SOURCE: “Lem as Moral Theologian,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, Pt. 2, July, 1994, pp. 212–24.

[In the following essay, Krabbenhoft examines elements of Christian morality in Lem's novels concerning human encounters with extraterrestrial life. Focusing on Fiasco, Solaris, The Invincible, and His Master's Voice, Krabbenhoft discusses the conflicts and juxtapositions of religious morality and scientific rationality as humans interact with alien beings whose intentions and spiritual essence is ambiguous or unknown.]

If Stanislaw Lem's novels on the theme of Contact With Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) can be said to express a coherent set of moral convictions, he can be described, I think, as a blend of secular humanist and scientist with a social conscience. At the same time, Lem's moral thinking, as secular as it is, is colored by his use of vocabulary and arguments traditionally associated with religion, in particular with theological speculation on the nature of absolute Being or Beings. The purpose of this essay is to examine a second, distinct form of religious discourse that is present in many of Lem's CETI novels and takes his moral thinking on the subject of CETI in a new direction in his most recently translated work in this genre, Fiasco (1986; English translation, 1987). In this disturbing novel Lem frames typically 20th-century admonitions about the dangers of technological prowess divorced from moral prudence in the language of Counter-Reformation moral theology: we find the “question about technology” viewed through the doctrine of probabilism, the theoretical underpinning of early modern moral casuistry. It is my contention that this moral probabilism in Fiasco is the latest stage in the evolution of Lem's thinking about CETI, which in the course of 30 years has changed from a concern that holds out the hope of toleration and reconciliation, to a profound and ironic skepticism. In this novel the spokesperson for Lem's new perspective is, significantly, not a scientist but a Dominican moral theologian.

Before going on, I should point out that Lem is not the first sf [science fiction] writer to speculate on the moral dimension of CETI. It could be argued that this genre is largely defined by its questioning of the application of technology, when science extends beyond the boundaries of human society into the depths of outer space and projects onto a screen of galactic dimensions the disastrous consequences of our inability to exert moral control over the creations of the mind. James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke, and Orson Scott Card, to name but three of the most innovative writers in this field, have advanced the premise that if humankind should ever reach the stars, the victims of our inability to wield scientific knowledge wisely will not be other human beings but entire alien cultures. In their novels, CETI so greatly amplifies the cognitive dissonance that has forever led one group of humans to turn against another that the non-human other is inevitably destroyed: to the genocidal consequences of moral error, these future scenarios add the unspeakable horror of exocide.¹ What makes Lem stand out in this group, as I see it, is the particular clarity with which he juxtaposes a specifically Christian moral paradigm with the purely logical schemes of empirical science, the better to point out the inadequacy of the latter in dealing with morally ambiguous situations.

1. “If incomprehensibility had degrees.” In Fiasco, the vehicle for the latest stage in Lem's moral thinking, the Dominican theologian named Arago has been sent as Papal envoy on humankind's first CETI expedition. Although the protagonist of this complex novel is the rocket pilot Parvis, Father Arago is given ample opportunity within the work's narrative economy to express his views about the morality of the enterprise: far from being a passive ecclesiastical observer—a marginal figure among scientists and explorers—he becomes the sounding board, in head-on conflict with the expedition's captain, for the debate over how the expedition should handle the Contact.² As I suggested above, this foregrounding of moral discourse in the person of a Roman Catholic religious marks a significant departure from Lem's earlier treatment of dilemmas arising from Contact.

Just as Lem is not the first sf writer to link CETI and mass extermination, he has his precursors in the use of casuistry to explore the consequences of Contact—notably James Blish, who gave a Jesuit priest top billing in his 1958 novel, A Case of Conscience.³ Unique to Lem's thinking on the subject, however, is the profoundly “stressed” cognitive framework in which the catastrophe takes place, a direct consequence of the radical lack of certainty with which Arago and the other members of the crew are forced to operate. In this novel, the entire sequence of events that plays itself out when the humans enter the alien solar system resists rational explanation. Although the ship's scientists come up with working hypotheses that provide a nominally logical justification for their actions, everyone on board recognizes that, in essence, they are dealing with symptoms that could be the consequences of moral disease just as likely as of social health.

The problem is that nothing—absolutely nothing—is known for certain about the inhabitants of the planet called Quinta. Their physical form and social organization, their history and attitudes toward the non-Quintan universe, the basic principles of their technology, which appears to be only slightly less advanced than Earth's—all is a matter of conjecture. During the last leg of the trip to the planet, for example, human observers notice a dramatic change on its surface: a belt of clouds is suddenly thrown up, shrouding Quinta's formerly clear skies and blocking visual observation. This is obviously the result of technological intervention on a massive scale, but none of the scientists can provide a convincing explanation of why or how such a thing would be done. As the anonymous narrator remarks, “None of the hypotheses was able to encompass all the observed phenomena to form a coherent whole” (§6:148). Captain Steergard arrives at the same conclusion about the defunct Quintan satellites found scattered in space at the fringe of the planetary system, one of which is taken into the ship for analysis. “There was nothing certain in their hypothesizing: there were no facts” (§7:156), he thinks to himself about the scientists’ speculations. The massive excavations that the expedition finds on Quinta's moon lead him to conclude similarly that “the construction begun in this desolate place with such vigor was incomprehensible; and even more incomprehensible (if incomprehensibility had degrees) was the abandonment of that work, as if in the panic of evacuation” (§8:167).

As they draw closer to the planet, the humans learn that the Quintans possess quite lethal weapons, but as was the case with the satellites and the structures on the moon, no one can figure out how they work. After a near-fatal attack by what appears to be a suddenly coalescing cloud of particles (reminiscent of the planetary defense system in Lem's 1964 novel, The Invincible), the scientists are left without a clear answer. The narrator remarks of one theory: “Such a reconstruction of the attack assumed a technology never before conceived and therefore never tested experimentally on Earth” (§11:207). To curiosity and puzzlement, then, is added the motivation of fear, a fear that is exacerbated by the humans’ inability to speculate meaningfully about the Quintans’ motives. Lacking any data to go on, they find themselves interpreting all of the aliens’ actions, including the detailed communications they eventually receive, as nothing more than lies and subterfuges. A possible explanation of this supposed duplicity can be deduced from the glimpse we are given of the Quintans in the novel's concluding paragraph: but this is ambiguous at best, as is the possibility that the Quintans may in fact survive the burning-off of their atmosphere (the hint is in the expedition biologist's remark that anything short of exploding the planet will allow bacteria and algae to survive). This is the only suggestion that the encounter might result in anything less than exocide.

As the violence escalates, the moral dimension of contact with the Quintans comes increasingly to the fore. The question facing the human expedition is, quite simply, whether to press forward or retreat. Given what appears to be their superior weaponry, this translates into a decision to go ahead and satisfy their curiosity (at whatever cost to the Quintans, and with a definite element of score-settling), or to risk no more destruction in the hope of coming to terms and simply going home. Lem treats the question with special urgency: by insisting on the radical unknowability of the Quintans rather than describing the differences between them and humankind, however great these may be, he throws the expedition back on its own moral resources, as if to say: You have to figure this out on your own. Despite the brilliance of Lem's scientists—their mastery of windows of contact and cryogenics and Einstein-Rosen bridges through space-time—their knowledge does no more than “get them there.” It provides no useful guidelines for their actions once they've arrived. Their fundamentally mechanistic view of the universe turns out to be wholly inadequate for dealing with the moral dilemma posed by the Quintans, however useful it is in moving them from one point in space to another.

This is where Father Arago enters the picture. We do not know much about him, except that he is a Papal envoy to the Quintans. As is often the case in Lem's fiction, the secondary figure serves a principally emblematic function: Arago is the Theologian, just as Parvis is the Pilot, Palassar is the Biologist, Steergard the Captain, etc.⁴ By assigning him a title and category like the scientists, Lem makes him seem like just another expert, and in fact the reader is quickly made aware of the subtlety of Arago's reasoning on moral issues: he is presented as a highly trained professional in this arena, fully comparable to the scientists in theirs. At first glance, his presence on the spaceship seems so normal we can easily forget how unprecedented it really is in Lem's fiction. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that Arago is set off from the scientists by a profound underlying difference: where the latter deal in certainties and the means to ascertain them, the Dominican's specialty is the interface between divine law and human behavior, between the indisputable dictates of God's commandments on morality and the circumstantial context(s) of individual conduct. He is, in other words, an expert in ambiguity.

Specifically, Arago's statements reveal him to be an adept of moral probabilism, a doctrine which was given its fullest expression during the Counter-Reformation by Roman Catholic theologians. Probabilism holds that in a given instance when strict adherence to moral law would require an individual to commit a greater sin than would result from non-compliance, one is justified in following one's conscience (in the language of moral theology, one may follow the “less probable” course of action, when it is understood that obedience to the law is always the “more probable” course).⁵ One of the classic applications of probabilistic reasoning is homicide in self-defense. The probabilists argued that if one is being attacked by someone whose intent is to maim or kill, and if one has exhausted all non-lethal means of resistance, then to cause the death of the assailant in order to save one's own life can in certain instances be justifiable. It is largely a question of intention and context: although homicide is a sin against the Fifth Commandment, the person acting purely in self-defense does not primarily intend to do harm to his or her assailant but to prevent harm being done to herself or himself.⁶ As the Latin phrase puts it, “Lex ambigua non obligat”: “An ambiguous law is not binding,” i. e., when its strict application is of doubtful value.

In Fiasco, Lem brings probabilistic reasoning into Father Arago's conversations with Captain Steergard, who of course has the final say about the course of the mission. Steergard is not an immoral man, but his sensitivity to the question of the Quintans’ intentions is mitigated by his need to make command decisions. His error, in Father Arago's mind, is in deferring to the authority of the shipboard computer, which ironically bears the Latin name for God, DEUS (acronym for Digitally Engrammic Universal System). Arago complains that DEUS is after all only a machine, and as such can only mirror the Quintans’ actions. If Steergard follows its purely mechanical analysis of events to their logical conclusion, Arago explains, he will inevitably perpetrate an injustice. Put another way, he says: “You wish to answer their blows with blows” (§13:249). When Steergard counters that by pressing the attack he is choosing the lesser evil, he is misapplying Arago's probabilism. He is mistaken when he equates the expedition's situation with that of the innocent victim, for two reasons. First of all, the humans do not know if the Quintans are acting with homicidal intent, or if they believe they are protecting themselves from extermination, or if they are obeying some other motive that is beyond the scope of human comprehension: they know nothing about the Quintans at all. Secondly, the humans have a way to save themselves without using lethal force: they can simply leave. In other words, as Arago (and presumably Lem) sees it, application of the moral law is not doubtful in this, the first human encounter with an alien civilization. The commandment against killing must be respected, as must the classic corollary to the doctrine of “Lex ambigua non obligat”: “In dubio pro reo” (“When in doubt, [decide] in the accused's favor”), an early version of the principle of presumed innocence (Arago quotes the Latin phrase in §4:106).

Arago tells Steergard that charity should be the first consideration in dealing with unknown Others, as it is in dealing with fellow humans. “Ama et fac quod vis,” he says, quoting St Augustine: literally, “Love, and do whatever you want”—the love here being the love of God that translates into agape. “In my eschatology there is no such thing as a lesser evil,” Arago explains. “With each slain being an entire world dies. For that reason arithmetic provides no measure for ethics” (§13:254). His final admonition to Steergard carries the weight of his moral logic: “Whatever you do—if you do not retreat—will result in a fiasco” (§15:293).⁷

2. Theological issues in Lem's other CETI novels. As a way of tracing the evolution of Lem's moral thinking in his CETI novels and highlighting the importance of his introducing a character like Father Arago, I propose to take a closer look at the dialogue between the kind of moral reasoning I have been discussing, on the one hand, and purely theological or quasi-theological speculation, on the other. In the context of CETI, Lem's theological speculation is concerned with the fundamentally ontological question of whether contacted Others (the Ocean of Solaris, for example, or the Senders of His Master's Voice) possess characteristics that humankind has attributed, historically, to its gods or God, while the discourse that in Fiasco owes so much to the doctrine of moral probabilism focuses on the human response to others, regardless of their divine or quasi-divine properties. A comparison of Father Arago with his scientist predecessors will be helpful in this regard.

Of all Lem's novels, Solaris (1961; English translation, 1970) arguably provides the most sustained exploration of the theological question. Readers will have little trouble, I think, recognizing the model of the scholastic Deity of Western monotheism behind Lem's descriptions of the Ocean. The creature that covers the surface of Solaris is presented as transcendent and unknowable in its essence: its fundamental being, like the Godhead of Western monotheism, remains cognitively inaccessible to human reason, however closely its external qualities (its Aristotelian “accidents”) resemble phenomena that are intelligible to the human mind.

The depth of Lem's debt to theological tradition can be judged from his prominent use of negative descriptions as a means of speaking about transcendent Being. The roots of this discourse lie in the pre-Socratic Greek mystery religions; it was later given philosophical expression in Plato's dialogues—particularly in the Parmenides—and during the Patristic period spread through all four principal currents of Western mystical ontology, pervading religious Neoplatonism, Christian theology, Mishnah and Kabbalah, Sufism and Islamic theology generally. The basic idea is that, since the transcendent God in its essence surpasses the reality of the human world and therefore the categories of human thought, the most logically satisfying way to speak of true Deity, the ultimate nature of which can be known only to itself, is by negating the descriptive terms of human speech. In the formulation usually attributed to the 6th-century Syrian monk known as the Pseudo-Dionysius, this apophatic language (from the Greek word for negation) has long been associated with mysticism, while kataphatic language (affirmation) has been the province of speculative or scholastic theology.⁸

In telling us how Kelvin, the protagonist of Solaris, came to be a specialist in the Ocean, Lem explains that the kataphatic approach has produced entire libraries full of data, studies, and speculation—the fruit of numerous scientific fields and sub-fields generated by inquiry into every known aspect of the Ocean. And yet, as Kelvin is acutely aware, all of this “affirmation” adds up to a negative sum: as the anonymous narrator remarks, “The sum total of known facts [about the Ocean] was strictly negative.” Analysis has shown, we learn, that the Ocean cannot be considered aggressive, that it “did not use machines … did not possess a nervous system … or cells, and its structure was not proteiform. It did not always react even to the most powerful stimuli” (§2:23), and so forth and so on.

As for what can be directly observed of the Ocean's external manifestations—the spectacular architecture of the mimoids and symmetriads—they are described by human observers through analogy with earthly phenomena but defy any deeper understanding. Scientists originally hoped that the mimoids, for example, would be a medium “to establish the hoped-for contact between the two civilizations”; but experience forces them to admit that “there was not the slightest prospect of communication” (§8:116). The cognitive distance between humankind and Ocean seems, if anything, to be even greater when it comes to the symmetriads, whose huge, incredibly complex structures extend beyond the scope of human mathematics and aesthetics. As the narrator remarks:

The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible.

(§8:120)

A little later he makes an analogy to music. The symmetriad “has been described as a symphony in geometry,” he reports despairingly, “but we lack the ears to hear it” (§8:121). Faced with the failure of kataphatic discourse, Lem's narrator uses apophasis to describe the Ocean's ineffable self in much the same way as Western mystical tradition describes the “Deus absconditus,” or Hidden God, of absolute transcendence.

Although we witness the events on Solaris through Kelvin's eyes, the two surviving members of the original observation team, Snow and Sartorius, also suffer from the maddening inability to make sense of the Ocean. This is especially true of Snow, who seems to have worked hardest to guess the motives or guiding principles behind the Ocean's incomprehensible activities. By the time Kelvin arrives on the scene, Snow's moral reason has been shattered by his failure to deal with the reality he is living. His inner conflict is intensified by his recognition that there is no room for mystical spirituality when dealing with such concrete and immanent beings as the ocean, or any actual alien Other for that matter. “We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact,” he explains to Kelvin, but

This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with 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 …

(§6:72)

Snow's “we” may be little more than a desperate, camouflaged “I,” but in a general sense he speaks for everyone who has been driven mad by Solaris.

Snow also rejects Kelvin's characterization of the Ocean as a deity driven to despair by its materiality, its confinement to matter, “a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible … [a] sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers” (§14:197). He must reject this view because to grant the ocean divine or quasi-divine status would be to remove it from the arena of human moral judgment. The flip side of Snow's speech about humankind's search for a mirror is the moral hubris with which he compensates for his intellectual frustration: it is this projection that feeds his desire to punish the Ocean. Of course he is not alone in mistaking revenge for justice: Kelvin, too, is rationalizing when he argues that bombarding the Ocean with x-rays, in direct disregard of their own scientific guidelines, may in effect communicate their suffering to the ocean and thereby persuade it to stop creating psi-creatures (note that the third member of the team, the taciturn Sartorius, is the one who actually throws the switch). We have to remember that the beaming of x-rays into the ocean is in reality comparable to the attack on Quinta in Fiasco, the major difference being that Quinta is apparently destroyed, while Solaris is not. But because there is no way of knowing for sure what the destructive effect of this action may or may not be, the humans consequently arrive at a kind of weary, dazed, perpetually frustrating truce with their “opponent,” whose intentions remain inscrutable to the end.⁹

In Lem's next CETI novel, The Invincible (1964; English translation, 1973), a mission to investigate the disappearance of a spaceship brings humankind up against what appears to be a purely mechanical planetary defense system of astonishing subtlety and power. This system, which may have been left behind by a vanished race of sentient beings, defeats the humans in pitched battle (the novel's ironic title refers to the rescue mission's ship, not the alien planet). The excitement and suspense are inextricably linked to (and heightened by) the challenge facing the humans, to understand the nature of their enemy. And although the problem of incomprehension is attenuated by the expedition's success in developing a working hypothesis about the alien power, it takes on a moral complexion that fore-shadows Fiasco. There is, for instance, an ancestor of Father Arago in the Invincible's biologist, Lauda, who is pitted against the expedition commander, Horpach. Lauda believes that the only prudent course of action, faced with an unknown technology which has unleashed itself on them with lethal consequences to a number of men, is retreat—a kind of “in dubio pro reo” argument. Lauda says “I think we should get out” after a large percentage of the ship's crew has either died or been rendered inactive. Like Steergard later, Horpach answers: “We need certainty. Not vengeance, but certainty” (§5: 101–02). In the end they have certainty, or at least tested hypotheses: their retreat, however, is dictated not by moral considerations but by outright military defeat.

Peter Hogarth, the narrator of Lem's 1968 novel, His Master's Voice (English translation, 1983), has a characteristic that links him with Snow, Lauda, and Arago: skepticism.¹⁰ Like Snow, but unlike Arago, Hogarth is also an atheist and an anticleric: and yet despite (or perhaps somehow because of) his rejection of religious answers to the CETI question, Hogarth often speaks the language of speculative theology, adopting theological or quasi-theological views about the Senders. Nor can Hogarth's metaphysics be divorced from his idiosyncratic brand of Pelagianism, whereby he sees his entire life (he is 62 years old) to have been basically inclined toward what he calls “evil” but at the same free of moral blame. He claims: “As far back into my childhood as I can recall, I sought out evil,” adding: “My evil was isotropic, unbiased, and totally disinterested” (§0:6). His exhilarating freedom of moral norms, he tells us, is the fruit of what he calls his “calculus of resistance,” an inversion of Judaeo-Christian moral discipline whereby he works hard to conform to accepted standards of moral behavior, when his nature is in fact pulling him in the other direction. In a sarcastic reference to his colleagues, he quips: “What those better people did voluntarily, at little cost, for they but followed their own natural inclination, I practiced in opposition to mine—hence, as it were, artificially” (§0:7).

On the level of Hogarth's private morality, this paradoxical juxtaposition of rigorism and doubt, suppression and liberation, echoes the cognitive dilemma presented by the Senders’ message. Human science's attempt to infer the Senders’ purpose from the substances produced with the information contained in the broadcast ends in frustration. There is no way of knowing, in the end, whether “Frog Eggs” and “Lord of the Flies” are an intellectual or moral test devised for a more advanced civilization than ours, or another “fiasco” resulting from human science's inability to interpret the message correctly. There is no way of knowing whether the Senders are “despairing gods,” like Kelvin's ocean, or harbingers of universal hope; the overriding conclusion of Hogarth's analysis is that human understanding cannot begin to solve the scientific (and metaphysical) puzzle posed by the Senders. Hogarth consequently scorns his colleagues for acting like “Keepers of the Mystery,” as if their efforts were directed at discovering some kind of scientific Holy Grail (§1:24). He likens the “plasmatic glob” of “Frog Eggs” to Holy Scripture and calls the Senders’ signal “the Word that becomes Flesh” (§8:99). He is delighted when Rappaport, one of the other scientists, compares science to “a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars” (§9:114).

3. Conclusion. By linking Fiasco with three of Lem's earlier CETI novels through speculative and moral theology, we can appreciate in a new light, I think, these works’ similarities and differences (bearing in mind always that the two theologies overlap when the human characters attempt to get behind the purely theological question in order to comprehend the intention behind the alien Other's actions). In Solaris, the frustration created by the Ocean's inscrutability provokes a morally unjustifiable attack which the victim seemingly survives, but the human observers’ theological discourse remains focused primarily on ontological rather than moral concerns. In The Invincible, the humans’ opponent is fairly well understood by the end of the novel, and the moral question is muted by the apparently unconscious and purely mechanical nature of this Other (also by its superior firepower). In His Master's Voice, the radical uncertainty surrounding the Senders and their message is echoed by Hogarth's inverted but completely internalized moral system; in any case, CETI is here so attenuated by time and distance, and the alien other remains so far removed from the possible failure of human moral judgment, that, as in Solaris, theological discourse and the language of apophasis predominate. The fundamental difference between this kind of speculation and Fiasco is that in the latter, as the plot moves inexorably closer to the ultimate violent confrontation, ontological questions simply fail to materialize. In fact, it seems that Lem makes the threat of exocide a real possibility for the first time in his CETI novels by endowing the Quintans with the quality of radical unknowability that he had previously reserved for theologically mysterious entities like Solaris and the Senders (this shift away from foregrounding speculative discourse also explains why Arago is the first of Lem's de-heroicizing heroes who is not a scientist). There is a deep irony in the fact that the mystery surrounding the ocean helps guarantee its preservation, while human ignorance of the Quintans, in the absence of moral controls, effectively ensures their victimization. Because the Quintans cannot be assigned quasi-divine status (because they cannot be assigned any status at all), they provide a sharper mirror-image of human moral intention than any of Lem's previously described alien Others. In this context, where the ontological quest runs aground on the Quintans’ physical immobility, Arago's moral probabilism stands out like a form of benign skepticism as the only alternative to fiasco.

One might object that the “doublers” of Lem's earliest CETI novel, Eden (1959; English translation, 1989), also hold the moral mirror up to humanity's face in a clear and dramatic fashion. But we must remember that these aliens are spared destruction, and this, I think, precisely because Lem puts a quasi-human (or at least quasi-mammalian) face on them: their resemblance to people is close enough that the novel can be read as a cautionary tale about genetic engineering. In fact, far from being a threat to humankind, the doublers are treated with a kind of nurturing, paternalistic concern. In Eden, CETI breaks off with the possibility of a future relationship between humankind and the other.¹¹

Through Father Arago, Lem expresses his view that CETI may well pose a challenge that humankind is unable to meet, even at the level of a future social harmony that enables planet Earth to direct itself, as one body, to reaching the stars. I say “may” because, as is often the case in moral questions, ambiguity stands a good chance of triumphing over certainty. As it turns out, we never know whether the human crew was justified in attempting to annihilate the Quintans: the only certainty we have in the end is that, incapable of charting a path through the unknowable, humankind falls victim to its ancient capacity for rage, which sweeps all else before it in the violence of fear and despair.

Notes

1. Darko Suvin's notion of cognitive estrangement provides an excellent theoretical description of the CETI genre for the simple reason that CETI allows for the creation of an especially pure and unadulterated kind of “novum,” i. e. the “totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author's and implied reader's norm of reality” (64). For Suvin, “An sf narration is a fiction in which the sf element or aspect, the novum, is hegemonic, that is, so central and significant that it determines the whole narrative logic—or at least the overriding narrative logic—regardless of any impurities that might be present” (70).

   I find it interesting to note that postwar films about CETI often take a very different view, reducing the struggle to smallscale encounters in far-away places (Alien) and/or giving the edge to the aliens while allowing for hope that mankind will ultimately triumph (as in The War of the Worlds or Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

2. Fiasco is so unlike Lem's previous novels that it is difficult to summarize. The Invincible, Solaris, and Eden, for example, begin with the hero or expedition landing on an alien planet. The first half of Fiasco, on the contrary, deals with the whys and wherefores of the journey to the Quintans, who do not make an appearance until the ninth out of sixteen chapters.

   Fiasco is also exceptionally rich in characters, leitmotivs, subplots, technological speculation, and intertextual tours de force. As Michael Kandel has noted, the novel's internal structure is based not so much on a unity as a proliferation of parallel and interpolated stories.

   Lem may have chosen the name Arago in memory of François Arago, the celebrated early nineteenth-century French physicist who worked with magnetism and the wave theory of light.

3. The moral dilemma raised by the alien society depicted in Blish's novel has been analyzed by David Ketterer and Patrick McCarthy, among others. See Ketterer, Imprisoned in a Tesseract, 79–104, and “Covering A Case of Conscience,” and McCarthy, “The Joyce of Blish.”

4. Paul Delany's remarks are relevant to this type-casting. Delany remarks that “Arago and Tempe [the name given to the pilot Parvis in one of the novel's complex subplots, after he is brought back from cryogenic suspension] represent survivals of the sacred and the archaic” in a world whose moral standards, such as they are, are set by technology (33).

   Among other valuable observations, Robert Philmus pointed out to me that a group of monks is featured in Ijon Tichy's 21st voyage, as related in The Star Diaries (1971; English translation, 1976). Professor Philmus was referring to a sect of monastic robots (there is also a human monk named Lacymon—like Arago, a Dominican—who makes a brief appearance in the 22nd voyage). These are indeed Arago's predecessors, and proof of Lem's abiding interest in, and reliance on, topics derived from Christian theology. But in defense of Arago's originality as a character, I would say that these other monks represent something like the inversion of the theologian's role in Fiasco: Father Lacymon tells Tichy how a fellow monk was gruesomely martyred by a society of well-meaning aliens who lacked the ability to interpret what he said figuratively, and the robots are the repository of a theology that has ossified in the face of humankind's dehumanizing abuse of genetic engineering. Like the Quintans, these monks are passive victims of alienation, while Arago holds a position of great (though frustrated) power over a victimized race.

5. Probabilism was given its first explicit formulation at the University of Salamanca in the 1570s, notably by the Dominican theologian Bartolomé de Medina. The doctrine was further developed by the Jesuit Francisco Suárez, but the debate over its use in casuistry carried over well into the seventeenth century. Against the probabilists (especially those among them who made the most liberal application of the process, the laxists) were arrayed the tutiorists, proponents of the idea that the moral law must always be obeyed, regardless of the circumstances. This was the view held by many Jansenists and given its most famous literary expression by Blaise Pascal in the Lettres Provinciales. (I have argued elsewhere that Pascal's rigorist bias led him to make some unfounded allegations; see “Pascal contre Caramuel.”) A subsequent stage in the development of probabilism came in the eighteenth century, with the moral theologian Alphonsus Liguori's invention of equiprobabilism, which states that either law or opinion may provide an equally valid moral option, depending on the circumstances. See Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry, 164–75.

6. This is a necessarily superficial treatment of a very complex issue that was taken up in countless confessors’ manuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See for example Cardinal Francisco de Toledo, Summa Casuum Conscientiae sive De Instructione Sacerdotum (Cologne, 1601). Toledo devotes many pages to the homicide problem alone. In Book V, Chapter 6, he states that it is justifiable to commit homicide “ad vitam defendendam, suam, vel amici, vel parentis, filii, vel coniuncti … Cum enim homo inuaditur ab inimico, si aliter non potest vitam conseruare, nisi occidendo illum licet occidere” (“in order to defend one's own life, or one's friend's, or parents,’ or children's, or spouse's. … And when one is assaulted by an enemy, it is permissible to kill him if there is no other way to preserve one's life short of committing homicide”; 346–347). The casuists often warn that homicide is justifiable only before an aggressor inflicts injury: if the victim survives the attack, he cannot respond with lethal force, since his life is no longer in danger. See Manuel Rodríguez, Summa de Casos de Consciencia (Barcelona, 1616), Chapter CXXXV: “recibida la injuria, no puede el tal [i. e. the victim] matarle [al acometedor] con título de defensión, pues ya su vida no está puesta en el peligro que antes estaba” (spelling modernized; “once the damage has been done, the victim cannot kill his attacker in the name of self-defense, since his life is no longer exposed to the same danger as before”; 336).

7. In a 1986 interview with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Lem remarked of Fiasco that “with the symmetrical lack of trust according to the principle pacta sunt servanda, each side maximizes its efforts to prevent being overtaken by the other. This state of affairs can indeed lead to a technological foxhole” (252).

8. Two of the fullest treatments of apophasis in the Greek tradition, both pagan and Christian, are in Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, Book IV 849–853, Book VI 1065–1134, and Book VII passim, and the Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Celestial Hierarchy, Section II, 3–4 (140c–144c).

9. Much of what has been written about Solaris is applicable to Fiasco. I am thinking for instance of Mark Rose's remark that “Solaris transforms problems of cosmology into problems of epistemology” (126). See also Bradford Lyau on Lem's mockery of the “compendium”: “By piling up speculation after speculation, Lem shows the inadequacies and follies of human endeavors to explain the unknown” (Storm Warnings 57), and George Slusser's comments on Solaris in “Structures of Apprehension.” Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., calls Solaris “an elaborate metaphor for the cultural and philosophical implications of scientific uncertainty for Western culture” (7). In a comparison of Solaris, The Invincible, and Fiasco, Michael Kandel finds the latter to be Lem's “blackest book”: “It has the inevitability of the horror story, where everything leads up to the cruel twist at the end and there is absolutely no redemption” (“Two Meditations on Stanislaw Lem,” 379).

10. Scepticism is an approach to reality that the protagonists of Lem's non-CETI novels, too, find useful, not to say necessary. It is closely linked to the view of reality as determined by stochastic processes, a view shared by Hogarth, Dr Sciss of The Investigation (1959; English translation, 1974) and Torcelli, the astronaut/ detective protagonist of The Chain of Chance (1975; English translation, 1978). The universe as stochastic process is a central theme also in Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961; English translation, 1973).

11. A word about theological and moral discourse in two novels mentioned at the beginning of this essay is in order. In Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (1973), the encounter with an alien technology raises all kinds of ontological questions that are often expressed in theological terms. Named for the Hindu embodiment of divine reason and virtue, the spacecraft Rama—like Solaris and the “Deus absconditus” of Western religious tradition—transcends the cognitive capacity of the human mind. It is described, for instance, as “a place that was simultaneously brand new and a million years old” (§13:63), and there are hints of the Ramans’ likeness to the Trinitarian God of Christianity (i. e., they do everything in threes, presumably because they have—or had—three limbs) (§42:225). Also, Rama is taken up as a cause by at least one religious group, the Cosmo Crusaders (§20:104–06). It is no wonder that this alien artifact ultimately defeats all human attempts to make sense of it, driving the narrator to adopt apophatic language, as, for instance, when he notes that “the more they [the scientists] discovered about it [i. e., Rama], the less they understood” (§31:168). As for the discourse of moral theology, there is little place for it in Clarke's novel: unlike Blish's or Lem's aliens, Rama's utter indifference to humankind's existence removes the need for moral speculation. In Clarke's tale, for all of the “touching”—i. e., the unimpeded exploration of the alien vessel—there is no “contact,” whereas in Fiasco, for all the contact, there is no touching.

    Orson Scott Card, in the series of novels inaugurated by Ender's Game (1985), takes yet another tack, describing the destruction and salvation of an alien race (the insect-like “buggers”) by the same individual. The twist here is that Ender comes to understand the buggers only after he has (he thinks) annihilated them. The survival of a single fertile alien “queen” who can in fact keep her race going, works at cross purposes to the moral horror of exocide that Card so vividly describes before the novel's concluding pages: it is a plot development destined primarily, it seems to me, to allow the author to write a sequel.

Works Cited

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. “The Book is the Alien: on Certain and Uncertain Readings of Lem's Solaris,” SFS 12:6–21, #35, March 1985.

———. “Twenty-two Answers and Two Postscripts: an Interview With Stanislaw Lem,” SFS 13: 242–60, #40, Nov 1986.

Clarke, Arthur C. Rendezvous with Rama. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1973.

Delany, Paul. Review of Fiasco. New York Times Book Review, June 7, 1987. 33.

Jonsen, Albert R., and Stephen Toulmin. The Defense of Casuistry. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1988.

Kandel, Michael. “Two Meditations on Stanislaw Lem” SFS 13: 374–81, #40, Nov 1986.

Ketterer, David. “Covering A Case of Conscience.” SFS 9: 195–214, #27, July 1982.

———. Imprisoned in a Tesseract: the Life and Work of James Blish. Kent, OH: Kent UP, 1987.

Krabbenhoft, Kenneth. “Pascal contre Caramuel.” Le xviie Siècle 133: 435–42, #33, Oct-Nov 1981.

Lem, Stanislaw. Fiasco, trans. Michael Kandel. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

———. His Master's Voice, trans. Michael Kandel. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

———. The Invincible, trans. Wendayne Ackerman. NY: Seabury Press, 1973.

———. Solaris, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.

Lyau, Bradford. “Knowing the Unknown.” Storm Warnings. Slusser, George, Colin Greenland, and Eric Rabkin, eds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

McCarthy, Patrick. “The Joyce of Blish: Finnegans Wake in A Case of Conscience,” SFS 15: 112–18, #44, March 1988.

Proclus. Commentary of Plato's Parmenides. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.

Pseudo-Dionysius. La Hiérarche céleste. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1970.

Rodríguez, Manuel. Summa de Casos de Consciencia. Barcelona, 1616.

Rose, Mark. Alien Encounters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981.

Slusser, George, “Structures of Apprehension: Lem, Heinlein, and the Strugatskys.” SFS 16: 1–37, #47, March 1989.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Toledo, Francisco de. Summa Casuum Conscientiae sive De Instructione Sacerdotum. Cologne, 1601.