[In the following review, Foden offers a positive assessment of Peace on Earth.]

Born in 1921 in Poland, where his medical studies were interrupted by the Nazi occupation, Stanislaw Lem has had a long and successful career. “A science fiction writer worthy of a Nobel Prize,” the New York Times has said. Among his works is the novel Solaris, filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Lem's writing combines a wild, dystopian vision—wittily, absurdly logical—with a firm grasp of actual scientific and philosophical issues. In Peace on Earth, he introduces us once again to his cynical but essentially warm-hearted space traveller Ijon Tichy.

Given the Other and (indeed) other well-traded types of binary sensibility, it was only a matter of time before someone wrote a novel with a narrator whose brain has divided into two. Last hope in (or off) a world where the arms race has been segregated into sectors on the moon, Tichy is sent up to find out what is happening. The sectors, in which weapons have been programmed to self-mutate and, if need be, fight it out between themselves without any immediate human damage, have somehow become invisible to the “Lunar Agency” that arbitrates between the various earthbound powers.

Tichy's investigations are mainly performed by a series of remote mechanical simulacra of himself, called LEMS, and attached by sensors to a bodysuit worn by him in the ship. But one landing is non-virtual (though the v-word isn't bandied about), during which Tichy suffers an unexplained and non-invasive operation, namely a callotomy: the severing of the corpus callosum or great commissure, which connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

The right hemisphere (apparently more or less unexplained territory, so far as neurophysiology is concerned) controls the left side of the body, and the left (the dominant side in terms of articulation) controls the right. Plainly, the physical consequences of callotomy for Tichy are disastrous. The right hemisphere seems to have taken on “a life of its own,” of which the least manifestation is that the left leg and arm are extremely disobedient; the left hemisphere, meanwhile (the ostensible narrative voice), plays Laurel to the right's Hardy.

There are lessons for narratologists, as well as for comedians, in Tichy's cranial anti-syzygy: “I interrupted my writing to kick myself. That is, my left foot kicked my right so it wasn't I, or it was only partly I, but grammar simply can't describe this situation.” Moreover, the sensual distance of the LEM suit, as Tichy relates what it/he experiences (a sexual encounter, various “deaths”), becomes a figure for the disembodied voice of the author, an oscillation between absence and presence, a mid-way reality.

That Tichy's body proper should have fallen into “two enemy camps” is, obviously enough, symbolic of the parodic scenario of generalized human conflict set up in the book—and his fallen state is appropriately instrumental in the plot. The right side (“It”) knows stuff about the Great Game (what's happening on the moon), and It's not telling left-side Tichy, never mind the various spooks from the different powers and the Lunar Agency itself who try to wheedle it out of him. He eventually develops a sign-system to negotiate between “It” and “I.” “We” tries to write down the story of the moon landing.

If we sound a bit cumbersome, don't be put off, because Lem is a very funny writer, even in translation. Going to buy shoes without laces, to overcome one difficulty of the doubling, Tichy mutters something to the salesman to excuse his erratic behaviour which isn't actually his:

Then, as he knelt before me with the shoehorn, I grabbed his nose with my left hand. My left hand, that is, grabbed his nose, and I tried to explain to this to him, the difference, figuring that even if he thought I was deranged (how could a shoe sales man know anything about callotomy?) he would still sell me the shoes. No reason for a madman to go barefoot. Unfortunately the salesman was a philosophy student working part-time in the shoe store and he was fascinated.

“Mr Tichy!” he now yelled in my apartment. “According to logic, you're either singular or you're plural! If your right hand is pulling up your pants and the left hand interferes, it means that behind each stands a separate half of the brain. … Because hands and feet don't go around fighting each other on their own!”

Among various other comic set pieces are strewn a vast number of ironical observations on technological progress. On biotechnology, for example: “Microprocessing elements called chips were being replaced by corn, the product of the genetic engineering of a culture of artificial microbes. …”

It is corny, all this, but sometimes it is sublime. The dredged-up moon scenes, archetypal combat action sequences which a less intelligent writer would have put at the start of the novel, are especially, phantasmagorically powerful, full of terror and pathos by turns. A corpse speaks: or, the damaged loop of program in the larynx of a burnt-out, leathery mechanical body speaks:

“Come, my brother. Come to me. Without fear. … Come. We will not fight. Let us be brothers, let us help each other my brother. …” A snapping sound, and the same voice but in a completely different tone, sharp, barking: “Put down your weapon! Put down your weapon! Or I'll fire! Don't try to run! Turn around! Hands up! Both hands! And don't move! Don't move!”

As well as provoking in a purely intellectual sense, Lem is a moralist and (rare in the genre) a stylist. If, strange thought, Samuel Beckett had written science fiction, he might have written it like this.