SOURCE: “Stanislaw Lem: A Stranger in a Strange Land,” in A Stanislaw Lem Reader, Northwestern University Press, 1997, pp. 1–19.

[In the following essay, Swirski provides an overview of Lem's wide-ranging publications and the development of his philosophical, literary, and sociopolitical concerns.]

A stranger in a strange land. Ever since Elizabeth Ashbridge coined this phrase to express her sense of alienation on arriving in America, it has become a standard metaphor for describing someone's sense of wonder and estrangement. These days the phrase appears equally frequently in works of fiction and of philosophy that target the future.

Robert Heinlein adopted this metaphor as the title of one his most popular novels about contact with the alien. Following H. G. Wells's (and especially Orson Welles's) War of the Worlds, contact with the alien conjures up images of extraterrestrial invasion, these days ossified into a tradition of low-budget, Ed Wood-type, Hollywood pictures. But things are not so simple in Heinlein's work. In Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), a messiah-like humanoid from Mars becomes a cult figure in circumstances which mock and satirize not so much the fundamentally not-so-strange stranger as the oddities of our own civilization. It is ourselves, examined through the distorting prism of Heinlein's narrative Gedankenexperiment, who emerge as the true strangers in a strange land of our alternative future.

To pack it with more resonance, the topos of a stranger in a strange land is often approached through a symmetrical inversion of its main elements. Thus an emissary from the Earth finds himself in the midst of an alien civilization, playing the unenviable role of a stranger in a strange land. Depending on the intentions of the writer, the reaction to the stranger's presence runs the gamut from xenophobic suspicion to veneration and reverence of the type usually reserved for beings of a higher order, like the demiurges or deities of antiquity.

The latter variant is exploited by the Russian writers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, in Hard to Be a God (1964). Rumata, an emissary from the Earth, is a deus ex machina witness to the feudal, fascist, and theocratic upheavals which tear the alien society apart. The Strugatskys’ novel illustrates and evaluates several precise socio-historiographic theses, especially those with roots in turbulent twentieth-century Russian history. It scoffs at the messianic impatience of social revolutionaries for a “quick fix” to the agonizingly enduring socio-evolutionary problems of our times. The Strugatskys caution that taking on responsibility for an alien race is as thankless a task as shaping the history and social development of our own.

The analogy between the foreign world of Hard to Be a God and our own is far from accidental. The strangeness is only an illusion; behind the alien society and its superficially unfamiliar names, places, or customs, there is always the sadly familiar Earth. It is no accident that the cognitive and emotional epiphany of estrangement is a paradigm of self-revelation. The envoy from our planet, striving to penetrate the veil of enigma and mystery which surrounds the alien race, finds himself in the position of the eponymous hero of Edgar Allan Poe's story “William Wilson.” In a moment of terrible epiphany, when the protagonist tears the mask off the mysterious visitor, he sees only the contorted features so intimately familiar, because they are his own.

Although structurally antithetical, these two variants of estrangement meet on a deeper cognitive level, in both cases trying to tell us something significant about our own society. Both function by estranging the familiar and accentuating the relations that lie at the cultural center of today and tomorrow. In addition to the first two, there is one more fiction-specific version of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. The third variant combines the first two, in order to alienate the reader from the contemporary world. The cognitive and emotional correlative is achieved by looking at ourselves from within our own culture. We need not automatically think at this point of the threadbare conventions of time travel. Far more striking and original is the stratagem employed by Poe in his less known “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” (1845). In the story, instead of dispatching Sindbad to the future, the author sends him to the author's own mid nineteenth-century present, recounting Sindbad's amazement and incredulity at the natural and scientific wonders of Poe's contemporary world.

Notwithstanding Poe's remarkable narrative success in the middle of the nineteenth century, today, at the close of the twentieth, the reaction to this type of storytelling may understandably be more skeptical. Surely this type of estrangement could no longer work with the same efficacy in the present-day context. Novelty, surprise, and estrangement are a function of the absence of contextualizing information, but what could surprise us today, in the age in which, symbolically, Fort Knox has turned into a Data-Bank?

And yet, in a world where reality turns out so often to be stranger than fiction, where the accelerating pace of social events and scientific research makes one feel like a stranger in a strange land, the world of today seems more and more like a futuristic tale of tomorrow. How is that? Stellar probes are already on their way to other solar systems; the genetic code—though not yet the hereditary plasma—has already been altered in newborn babies; some forms of blindness can be remedied by plugging video terminals into sockets planted directly in the brain; the cloning of human embryos is now a fait accompli; infertile sixty-three-year-old women are now able to bear children; computer system and program aggregates—what the media are fond of calling “cyberspace”—are growing so rapidly in size and complexity that they may be on the verge of becoming nontransparent to human scrutiny; cyclotron-created antimatter, instead of annihilating on impact, can now be stored in “jars” made of magnetic fields; and so on and so forth.

The roster is practically endless, augmented daily with reports of events and phenomena which stun with their implications for our society and culture. Awe-inspiring as they are, however, the strange news is not from nowhere, but from the strange land of our own contemporary reality. If there is one thing it makes clear, it is that we are moving with escape velocity away from the familiar cultural equilibrium of yesterday, into the accelerating turmoil of tomorrow.

The structural order based on narrative estrangement gives striking and useful results when applied to the writings of Stanislaw Lem. Conventionally Lem's works have been chronologically divided into, roughly, the early phase of the 1950s, the “golden” period of the 1960s, the experimental stage of the 1970s, and the less known group of works—some still untranslated—from the 1980s.¹ The one immediate result of viewing Lem's literary career through the prism of estrangement is a perspective on his progressive refocusing from the themes of distant space and future to the present and pressing concerns of our society. From the perspective of four decades, his works display a clear shift from the cosmic theater of “there and then” to an intensifying preoccupation with the strangeness of the Earthly “here and now.”

The earliest phase in Lem's writing illustrates well his cosmic search for enlightenment, with outer space serving as a backdrop to stories usually set in the faraway future. In the utopian future of Astronauci (The Astronauts, 1951), a spaceship is dispatched to Venus to explore an alien civilization, which, as the investigation reveals, perished accidentally while arming for a military invasion of Earth. Oblok Magellana (The Magellan Nebula, 1954) replicates this futuristic and expansive pattern but on a galactic scale. Gea, a planetoid-type spaceship from Earth, bears generations of human explorers in search of extraterrestrial life and intelligence. On a more satirical note, there is also The Star Diaries, a collection of short stories about the cosmic capers of Ijon Tichy, adventurer and homegrown philosopher par excellence, who roams the galaxy and records the strange familiarity of its peoples and cultures.

The second, “golden” phase in Lem's creativity, from which comes his most acclaimed novel, Solaris, adds a new dimension to this expansive, adventurous pattern aimed at the future and the cosmos. Eden (1959) depicts the peripeties of astronauts who, while investigating a strange planet, agonize over the same socio-evolutionary dilemmas that Rumata confronts in Hard to Be a God. Solaris (1961) begins to question the anthropomorphic premises behind the exploration of space. The protagonist, Chris Kelvin, is sent to a research station which is to monitor the behavior of a sentient “ocean” which covers the surface of the planet Solaris. To all appearances this is a routine mission; after long decades of research and exploration, Solaris is now considered a familiar, if still unexplained planet. Yet this time an unscheduled effort to establish contact with the ocean has profound consequences. Word turns into flesh when the ocean transforms memories extracted from the scientists’ minds into living neutrino-based beings, driving humans to the brink of insanity. All thought of exploration is quickly forsaken in a frantic struggle to come to terms with the “invasion.” Staggered by shock and doubt, the scientists concentrate instead on erasing every painful trace of the unwanted contact. Far from Earth, in the midst of the cosmic void, Kelvin and his colleagues finally glimpse the parabolic face of the universe—their own. A similar pattern is at work in another of Lem's novels from that period, The Invincible (1964). The work takes its title after a space cruiser dispatched to extend the military and scientific frontiers of Earth's future space civilization. Yet by the end of the novel, the Invincible and its crew are humbled and robbed of their anthropomorphic illusions in an encounter with a Black Cloud of strange microcrystals, a by-product of extraterrestrial cybernetic evolution.²

But even though this expansive, outwardly oriented pattern of narration is prominent in the first half of Lem's career, from the beginning we can discern a countertrend in his concerns. The virtually unknown Czlowiek z Marsa (The Man from Mars, 1946; which makes it de facto Lem's first published novel) has contemporary society as its focus, and displays few of the props associated with the exploration of space. Published only once as a serial in a Kraków magazine, The Man from Mars censures the vicious tangle of military and political strategizing which turns the idea of cosmic contact into a farce, and ends in the cold-blooded destruction of the Martian visitor. This early work seems to presage Lem's eventual turn away from the epistemic concerns of the cosmic future and his return to the more immediate, if equally intractable, social and cultural dilemmas of our times.

This is not to say that The Man from Mars is an isolated example even among Lem's early works. The thread of contemporary realism continues in Szpital Przemienienia (Hospital of the Transfiguration, 1955). The action of this novel takes place in a mental hospital during the first days of World War II.³ The medical staff's moral and ethical dilemma between fleeing for safety before the invading Nazi troops, or staying to tend to the helpless patients, has lost nothing of its harrowing truth today, during the gory breakup of the Yugoslav federation. At the beginning of Lem's second phase we also find The Investigation (1959), a detective story contemporary (if not typical) in all respects. The novel describes a series of forensically and scientifically inexplicable “resurrections” from local morgues, which allows Lem to reflect on the explanatory nature and the epistemological a priori of Western philosophy.

Two years later appears Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), another work which returns from the stars to focus on the socio-political insanity shaping Cold War reality. As in The Man from Mars, this novel targets the social dangers implicated in and by military politics. Depicting the quixotic wanderings of a nameless espionage agent, Lem's Memoirs—in the tradition of the theater of the absurd, and with the blackest of humors—is a Kafkaesque correlative for the cultural void and the existential post-traumatic stress disorder which make the latter half of the twentieth century such a confused and chaotic time.⁴

Lem's drive toward greater realism and immediacy of social concerns from that period is documented in a series of nonfictional monographs. Although not available in English, they are legendary from the accounts of those able to read them in their native Polish, or in the Russian or German translations. Dialogi (Dialogues, 1957) is a record of Lem's analysis of the then still novel field of cybernetics, externalized by means of Berkeleyan dialogues between Philonous and Hylas. Written from the perspective of a social scientist, the book marks Lem's growing involvement in the reality of his social present. In the first, theoretical part the author recapitulates the fundamental concepts and accomplishments of the new science. In the second he launches an applied cybernetic analysis and critique of the main political and economic formations known from modern history. The objectivity, acumen, and integrity of Lem's analyses guarantee that they never turn into a diatribe against any specific ideological or politico-economic system. Even more important, his hypotheses and diagnoses have lost nothing of their pertinence today, forty years after they were first written.

Lem's nonfictional ambitions are even more apparent in his most extensive philosophical work to date, Summa technologiae (1964). Summa is a landmark work of futurology in which Lem attempts to chart out the future course of our civilization's pan-instrumental development. As the author puts it, Summa is a “cybernetic interpretation of the past and future of Man … a picture of the Cosmos seen with the eyes of the Constructor … a study of the engineering of the powers of Nature and of human hands … a collection of hypotheses too bold to claim scientific accuracy” (5). Picking up the thread of the fictions from the same period, but turning his attention toward home, Lem develops a series of wide-ranging prognoses on the social, cultural, and technological destiny of our civilization. Virtual reality, information “breeding,” cosmic expansion, or teleporting are just a few hypotheses with which Lem bridges the discussion of the technology of today with supertechnology of the future.

Still, during the academic debates which followed the publication of his futurological masterpiece, Lem distanced himself from an uncritical faith in humanity's cognitive development. Instead he would point with dismay to our ubiquitous and seemingly unstoppable drive for conflict and aggression. This was in itself a significant change in a writer who, up to this point, still subscribed to Enlightenment ideals, according to which humanity could transcend tribalism and build a better future on a planetary scale. With hindsight, however, it is Lem's vintage The Man from Mars, with its stark images of mistrust and aggression, which captures the bitter and almost accusatory tone nurtured in his later, more mature novels.

The quintessential fiction of this period, which culminates the second and most prolific phase in Lem's career, is His Master's Voice from 1968. It may be somewhat misleading to classify this work as a novel, overshadowed as it is by the tone and format of a philosophical essay and a spiritual diary. A coded neutrino message from outer space is the narrative and philosophical catalyst with which Lem estranges the reader from concerns which otherwise would have been only too familiar: military takeover of scientific research, nuclear superpower rivalry with its narrow-minded chauvinism, excess pride and lack of humility of the political and military establishment, and humanity's perennial capacity for (self-)destruction.

His Master's Voice marks Lem's return from the stars for good. With only minor exceptions, the twin problems of contemporary, or currently anticipated, cultural developments dominate his writing to this very day. This trend is reflected and, if anything, intensified in his nonfiction of that period. In 1968, that is, at the same time as His Master's Voice, Lem published his extensive study of literary culture, theory, and scholarship entitled Filozofia przypadku (The Philosophy of Chance). In it he applied himself to the other of C. P. Snow's “Two Cultures,” theorizing on the subjects of culture, art, literature, literary scholarship, criticism, aesthetics, and axiology (among others).⁵

The year 1970 saw the publication of an equally ambitious and extensive two-volume monograph devoted to—in Lem's view—the related disciplines of futurology and science fiction. In this encyclopedic study, the author traces the cognitive parallels, aesthetic differences, and shared social responsibilities of the science of futurology and the literary genre of science fiction. Fantastyka i futurologia (Science Fiction and Futurology) again sets Lem as a stranger in the strange land of poststructuralist excesses. Lem's departure from its canons is unmistakable. His strangeness is that of an epistemic realist and antirelativist, a proponent of forging cognitive connections between the assembly of aesthetic artifacts known as literature and their social context, without reducing either to a well-known canon of academic “isms.”

Lem's critical analysis of the sociology and structuralist aesthetics of science fiction are especially accurate, and his commentary on the genre's past and present ghetto status have lost nothing of their accuracy during the intervening years. Today, much as when Science Fiction and Futurology was first published, any bookstore provides ample evidence as to how far science fiction has (d)evolved from its brave new origins. This stimulating literary form which, in Europe, boasts H. G. Wells, Karel Čapek, and Olaf Stapledon among its progenitors, has been relegated to that neutered marketing hybrid of sci-fi/fantasy. The economic pressures of the marketplace reflect, and are in turn reflected, in the amorphousness of the genre, whose cognitive and literary ambitions are symbolized by its lurid covers, full of advertising clichés.

Yet sporadically one may still find, amid the broadsword-wielding, time-jumping, cyberspace-hacking average, works of great originality and erudition. These artistically and philosophically ambitious novels are true strangers in the strange land of a Star Trek aficionado, and some of the most challenging (and experimental) among them were written by Stanislaw Lem in the 1970s and early 1980s. This third phase in Lem's writing includes a collection of metaliterary experiments published as A Perfect Vacuum (1971); Imaginary Magnitude (1973) and Golem XIV (1981; included in the English edition of Imaginary Magnitude); and the genre-defying short novels, The Futurological Congress (1971) and Chain of Chance (1976).

The format which Lem employs with such success in A Perfect Vacuum is a review of unwritten and nonexistent works, including a bravado tongue-in-cheek review by Lem the critic of A Perfect Vacuum by Lem the writer. This ironic collection, reviewing an entire array of fictive novels, exposes what Lem sees as the dead ends of contemporary culture. He denounces its value systems and especially its overintellectualized self-centeredness which, notwithstanding a chorus of laudations from the critics, is impotent before the profundity of contemporary social and cultural problems. Lem goes so far as to argue that art itself has failed in its historical role as an emotional and philosophical registrar of culture and society. The art world, flooded by mass produced genre clones, is no longer capable of bringing the contemporary world to justice in a Poe-like moment of terrible but illuminating epiphany.

The problems which Lem dissects in A Perfect Vacuum are of immediate concern not only to literary critics and theoreticians. One of his central arguments—to which he returns with almost manic intensity—is that the fashionable poststructuralist experiments in literature, combined with the complacent response from cultural curators, have precipitated its almost total infertility. Lem argues that one of the main reasons for this flight of art from reality is a complete leveling out of cultural (including literary-critical) evaluative efforts. This process is, in turn, feedback-linked to inflationary trends characterizing contemporary publishing and advertising practices, which the author mercilessly targets in A Perfect Vacuum.

“Pericalypsis,” for example, could have been written only in the twentieth century, the age of information explosion, with the specter of unknown Shakespeares buried under mountains of print. Lem's story identifies the need for some sort of capping process to the continuous outpouring of printed words. However, one is compelled to ask, how is such filtering of published material to be effected? In game theoretic terms there is a minimum payoff—the act of publication—that each and every writer/player can get individually. The optimum strategy for individuals outside a coalition is to make moves which guarantee them the minimum payoff. And, despite Lem's prototypic “Save the Human Race Foundation,” proposed tongue-in-cheek in “Pericalypsis,” there is little hope of successfully forming a coalition which will pay artists not to create. This situation would resemble too vividly one of the absurdities in Catch-22, where the more alfalfa farmers do not produce, the more they get paid for not producing it.

Where A Perfect Vacuum addresses itself to art and literature, Imaginary Magnitude is more anthropological and sociological in its impetus. This time Lem has written an eclectic collection of prefaces, forewords, and introductions to unwritten books which, according to him, should nevertheless exist. In the collection he parodies some of the naive but popular futurological scenarios, while hypothesizing on ideas whose extravagance extends beyond the scope of contemporary scientific theories.

In Golem XIV, Lem's farthest-reaching attempt to stake out the conceptual limits of humanity's future, the author engages in futuristic prognostication of the anticipated progress in the cognitive and bio-sciences. Using as his narrative alter ego an eighteenth-binasty (bitic dynasty) computer prodigy, Lem contends that the revolutionary advancement in the sciences will usurp the conceptual ground traditionally claimed by philosophy (whether ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, or metaphysics) and even religion. He also calls into question our ability to control and utilize this process for the greater benefit of all people. The bleak, detached, almost clinically analytic tone of Lem's discussion underlies his growing skepticism as to the rationality of Homo sapiens, whom—just like Jonathan Swift before him—he sees merely as Homo rationis capax.

After devoting the first part of his career to the exploration of humanity's place in the cosmos, from the mid-1960s onward Lem has applied himself with increasing urgency to the task of defining and interpreting humanity's place on Earth. During the 1980s the urgency not only has not abated but has assumed critical proportions, felt especially in his latest (and probably last) novel, Fiasco (1987). This farewell work is a fit conclusion to Lem's career as a fiction writer, in which the parabolic depiction of the planet Quinta allows him to express his concern for the future of Earth. The novel openly alludes to many leitmotifs from his earlier works, even to the point of symbolically resurrecting Pirx, the eponymous protagonist of the popular Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1959–68) and More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1965–83).

Fiasco illustrates how, under the pressure of shortsighted and pragmatist realpolitik, ethical and moral edicts can be subverted to justify social and military oppression. Stunned by our potential for succumbing to the madness of strategic violence, Lem contemplates the scarcity of chances for survival of the human species, using the death of an alien race to illustrate the (self-)destructive tendencies of our civilization. It is no accident that Quinta, to which the Earthmen trek across the stars, ends up massacred by the arsenals wielded by Earth scientists who, despite their edifying efforts to maintain professional neutrality, succumb to the paranoia of local power struggles. Lem, the impassioned rationalist, concludes from the human experience on Earth that a chance disturbance in any such fragile equilibrium (on Quinta represented by the arrival of humans) can lead to its collapse and the potential destruction of the planetary civilization, whether Quintan or our own.

Fiasco gives voice to our contemporary anxieties not in terms of abstract ontological, moral and ethical axioms, but by relating them to the immediate reality of the social and political present. With constant references to military technology, its destructive potential, its calculated strategy—so many that they threaten to overwhelm the second half of the novel—Lem warns of the incessant threat of the armament race which, despite a proliferation of treaties and an end to the Cold War, shows few signs of dissipating.

Until now a patient, if acerbic, observer and moralist, Lem predicts in all earnestness that our species might be on the way to imminent destruction. If we juxtapose this view with the hopes still expressed in the mid-1960s in The Invincible—that humanity will balance the exploration of the universe at all costs with the recognition of the inevitable limitations of anthropocentrism—the result is a picture of a writer who has comprehended the limits of his humanism. How can we seek contact with other civilizations if we continue to wage war with fellow members of our own species? How are we to achieve understanding with aliens when we cannot accomplish the same here on Earth?

The period between Golem in 1981 and Fiasco in 1987, which Lem spent largely abroad following the imposition of martial law in Poland, was very productive. It was the publication of Wizja lokalna (On Site Inspection, 1983), Prowokacja (Provocation, 1984), Biblioteka XXI wieku (in English as One Human Minute, 1986), and Pokoj na ziemi (Peace on Earth, 1987). All these works are full of bitter and ironic reflections on the future of our society and of Lem's growing condemnation of the socio-political practices of our times.

On Site Inspection contains a tragic vision of a technologically splendid society which surrenders its own freedom to intellectronic nanomachines in order to put an end to the menace that it harbors within itself. The wide-ranging measures of social order and security on the alien planet recall the “soft” totalitarianism of Return from the Stars (1961), even though for the first time Lem seems to consider the suppression of one's individuality a lesser evil than the perennial and all-too-real drive to aggression. The beast within, which was previously confined to the range of primitive clubs, slings, spears, or arrows, can now be released to sow death on the planetary—or, as Fiasco illustrates, even interplanetary—scale.

The subject of death is nothing new in Lem's work. One only needs to recall the Nazi invasion in Time Not Lost, the self-destruction of the Venusian civilization in The Astronauts, the concentration camps of Eden, the cybernetic “necrosphere” of The Invincible, the macrotunneling effect which almost becomes the ultimate mass weapon in His Master's Voice, the starving and dying humanity drugged into beatific stupor in The Futurological Congress, or the “necrobiosis” of a culture which has instrumentally realized the dream of immortality in On Site Inspection. Not surprisingly, then, the subject is picked up again in Lem's next major work from the 1980s, Provocation.

In the Polish edition this book/essay is made up of two reviews of two fictive (nonexistent) works of nonfiction: Der Völkermord by Horst Aspernicus, and One Human Minute by J. and S. Johnson. Through his review of the fictive Aspernicus's work, Lem conducts a broad cultural analysis of the role of death in modern desacralized society. As his analytic base he uses the factual material of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in the occupied territories during World War II. At the same time he tries to account for the morbid ubiquity of death—especially in its most violent incarnations, such as terrorism—in contemporary society. In an attempt to reintegrate the Nazi atrocities into the order of the Mediterranean civilization, Lem accuses modern culture of denying death the cultural prominence which it has hitherto enjoyed due to the previously unchallenged status of its Judeo-Christian roots.

In the course of his discussion, Lem proposes explicit historiosophic and anthropological these regarding the symbolic and institutional functioning of death in the context of its modern reutilization. Specifically, he maintains that the patchwork synthesis of the ethics of evil and aesthetics of kitsch—which gave rise to the mass murders of the German extermination juggernaut—returns in a modified, fragmented form in today's cultural reality. As an example Lem points to state and antistate terrorism, ritualized violence in art and the media, political extremism, the ultra-right turn to neofascism in electoral practice, and the lasting attraction of death as an ultimate cultural bastion to be defeated.

Any social formation that denounces the cultural significance of death by relegating it to a barely tolerated necessity fails to realize that, sooner or later, in one form or another, the banished issue is bound to return. Once we accept, however, that there is no escape from the dictates of our biological selves, it is easier to see that almost all cultural and life choices derive their sense and essence from our mortality. The striving for progress or achievement, the instinct for procreation or fame, all derive their rationale and raison d'être from the ineradicable presence of death. Attempts to sweep the subject of death under the carpet of the group subconscious lead only to suicide or genocide, sanctioned by the dictates of one ideology or another.

It was the cultural domestication of death, combined with the inversion (or rather perversion) of its symbolic and real value, that enabled Nazi Germany to justify its eugenic Aryan ideology, together with acts of mass slaughter and genocide. Lem's fictional review of a nonexistent socio-anthropological study—one which, in his opinion, clearly ought to exist—documents the presence of a vast cultural domain all too often neglected by contemporary sociologists, historians, and cultural philosophers.

There is an almost anecdotal incident that illustrates once again the extent to which Lem's writings at this later stage blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, between imaginary events and imaginative renditions of real ones, between the cognitive impulses behind fictive and factual writing. In a 1984 interview with Peter Engel, Lem describes a whimsical encounter between an acquaintance of his—a professor of contemporary history—and a member of the Polish Academy of Science. The meeting took place in Berlin, shortly after the publication of Provocation, which apparently made quite an impression on the member of the academy: During the conversation, the historian remarked to him, “I believe that Lem wrote a review of that book,” to which the other replied, “I don't know if Lem wrote anything, but I've got the book at home!” (230). One can only wonder about the power of a fictional review which impresses readers to such an extent that they imagine its imaginary subject must exist—more, that they own the book in question …

For years Lem's works, couched in the guise of fictive metacommentaries, imaginary publications, allegorical or philosophical fables, or even outright speculative treatises, have departed from mainstream fiction writing. It was thus an interesting move for a writer who had often complained of being tired of conventional fabulation, to return to it in a couple of pivotal Ijon Tichy novels: On Site Inspection (1983) and Peace on Earth (1987). Through their protagonist, both hark back to the earlier cycle of Tichy short stories: the regularly expanded Star Diaries (first edition 1957; in English also Memoirs of a Space Traveler, 1981), which, despite the hilarity of the hero's (mis)adventures, always contains a serious didactic strain.

In Peace on Earth, in order to free our planet from the threat of mass destruction, all national arsenals are transferred to the moon. The satellite becomes a massive international armory of future weapons systems designed on the principle of natural biological evolution (they can multiply and mutate using the sun for energy and the lunar soil for raw materials). The novel opens at the point when miscellaneous lobbying groups blackmail the UN into action with threats that the military equilibrium on the moon has been breached, creating a new and unknown generation of weapons which could eventually turn against the Earth. It is decided that an impartial human observer should be sent to the moon, and the honor is bestowed on Tichy.

The outcome of Tichy's mission (itself related in a series of flashbacks) surpasses all misgivings. The moon's ecological environment has been taken over by micropolymers—a kind of intellectronic pollen, capable of transforming into symbiotic bacterialike species. These “necrocytes” give life to “selenocytes” which, being even more versatile, wipe out the older generations of weapons systems. At the first opportunity, the selenocytes invade the Earth by way of Tichy's spaceship and then, assuming the form of computer viruses, attack all computer systems and their programs. In the pan-computerized twenty-first century, it takes only a single day for the human race, deprived of its infrastructure, industrial base, and telecommunications, to be pushed to the brink of calamity reminiscent of the “papyralysis” and the collapse of human civilization in Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.

The evolution of inanimate matter is one of the perennial topics in Lem's philosophical investigations. The birth and evolution of “miniaturobots” was discussed already in Summa technologiae and found a narrative expression in the form of the Black Cloud of miniaturized crystals in The Invincible. The idea of organisms that lack intelligence and react only instinctively to signs of immediate danger returns in “The Upside Down Evolution” (in One Human Minute, 1986). In this story/essay, mass production of “synsect” weapon systems marks a qualitatively new stage in the history of human warfare. Where previously the conventionality of war arsenals entailed the conventionality of declaring and conducting hostilities, in the anarchic future painted by Lem, hostile actions of independent and autonomous synsects are indistinguishable from natural disasters occasionally ravaging the Earth (diseases, acid rain, landslides, earthquakes, etc.). The difference between war and peace is obliterated and replaced by a much more horrific era of crypto-hostilities, where all sides participate in the secret use of weapons so secret that not even their creators can tell them from phenomena of nature.

But the astuteness of Lem's prognoses on the subject of future technology, whether military or any other, is not the only factor which contributes to the overall value of his works. Although Lem's fictions are always formidable instruments of cognition, they are more than mere fictional illustrations of scientific and epistemological dilemmas. Their value owes as much to their artistic and aesthetic qualities as to their success in defining the forefront of our technology-driven culture. Perhaps the most powerful among those qualities is Lem's haunting symbolism, frequently touched by sadness and tragedy.

One unforgettable example is the dementia experienced by Tichy in Peace on Earth. During the lunar mission, without the protagonist's knowledge or consent, he is subjected to a procedure which truncates the nerve links between his brain hemispheres. Tichy's futile efforts to come to terms with his new and alien psycho-physical identity is an emblem of the agony of a contemporary Everyman. The protagonist's struggles with his subconscious and his altered patterns of behavior are a symbol of our times—a metaphor for the trauma that the human psyche has sustained in confrontation with the alienating bestiality of the twentieth century. The inner tortures experienced by Tichy, his efforts to find some modus vivendi, symbolize humanity's efforts to reconsolidate the shattered universe in a search for some values around which the fragmented culture can rally.

This, in brief outline, is the portrait of Stanislaw Lem as a stranger in a strange land. Still, it might appear contentious, perhaps even iconoclastic, to pin the label of “stranger” on a writer who has certainly had his share of recognition and success. Called a cultural movement unto himself, hailed as a grand master of European letters, Lem has been featured many times in the Nobel Prize shortlist for his country. His works have enjoyed a staggering number of translations into almost forty languages, as well as almost unbelievable publishing figures, approaching twenty five million worldwide.

During his career he has been the recipient of myriad literary awards; he has been an eagerly consulted philosopher, futurologist, theorist, reviewer, and critic. His reputation has crossed the boundaries of the literary world, with more and more commentators showing interest in his contribution to philosophy and philosophy of science. In a class by himself, stubbornly following the call of his difficult muse, Lem is indeed a strange phenomenon: a writer of fiction, who commands attention and respect from scientists, philosophers, critics, scholars, and writers—from John Updike to Kurt Vonnegut to Anthony Burgess—alike.

Whence the strangeness, then? A partial answer is suggested by Michael Kandel in his “Lem in Review (June 2238).” As Kandel describes it, Lem's scientific and philosophical pansophism is staggering in its proportions. It encompasses cybernetics, information theory, probability, game theory, linguistics, theory of automata, computing, genetics, biology, cosmology, ethics, anthropology, sociology, aesthetics, and literary studies, to name just a few. But the differences between Lem and his literary contemporaries are more profound, owing not so much to his encyclopedic knowledge or almost unbelievable range of interests as to his attitude toward knowledge and cognition.

I have remarked elsewhere that, rather than treating Lem's writings as individual opera, we should see them as a single monumental opus, consisting of so many chapters (represented by individual works), which can be ordered and reordered to yield new insights into his works and into the problems they touch on.⁶ If there is a single overarching theme in this kaleidoscope of novels, stories, monographs, essays, studies, reviews, critiques, futurological predictions, philosophical speculations, and literary experiments, it is Lem's uncompromising view of literature's role in the contemporary cultural environment. His views on literary realism reveal that the many narrative conventions circulating in the literary world are of little use to him. For Lem realism is literature's way of confronting real and pressing problems which have already come, or are in the process of coming into existence, or those that will lie on the path of humanity's tomorrow. In fact, he concedes that this type of realism could be described simply as “sound prognosticating.”⁷

In the final analysis, this is probably the most profound sense in which Lem is a stranger in a strange land. In a day when the humanistic part of our culture, and especially its academic element, persistently questions the objectivity and even rationality of epistemic criteria, Lem's philosophical and literary work is a strong voice to the contrary. In his writings, which constantly redefine and reinvent the concept of “literature,” Lem plots the course for tomorrow with the imperfect knowledge of today. In his hands literature is a modeling vehicle, a flexible medium for developing socio-cultural hypotheses, an instrument of cognition and intellectual exploration, and a humanist avant-garde of contemporary culture.

From the perspective of forty years we can see that, far from escaping into outer space, Lem's works blend into a single magnum opus with Earth and its future as its twin foci. In fact, in view of the universality of this theme, I would argue that almost all of Lem's works are a source of fictional and nonfictional models for a single historiosophic scenario. His novels, stories, and essays model plausible socio-cultural reactions to powerful new stimuli, often of global proportions. Inventing fictional crises to portray the flexibility of our culture's potential response, Lem suggests—correctly in my opinion—that the stable (dynamic) equilibrium of a sufficiently large cultural system will tend to dominate its overall pattern of behavior.

The easiest way to illustrate the principle of dynamic equilibrium is to consider a simple closed system consisting of a bowl and a ball. Its initial equilibrium state is when the ball rests on the bottom of the bowl. The system is stable since occasional perturbations fail to prevent its return to the original equilibrium state. Every time an outside force of a finite nature (e. g., a human hand) rolls the ball up the side of the bowl, on withdrawal of the force the ball will return to its most probable state, coming to rest on the bottom again. The system will behave in the described manner only until the point where the ball is balanced on the rim in perfect symmetry. As this unstable kind of symmetry will inevitably be broken, the ball will roll either into or out of the bowl. In the latter case, it will again reach an equilibrium, but only as part of a completely new configuration (the same effect can be achieved by increasing the force violently enough to send the ball flying out and away from the bowl).

All futurological writing, so popular especially since becoming a well-paid industry in the 1960s and 1970s (under the aegis of, among others, the Club of Rome and the Rand Corporation), focuses primarily on the change aspect of the future. How the future will differ from today is the ruling and, surprisingly often, the only parameter in any scenario forecast. Little consideration is given to the possibility that, almost paradoxically, the challenges of tomorrow might turn out to be not so different from the challenges of today. In the French language this phenomenon is expressed as plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose; in fiction it is known as the Rip van Winkle syndrome, an enduring story of timelessness that defies a superficial facelift.

Lem's works flesh out the psycho-social consequences of this thesis in a variety of narrative and futurological scenarios. Formulating fictional models for what might be dubbed a Law of Preservation of Cultural Momentum, Lem debunks the fantasy of social enlightenment programs, whereby radically new social forces—wars, revolutions, scientific discoveries—might produce utopian peace and prosperity on Earth. Are we ready to accept Lem's hypotheses? If so, we might have to admit that our problems and conflicts are of our own design and that, as such, they are here to stay; that small incremental improvements are all we can hope for from even the most dramatic revolutions; that our cultural policies might have more lasting and wide-ranging effects than we often suspect when implementing them; that culture does abhor a vacuum; and that the sooner we come to terms with these insights, the better for us and our future.

The evolutionary momentum of our culture gives it a tendency to adopt and adapt to changing circumstances, rather than to collapse in their face. On the other hand, its ability to adapt (plasticity) is clearly not infinite, and can, under special conditions, be exceeded. Cultural plasticity will accommodate centrifugal pressures only to a certain degree, after which the culture will either dissolve entirely or, more likely, establish a radically new form of equilibrium (like the ball in our example, which might now come to rest in the corner of the room).

Even if any single factor may not affect culture to a catastrophic degree, the combined effect of several destabilizing factors might. Today it is becoming increasingly obvious that we do not have to look to outer space for such a synergistic combination. Gene doctoring, population explosion, nearsighted fiscal policies, eco-damage, new reproduction technologies, breakdown of families, rise of ultranationalism, the information highway, “smart” weapons, tactical nukes—the list is endless. It is impossible to predict whether the fusion of these and other factors will destabilize our culture to the point where it will cave in, perhaps to reassemble in completely novel and unpredictable ways. We must not, however, stop examining these factors for any signs of the jolt which might send us, so to speak, out of our cultural bowl.

Experience and hindsight teach that, in one way or another, all these new trends and phenomena will probably be assimilated into an everyday part of our lives. The same experience and hindsight also teach that his process usually happens without any deliberate plan of action on anybody's part. In fact, the usual response to cultural revolutions is usually of the “too little, too late” variety. As a result, the full potential of such cultural revolutions, novel technologies, legal and ethical precedents, and the like is never realized. Nor are we always better off for having them in the first place.

And this is precisely where mature literature can make a contribution—plotting the likely social consequences of such cultural transformations and developing anthropo-historical theses regarding psycho-social responses to new technologies. Such an ambitious agenda forms, of course, an equal challenge to the producers and consumers of fiction. In the end, it is no coincidence that Lem makes such great demands not only on himself but on his readers as well. For if we look closely at his lifelong creative metaphor, even though his vehicle is frequently a futurological scenario, his tenor is always a variation on an Earthly theme.⁸

Notes

1. In 1995 Harcourt published two new releases: Highcastle and Peace on Earth.

2. See my “Of Games with the Universe: Preconceptions of Science in Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible.”

3. This novel was actually completed in September 1948, i. e., before the publication of The Astronauts, which is usually listed as Lem's first work. Due to the complexities of the political and publishing situation during the Stalinist 1940s, Hospital of the Transfiguration was not published until 1955, and then only as part of the trilogy Time Not Lost. After 1975 Lem allowed to reprint only the first book, the earliest and independently written Hospital.

4. For an extensive analysis of this novel, see my “Game Theory in the Third Pentagon: A Study in Strategy and Rationality.”

5. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1959] 1964).

6. See my “A Literary Monument Revisited,” 416.

7. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “Twenty-Two Answers and Two Postscripts: An Interview with Stanislaw Lem,” 244.

8. I want to thank Ellen R. Feldman and the editorial staff at Northwestern University Press for their help in preparing this book for publication.