications like John Foyster’s Journal of Omphalistic Epistemology and especially Bruce Gillespie’s Science Fiction Commentary. These writings proved quite controversial for science-fiction buffs, especially the long essay “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case — with Exceptions,” a more polemical version of a chapter from Fantastyka i futurologia.

Lem has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and more of a philosophical than a poetic bent; scientific and philosophical inquiry has always played an important part in his work. Even in his fiction there is a strong essayistic element. Learned disquisitions are frequently woven into the plot, and if anything this practice has grown stronger with the passage of time. The stories in the various cycles (such as the Ijon Tichy tales, the Pirx stories, and the philosophical tales of the Cyberiad) become more complex with time; sometimes they carry so heavy an intellectual load that the story is in danger of being smothered. Moreover, Lem leans increasingly toward forms that are hybrids of fiction and nonfiction. His Master’s Voice, a novel of science, is actually a brilliant essay on the limits of human knowledge, the process of cognition, and the moral responsibility of the scientist. It was followed by fictions that do away altogether with conventional characters and narrative. A Perfect Vacuum is a collection of reviews of nonexistent books; Imaginary Magnitude brings together introductions to equally nonexistent works.

So it is hardly surprising that Lem should have made a critical study of the problem that interests him most, that of the scientific and literary foundations of his own and others’ writings. Given the vagaries of translation, however, very little of Lem’s criticism is available in English, and most of what is available deals with science fiction, the genre which Lem himself favors most of the time. Of course, the practice of science fiction is an important subject of Lem’s nonfiction writing, but it is only one of many. Lem’s interests range from cybernetics and artificial intelligence to cosmology and cosmogony, genetic engineering, the creation of simulated environments, literary theory and the reception of literary works, and indeed everything pertaining to the future of man and his civilization.

In Dialogi (1957; Dialogues) Lem discussed, in the form of Socratic dialogues between a Berkeleyan Hylas and Filonous, the amazing prospects of the young science of cybernetics. His Summa Technologiae (1964), perhaps his most important discursive work, is a futurological treatise unlike anything else on the subject. Instead of presenting the usual catalogue of wonderful or horrible things that the future has in store, Lem selects certain ideas to pursue to their outermost limits — the problem of cosmic civilizations, the evolution of artificial intelligence, the genetic remodeling of man, the creation of worlds, stellar engineering; or he formulates daring hypotheses about the breeding of information or the total reconstruction of reality.

In Filozofia przypadku (1968; The Philosophy of Chance), Lem turned to quite another question: why are works of literature received differently in different ages and different cultures, being highly esteemed at certain times and held in low regard at others? Here Lem tried to arrive at an empirical theory of literature that would take into account such temporal and cultural factors. The book also contains a spirited polemic against structuralism, a polemic that is continued in Fantastyka i futurologia, in which Lem applies to science fiction the theories elaborated in the earlier, more general volume.

Lem’s relationship with science fiction is a love-hate relationship. Although much of his writing can only be called science fiction, for a long time Lem was not familiar with what other science-fiction writers were doing (he has often declared that he lived in Poland like Robinson Crusoe on his island). Verne and Wells he read in his youth, but modern Western science fiction was unknown to him until the late 1950s, when he read some of it, mostly in French translation, following his publication in France by Denoël. Only much later was he able to read more widely, and the more science fiction he read, the more he was disappointed. This disappointment is reflected in many of his autobiographical pieces and, of course, in his criticism. In the late sixties, Lem decided to put his ideas about science fiction into systematic form. The result was Fantastyka i futurologia, a major study of Western science fiction.

For a time Lem played the part of a missionary in the science-fiction world, but today he feels he was wasting his time trying to reform science fiction by criticism, and he has virtually stopped writing about it (and reading it), although he still contributes occasionally to publications like Science-Fiction Studies. To judge from the reaction to Lem’s essays, few understood him. But some people at least seem to have understood him: in 1976 the Science Fiction Writers of America revoked Lem’s honorary membership, following publication by an American press service of excerpts from an article of his in a German newspaper, sharply critical of science fiction. Officially, Lem’s membership was withdrawn on technical grounds. Had Lem been less critical of science fiction, of course, the SFWA officers would have had no reason to read the bylaws of their own organization, and Lem would not have been treated so shabbily. (The whole affair is documented in Science-Fiction Studies, July 1977 ff.)

A Polish reviewer has remarked that Lem is not interested in literature per se at all; his main interest is in the structure of the world, not the structure of the literary work. Lem is more interested in intellectual problems than in their literary expression. He has no patience with the notion of fiction as entertainment or art for art’s sake, and fiction without intellectual problems bores him. He is filled with curiosity about what is not yet known. For him, science fiction is a laboratory for trying out experiments in new ways of thinking; it should be a spearhead of cognition. It should attempt what hasn’t been thought or done before.

These goals are of course impossible to achieve, let alone in a literature of mass entertainment. Lem sees science fiction as literature with great potential — a potential that naïve apologists often claim has already been achieved — and he is all the more disappointed that it falls so far short of his expectations. He complains that it is only a rehash of old myths and fairy tales, that it avoids all kinds of real problems, and that it resorts to narrative patterns of primitive adventure literature, which are wholly inadequate to express what is claimed for science fiction. For him, science fiction plays “empty games” — the tired old vaudeville of time travel, robots, supermen, mutants, extrasensory perception, and the rest.

From this disappointment comes the polemical acerbity of Lem’s writings on science fiction. He believes in old-fashioned cultural and intellectual virtues, which he sees threatened by the onslaught of mass culture. Science fiction is a traitor to those values; even worse, it often claims to possess those values when it does not, quite unlike more modest forms of popular fiction. One of Lem’s recurrent nightmares is the flood of information whose sheer volume makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find the few good works in the mass of the bad. Such a leveling effect he also attributes to structuralism, one of his main targets.

It is Lem’s concern for the real world and its cultural heritage that explains the sharpness of his tone, for he writes in a tradition where cultural values matter. Lem does not have to denigrate “Western science fiction” in order to ingratiate himself with the Polish authorities, as one of the sillier opinions once current among American science-fiction writers had it. Nor does it follow, from the fact that Lem’s criticisms in Fantastyka i futurologia deal mostly with American and English science fiction, that he likes the Soviet variety any better. It is only that it would be more difficult for a citizen of Poland to write serious criticism about Soviet science fiction, not because it couldn’t be published, but rather because objective discussion of the better works would be fraught with dangers for the writers discussed. Nevertheless, the present collection includes an analysis of one of the most brilliant examples of modern Soviet science fiction, Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky brothers, originally published as an afterword to a Polish edition in a series entitled “Lem Recommends.” (The series included Philip K. Dick’s Ubik — Lem’s afterword is also printed here — and short story collections by M. R. James and by the Polish weird fiction writer Stefan Grabiliski, as well as Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea.)

All the essays in this volume have been published before, and the selection presented here was made entirely from existing translations. The magazines in which they first appeared range from science-fiction fanzines to Science-Fiction Studies and The New Yorker. Some were written originally in German; two came into English via Hungarian and German, respectively. Of some essays, such as the one on Borges, there is no Polish version; one, “Todorov’s Fantastic Theory of Literature,” was originally written in German, later rewritten in Polish by the author himself, and then translated from Polish to English. The autobiographical essay was commissioned by a Chicago publisher for a series on contemporary authors. It was written by Lem in German and published in my translation. A somewhat different version appeared in The New Yorker, as “Chance and Order.”

Despite the mixed origins of the essays and the many hands involved in giving them their final shape, I think that this collection has a remarkable unity and can serve as a useful introduction to Lem’s nonfiction and to his ideas on science fiction and fantasy. It should contribute to a better understanding of Lem’s unique fiction, so much different in scope from other science fiction even when it uses the same forms.

Special thanks are due to all the people who first published these essays, especially to Bruce Gillespie, whose Science Fiction Commentary was in its day one of the liveliest and most open of the many fan magazines in the science-fiction field.

—Franz Rottensteiner