Characters Discussed
Rohan
Rohan, the navigator of the spaceship Invincible, which has been sent to explore the planet Regis III. Some time before, another spaceship, the Condor, landed on Regis III. Less than two days after arrival, the Condor sent a garbled message and then ceased transmitting. The Invincible has been sent to learn what happened. Rohan, the protagonist of the novel and the only substantially developed character, is an Everyman who rises to heroic stature. Like his fellow crew members, he is horrified by the discovery of the Condor, whose crew—all dead—apparently went mad. Like his comrades, he comes to fear and loathe the force that opposes them on Regis III: swarms of tiny crystalline forms that swoop and scatter like insects and form enormous pulsing clouds with great electromagnetic power. Rohan’s triumph comes not in the victory-by-force of the conventional hero but in the recognition—even appreciation—of this “black rain” as an independent form of existence, however alien to humanity.
Horpach
Horpach, the astrogator (commander) of the Invincible. A gray-haired veteran, tall and broad-shouldered, decisive, and seemingly unflappable—a virtual caricature of the steely military leader—Horpach is revealed to be human and vulnerable in a crucial meeting with Rohan.
Lauda
Lauda, the chief biologist of the Invincible. Like Horpach, Lauda is a veteran, unusually old for spaceflight. It is he who first proposes that their enemy on Regis III is the product of eons of inorganic or “machine” evolution, a hypothesis that is confirmed by subsequent events.
The Characters
The Invincible has elements of both the classic detective novel, in which the characters investigate some unusual event, and the futuristic adventure story, in which there is no convenient or unequivocal solution to the problem at hand. While the setting is not as conventional as that offered in Sledztwo (1959; The Investigation, 1974) or Katar (1976; The Chain of Chance, 1978), the detective genre laced with Stanisaw Lem’s ubiquitous irony and sense of play serves the characters well. The quest of Horpach and Rohan for their missing comrades proves to be an exploration of man’s ethical dilemmas made tortuous and bitter by an alien contact that can be pursued only from the narrow perspective of human understanding.
Horpach and Rohan emerge as distinctive characters during this enterprise. Horpach, the unrepentant rationalist and conqueror, is technologically confident, grimly certain of the rightness of contact, and determined to overcome the cybernetic creatures of Regis III. On the other hand, Horpach is also courageous and, within the sphere of technology, quite resourceful. He expresses the themes most critics agree are central to Lem’s work: the tension of living in a universe of “chance and order” in which the natural desire to gain knowledge of the world often becomes an arrogant need to dominate and control what is discovered.
Rohan, in contrast, is a struggling, suffering character whose human limitations are brought to the surface by a confrontation with the unknown. Lem’s central characters are often loners who display a range of personalities. While Ijon Tichy, for example, of Dzienniki gwiazdowe (1957; The Star Diaries, 1976), is a genial amateur and unpredictable Gulliver who indulges in intellectual high jinks, Rohan, like Kelvin in Solaris (1961; English translation, 1970), is outwardly self-assured and inquisitive about the cosmos, but often psychologically unguarded. For example, he is initially confident about the meaning of the mission to Regis III and seemingly subscribes to Horpach’s ideals and values, but as the cybernetic “insects” inflict one humiliating defeat after another on the crew of the Invincible and their formidable hardware, Rohan’s assessment of the mission...
(This entire section contains 423 words.)
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is clouded by anxiety, sleeplessness, and uncertainty.
Rohan is very much a typical Lemian protagonist. Despite the horrific specter of fellow humans stripped of experience, knowledge, and personality by the cybernetic swarms, Rohan comes to see that the alien creatures have a right to exist apart from human expectations and that conquering them or seeking revenge is pointless and illusory. He makes a painful but authentically ethical decision that humans have no business on Regis III and should simply leave.
Characters
Who are the human representatives in Lem's work, and why are they unable to escape their habitual ways of thinking? The answer might be found in the notable imbalances depicted in the character portrayals within The Invincible.
Only Horpach, the Commander, and Rohan, the Navigator and second-in-command, are given sufficient attention to stand out as individuals. Even then, their differences are so finely balanced that their individuality seems like two sides of the same coin. Rohan, as he reluctantly aligns himself with Horpach, begins to see himself in his superior's image, dreaming of one day becoming the "commander of the Invincible." Both leaders, distant and reserved with the crew, view each other through a rigid, hierarchical lens. Their relationship remains strictly professional; indeed, although "they had flown together many parsecs, they had never become friends."
Their adherence to military codes of conduct, along with the stringent rules of space exploration, fosters a similar rigidity among the crew. The reduction of leaders to mere professional roles is even more pronounced among the forty or so crew members depicted in the novel. Their last names, paired with their areas of scientific expertise, are the primary means of distinguishing them. Even their quarters on the spaceship are nameless, marked only by functional initials like Ch. I., Ch. Ph., Ch. T., and Ch. B. Clad in uniformly white suits reminiscent of lab coats, the specialists aboard the ship appear as a faceless collective, obedient to their military leaders and reflecting their constraints. This portrayal of the crew prompts questions about the intersection of science and the military-industrial complex. The uneasy partnership between science and this complex is a significant concern, particularly when the latter dictates the research agenda, becoming the primary driver of scientific priorities and strategies—a recurring theme in Lem's work.
For many European critics, this reductionist depiction of the crew aligns with Lem's focus on universal, rather than individual, human issues—a stance the author has reiterated multiple times. Ewa Balcerzak suggests that within Lem's narratives, it is almost inevitable that "man becomes a figure portraying humanity's scientific thought, its moral dilemmas, metaphysical and cultural problems, etc." Given the philosophical demands Lem places on his works, simplifying characters to the bare narrative minimum seems unavoidable.
These observations are equally applicable to many of Lem's other "alien contact" novels. Even in his early work, Eden (1959), the epistemological and narrative challenges that reappear in The Invincible are already evident. In Eden, a team of specialists tries to understand an alien world, only to realize the limitations of their Earthly assumptions. Interestingly, the characters are identified solely by their professional titles: Captain, Doctor, Chemist, Physicist, Engineer, and Cyberneticist. This reduction of individuals to their professions is further emphasized through symbolic traits in their personalities. The Doctor and Chemist, who represent the biochemical sciences, are portrayed as more humane and less aggressive in their interactions with the civilization of Eden. Conversely, the physical scientists prefer more instrumental and invasive methods. This depiction is clearly symbolic, as both groups make errors that stem from the stereotypes of their respective fields.
The similarly stereotypical portrayal of an all-male scientific community in The Invincible serves as an ironic commentary on their failed research mission on Regis III. The same irony is present in the reductionist lineup of specialists aboard the spaceship. With the notable absence of biological and medical sciences, the crew predominantly represents the physical sciences. What does this significant imbalance suggest? These "hard" sciences, focused exclusively on the physical universe, are assumed to be objective and free from human bias. However, Regis III ultimately reveals that they are burdened with Earthly preconceptions.
