In his well-constructed novels and stories Lem transcends the hackneyed conventions of [science fiction]. He felicitously combines erudition with suspense, verbal inventiveness with narrative skill, social conscience with a satiric wit and a marvelous gift for grotesque parody. His best fiction, much of which has now been translated into English, has earned Lem the reputation of a serious creative writer. In this essay I propose to examine those elements of his work that make him an original artist as well as a timely social critic.

When reading Lem one quickly notices two opposite though not mutually exclusive tendencies in his thought. On the one hand, his weltanschauung is scientific; he believes that modern technology is important and necessary. On the other hand, he manifests a humanist's preoccupation with ethical questions. He portrays with irony man's stubborn and arrogant compulsion to subjugate his fellows and the infinite universe around him, yet he clearly admires the very qualities—inventiveness, will and determination—which impel men to compete with each other and with the forces of nature. Lem attacks the absurd excesses of modern civilization from many angles, and his imagination never ceases to amaze readers with its sly and timely resourcefulness. Although diverse literary influences are perceptible—Swift, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Kafka, Gombrowicz, Dostoevsky, Sienkiewicz, folktales, popular mysteries and sf (to name only a few)—the narrative style and satiric tone remain uniquely Lem's.

By confronting his heroes with the absurd, the grotesque, and the unknown, he stresses human limitations and fallibility. The novel The Investigation … uses the detective story format in order to show the inadequacies of scientific rationalism…. Despite a few striking incongruities … and a lack of character development, the novel does "work" if it is read as a paranoid nightmare, dreamt rather than lived by [the young detective] Gregory, a lonely and introverted individual who is desperate to succeed.

The dream situation has deeper implications in Solaris … a compelling novel about a planet endowed with a sentient ocean. This "ocean" (made up of a kind of matter hitherto unknown to man) has remarkable mimetic powers. Capable of learning from its experiences with human beings, the sea dispatches to each of the three scientist-protagonists the simulacrum of a woman whose image has been present in his innermost thoughts…. [Faced] with the majestic indifference and utter silence of an alien planet, the human protagonists despair of being able to establish the "Contact" which has been the object of their mission…. Suspended in the artificial environment of a mobile observation station, they become increasingly dominated by paranoid anxieties and fear of the unknown.

Descriptions of a surreal landscape play a decisive role in the novel. The planet's red and blue suns alternately set over a sea of matter which constantly spawns baroque formations that grow, flourish, metamorphose, only to subside quickly and disappear. Lem invents a whole terminology to describe these stately configurations of matter…. The passages depicting such bizarre excrescences that apparently serve no utilitarian goal reflect the author's preoccupation with an esthetic ideal of pure creativity. Like the creative process, whether in the universe or in the artist's imagination, Solaris resists scientific dissection. (pp. 549-50)

[Cruel and miraculous] is the anxious, somnambulent drama played out between the principals. An atmosphere of almost Gothic horror reflects their fears of the unknown and unknowable. Human behavior patterns are dramatized with authenticity, but the underlying motivations remain obscure and lacking in "rationality." Because of its psychological probing, tight narrative structure and grotesquely refined imagery, Solaris must remain Lem's most original and complete contribution to the novel.

Social and especially political satire predominates in much of Lem's best work. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub … delineates the Kafkaesque plight of an unnamed narrator who finds himself entrusted with an unspecified security mission in "The Building," an enclave of paranoid spies and bureaucrats who have isolated themselves from the outside world in order to maintain their ideological purity. The inhabitants of this sinister and ambiguous environment … constantly undergo Protean metamorphoses, as they peel away false ears and noses, only to reveal new disguises…. The plot's circular movement inexorably leads the narrator to a tragic end, the inevitable result of a hopeless struggle for recognition within a self-perpetuating "system" that, having long ago forgotten its raison d'être, arrogantly defies all ethical principles. Among other things, this absurdist tragicomedy presents a timely satire on militarism.

Often in Lem's work the effects of a dream are humorous: viz., "The Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines," which details the plight of a crass, dull-witted monarch called Zipperupus who gets lost and then permanently immured in a box of dreams constructed by his archenemy Subtillion. This story occurs in The Cyberiad …, the only mock epic of note in Polish literature since Adam Mickiewicz's celebrated Pan Tadeusz. These fairy tales of the cybernetic age (which are linked by the figures of their robot heroes. Trurl and Klapaucius) reveal the author's capacity for linguistic invention and improvisation. He coins hundreds of grotesque neologisms and nonsense words (reminiscent of Edward Lear, whose influence is also apparent in Lem's own illustrations to The Star Diaries). The stories' fantastic wit depends to a large extent on the combination of diverse linguistic and stylistic levels. Archaic and dialectal language occurs cheek by jowl with scientific jargon, occasionally presented in Latin (the legacy of the Polish Baroque) and officialese (the unhappy influence of modern bureaucratic stultification); poetic diction merges with prosaic colloquialisms. (pp. 550-51)

One of Lem's most consistent themes has been the absurdity of utopian dreams about the future. In a society deprived of conflict, stress and danger man loses his capacity for moral commitment and self-assertion. The ingenious and well-intentioned robots Trurl and Klapaucius often try to assert their miraculous powers of scientific invention and improvisation upon an unenlightened universe of men and other robots. The results are usually farcical, if not downright tragic. (p. 551)

The way of the future does not lie in tampering with human nature; Lem's comedy implies a stern warning. A Futurological Congress … eloquently reveals the author's trepidations about future generations' capacity to deal with the problems of an even more distant future. The notion of an academic reunion—like the annual MLA meeting—here initiates a grotesque farce with serious overtones. Initially Lem satirizes the pompousness and sterility of academic gamesmanship…. The satire ridicules movements that advocate "liberation" through drugs and sex; academia, luxury hotels, the military and the medical profession also get some hard knocks in this very funny novel. Brave New World motifs dominate the most didactic section of the book (which also happens to be esthetically the least satisfactory). Miraculously transported into a future epoch, the narrator Ijon Tichy awakens in what appears to be an affluent, highly developed civilization. The population is living under an illusion: a small elite group has palliated the reality of miserable and sordid living conditions by placing hallucinogens in the water supply.

The implications of Lem's cosmology are clearly pessimistic. Man, despite, or perhaps because of, his technological achievements, remains an easy prey to his tyrannically inclined fellows. Machines tend, logically enough, to reflect the defects (or longings) of their inventors, while cosmic phenomena can only be perceived from the limited viewpoint of human understanding. Despite his belief in science (whose terminology, in both serious and parodic form, comprises an integral part of his literary and philosophical idiom), and despite his fascination with the infinite possibilities for expanding our knowledge through space exploration, Lem anticipates that future generations may be deprived of freedom through the very offices of a technology that was supposed to liberate them. By dramatizing the tragic consequences of despotism cum science in the future, he stresses man's ultimate responsibility for his own destiny. In fact, if Lem's space travelers … find adversity and even death during their journeys of exploration, the determining factor is usually human error, not the intervention of alien forces or creatures. In the last analysis, Lem is confronting us with a grotesque but truthful image of ourselves; after all, human nature remains eternally the same.

A final word on Lem's narrative technique: his humorous writing with its surreal guignol effects, should be distinguished from the "straight" fiction, where the emphasis is on plot development. The latter belongs to the same tradition as the historical adventure yarns of Henryk Sienkiewicz…. Sienkiewicz looked to Poland's colorful past for inspiration; Lem looks to an equally exotic space-age future. Sienkiewicz enriched his literary idiom by drawing upon seventeenth-century authors …; Lem, as mentioned above, borrows from these as well as many other linguistic sources, but the predominating element tends to be modern technical jargon (often heavily influenced by English). Both writers are consummate storytellers; by stimulating the reader's curiosity, they induce him to suspend disbelief. Their serious dialogue, however, tends to sound stilted, and their characterizations are for the most part one-dimensional and lacking in psychological depth. (An exception in Lem's case is Solaris with its guilt-ridden narrator and its ambivalent human relationships.)

Because it emphasizes narrative and description rather than character development, "serious" science fiction may be viewed as a quasi-traditional, even retrograde literary genre (while satiric sf clearly derives from the flawed utopias of Cervantes, Voltaire and others in the same tradition). Lem, moreover, betrays an old-fashioned predilection for verbal landscape painting. Whether barren or fertile, Lem's moon-or planetscapes are painted in vivid, graphic colors. Nature in the Cosmos alternately repels and fascinates his prosaic heroes. They record faithfully what they are—they either conquer or are defeated—but there is no time for introspection. (pp. 552-53)