much more narrative skill?
The only chance for a writer would be to transcend genre bound-
aries and become accepted as a mainstream writer: it is irrelevant
whether a Gabriel Garcıá Maŕquez or an Italo Calvino is a fantasy
writer. Some writers who started in the magazines seem to have
entered the mainstream: J. G. Ballard or Brian W. Aldiss in England;
others hover uncomfortably between the mainstream and genre
writing like Stanisl/aw Lem, who is considered a literary writer by
the fans—and an SF writer by the critics.
Surely, the most important living SF author on the Continent of
Europe must be Stanisl/aw Lem, but the fate of his books seems to bear
out the thesis advanced by himself in his polemical essay ‘SF: A
Hopeless Case—with Exceptions’: that literature has been split up,
somewhere after World War I, into an upper realm of serious litera-
ture, and a lower realm of trivial fiction. Whereas an H. G. Wells or a
Karel C
ˇ apek were accepted as writers without any labels in their
countries and in the world, Lem’s work is inseparably linked with
SF, which is ironical in view of his repeated claims that he entered SF
only by misadventure, out of ignorance, because he didn’t know into
what company he was getting (this notwithstanding the fact that his
earliest work was trashy stories for the Polish equivalent of the pulp
magazines). But in his own country he is not, save by some younger
scholars, taken seriously as a writer, and not even his closest friends
have shown the slightest interest in his work. The writer Jan Joźef
Szczepański, in the briefest of pieces, had only to say about Lem that
he had ‘imagination’; and the eminent literary historian Jan Bl/ons´ki
wrote just, decades ago, a newspaper piece, and glossed over Lem’s
work in a few short paragraphs in his history of Polish literature. Lem
Introduction
xi
himself feels, although his circulation numbers millions of copies, that
he has been ‘suppressed’ in Poland. Lem has had his greatest success in
Germany (both Germanies), where he sold some seven million copies,
and is also considered an SF writer whose work can be counted as
literature, and this high reputation persists even if the readers have
meanwhile largely lost interest in him. In the United States and
England Lem has been published as a literary writer, but his literary
reputation doesn’t extend much beyond the pages of The New York
Times Book Review. In the rest of the world he has almost exclusively
been published as part of SF series and not attracted much critical
attention. Just as what success he has had is closely linked with the
Communist system. This is another irony, since Lem despises Com-
munism but never took a position against it so as not to jeopardize his
chances of publication. But without the Communist system which
kept away competition, he would never have achieved his high sales
figures. Writers who made of themselves a nuisance to the system
were either not published at all, or only in small editions: political
expediency, not readers’ interest decided print-figures.
While Lem in his early stories and novels made acknowledgement
of the bright socialist future, he later developed a formula more in
accord with both his arrogant temperament and his limitations as a
writer. Lem’s great weakness is characterization and social back-
ground. In his most characteristic fiction he disregards social ties
and individual as well as social circumstances altogether, pitting
‘pure’ representatives of mankind against a cosmic riddle: sexless
beings without family, sweethearts, friends or indeed social ties of
any kind, unformed by social organization. Now most writers in
Communist countries followed a certain stock pattern: after having
paid lip-service to Communism as the certain and humane future of
mankind, they soon went on to what interested them really, the
adventure. Lem dispensed with even that, he neither defended nor
attacked Communism, he just ignored it, which made him more
acceptable to both his readers at home (who were tired of all that
propaganda anyway)—and, of course, to readers in the West who
cared even less about such admonitions and welcomed him as a free
spirit who wasn’t shackled by the constraints of ideology. Thus
paradoxically the very system that Lem so hated and chose to
ignore contributed to his success, and with the fall of Communism
those qualities were less of a virtue, and since Lem was linked with
the Communist system in the mind of many readers, he is now
considered by many to be a relic of that system.
xii
Franz Rottensteiner
It would be an error to see in Lem’s dominant theme of non-
communication merely a symbolic reaction to the policies of the Cold
War, but although there may be such undertones in it, it is more
firmly rooted in his personal preferences. Like Pascal, Lem is filled
with horror of the cold empty reaches of outer space, and expounds
the alienness and inscrutability of a universe that takes no cognisance
of man. Again and again Lem has presented alien worlds, from The
Astronauts of 1951 onwards, that confront man with cosmic phenom-
ena that prove to be unsolvable riddles. But for all of Lem’s consider-
able knowledge of the sciences, his scientific stance and the pseudo-
scientific trappings of his stories, his SF cosmos is more a romantic
construct than a system of scientific facts, of no more objective reality than Lovecraft’s eldritch Gods in an icy indifference to human beings.
Lem’s cosmos too is a projection, a displacement to avoid coming to
grips with the real problem which is of a psychological nature: Lem’s
lack of sympathy for the human animal, and missing solidarity with
his fellow humans. The true aliens in Lem’s stories are human beings
in general, and women in particular. Lem is a misanthrope and a
misogynist, and his inability to understand those ‘aliens’ has led him
to project his non-understanding upon the cosmos at large, and to
proclaim it an essential quality of the universe. Lem has turned his
weakness at characterization into an asset in his SF of ideas, and made
his heroes into viewpoints, certain perspectives of perceiving the
world. Pirx is the bungling hero who finally triumphs because of
rather than in spite of his ineptitude which proves again and again the
saving grace of man over the machine; Ijon Tichy is another space
traveller who doesn’t act but who has things happen to him and who
is able to observe the metaphysical, political and social follies of
mankind from the position of a disinterested observer. Trurl and
Klapaucius are super-heroes in a fairy-tale of the absurdities of
human existence. Unlike the writers of ‘hard SF’, Lem shows a
disregard for facts (which he makes up as he goes along to his heart’s
desire); he is rather an ideological writer, an atheist theologian, a
casuist and sophist who sometimes dances, sometimes blunders
through various sc
ientific, religious and philosophical systems and
creates in their interplay a web of ‘pleasant lies’ (as Kurt Vonnegut
would say), without committing himself. This makes for contextual
richness and ambiguity which are literary qualities, but which are
more of an entertaining than a scientific nature. The high point
of Lem’s methods is his most famous novel Solaris. The theories
advanced to explain the nature of the alien thinking ocean covering
Introduction
xiii
the whole planet belong more properly to theology than science.
Solaris is also the one Lem novel that combines the attraction of
philosophical speculation about the truly alien with the appeal of a
romantic love story. The ocean recreates, from the deepest, sub-
conscious residues of the human mind what is the deepest guilt of
the scientists on Solaris station. In the case of the protagonist Kris
Kelvin this is Rheya, his lover or wife who committed suicide after
having become estranged from him for some unknown reason. On
Solaris she returns, a materialized phantom lover resurrected by the
tremendous powers of the ocean, a manifestation of the alien that
offers Kelvin, it would appear, a second chance at love. At first Kelvin
reacts with horror at this succubus that exhibits superhuman
strength, and he packs Rheya into a rocket and shoots her off into
space. But she returns, and gradually he comes to accept and to love
her, as she acquires more human traits. After further experiments she
disappears for good, and at the end of the novel Kelvin squats before
the ocean, waiting for her return, hoping ‘that the time of cruel
miracles was not past.’ Solaris has usually been interpreted as a
touching love story, a kind of cosmic Tristan and Yseult tale of the
lovers who couldn’t come together, and an encounter with the truly
alien as manifested by the puzzling phenomena of the ocean. But the
real import of the story would seem to be quite a different one,
namely one of getting rid of the alien. First of all, Kelvin appears to be a very immature character, as his initial, incredibly brutal reaction to
Rheya shows: he kills her by spaceship, an act that may be considered
the SF equivalent of a shotgun murder in the family. After her second
return, he falls (again) in love with her as she apparently loses much
of her alienness and becomes more of a human being and less of a
phantom wholly dependent upon Kelvin. But it should be noted here
that in the novel there is to be found no trace of the genuine Rheya;
the ‘Rheya’ of Solaris is a construct of the ocean (which acts here as a
kind of amplifier), and has no informational connection at all with the
real woman. The reconstruction is rather a Rheya according to
Kelvin’s remembrance of Rheya, a materialization of Kelvin’s picture
of her, with the ocean acting only as a mirror, and this reconstructed
Rheya is more properly a part of Kelvin than a part of the ocean, let
alone a return of Rheya. She is in reality a piece of Kelvin’s mind, a
part of himself, that is to say that she is less alien to him than a real, living woman (like the original Rheya) would be—the Rheya he
couldn’t get along with. The Rheya that had been was a woman with
her own personality, her own mind, and her own interests, as distinct
xiv
Franz Rottensteiner
from Kelvin’s. The new ‘Rheya’ has only the semblance of Rheya, but
in all other respects she is from the stuff of Kelvin’s mind, there exists no psychic barrier between him and her. What the ocean provides, by
way of the alien, is an elimination of the alien, and it makes possible a meeting, a physical meeting, with one’s own self. The science fictional
device of the ocean allows a spiritual intimacy between lovers
impossible in the real world. In the recreated Rheya an immature
Kelvin, who so obviously was unable to love a real woman and accept
her on her own terms, is able to love her, courtesy of the alien ocean,
as part of himself, to love himself in her since she is no being with her own will but a figment of his own mind. In Rheya Kelvin loves
himself, the Solaris ocean is only a mirror whose function is to
eliminate ‘otherness’, while at he same time obscuring this truth.
The ultimate goal of Solaris is not, as the cognitive trappings would
suggest, knowledge, it is self-deception. There is also the telling scene in which Kelvin tries to devise a test to find out whether he is sane.
This is also a self-deception, since in principle there can be no test by which anybody could test his own sanity (which can only be
determined by others). The hidden truth of the love story of Solaris
is self-love: the love between Kelvin and Rheya is an act of masturba-
tion. Kelvin is the quintessential solipsist Lemian hero who has never
been able to bridge the gulf between the ‘I’ and the ‘You’, and to meet
others on their own terms. Kelvin is not a Tristan bemoaning his lost
love, the ending sees him rather as Narcissus looking into the mirror
of the ocean (mirror images abound in the novel) pitying himself. The
novel skilfully employs a gigantic science fictional apparatus to
obscure the simple fact that the cognitive thrust of the book is
foremost a psychological escape mechanism to camouflage the failure
of coming to terms with the profound mystery of the autonomy of
other human beings, especially the other sex, who are in Lem’s work
invariably pale and weak creatures: by far the most interesting
woman in Lem’s work is the female robot of ‘The Mask’.
In his work Lem has created a mysticism of non-communication
and non-understanding. Like the mystic he attempts in his SF to
speak of that which cannot be spoken of, the unknowable, that which
is inaccessible to human reason, and since such a goal is unattainable
and self-contradictory (it can only be expressed through human
reason) he can only approach it in a roundabout way, by piling
descriptive details upon descriptive details that are then said to be as a whole beyond human cognitive faculties. This proceeding makes for a
rich tapestry of a literature of ideas, but it is a private obsession that
Introduction
xv
the author tries to pass for an expression of universal laws. Lem’s
playful infatuation with theory-building has nevertheless a lot to say
about the limits of human reason.
After Lem, the most important SF authors on the continent of
Europe are Arkady (1925–1991) and Boris (1933–) Strugatsky who
are not represented in this book since their best work is almost
exclusively in the domain of long novellas and novels. They have
followed a different course from Lem who is not interested in human
beings and their social organization and has turned his back on
society. In the Soviet Union it was perhaps less possible than in
Poland to ignore society, the Aesopian mode of story-telling was a
necessity for survival, and then the Strugatskys are also firmly rooted
in the great Russian tradition of social satire of which Nikolai Gogol is the brightest example and which included in fantasy Mikhail Bulga-kov. The Strugatskys have often been the subject of specu
lations
whether they were antagonist critics of Soviet society, and their work
was violently attacked and the subject of censorship as well as
vigorously defended. It is firmly rooted in the particular conditions
of Soviet and Russian society, and an engaged expression of humanist
concerns. In many respects, the Strugatskys’ work can serve as an
indicator of the state of the present and not the future of their own
country, and since many of the allusions to Russian particulars will be
lost for non-Russian readers, the appeal of the work of the Strugatskys
is less universal than that of Lem and less accessible to Western
readers, but there is much in it that makes it timeless and of more
than local or transitory interest. One of the recurring problems in
their novels, especially in their early ones, is the question of inter-
vention or non-intervention by superior civilizations in primitive
ones, a problem that has also been touched upon in American SF,
but with less urgency. It was an axiom that the advanced Communist
society was superior to all other possible systems and progress to
Communism inevitable. The Strugatskys dared to question this as-
sumption, and showed that intervention by force, even with the best
intentions, might lead to more evil than good. Their many and often
hilariously funny put-downs of the excesses of bureaucracy are
typically Russian, but while red tape may have been a prominent
feature of the socialist system, it is of course far from restricted to it.
The work of the Strugatskys is deeply rooted in history and human
society and distinguished by a deep concern and solidarity with
human suffering in a way that Lem’s work is not; this brings them
closer to Philip K. Dick, the foremost science fiction existentialist. Like
xvi
Franz Rottensteiner
Dick’s heroes, the protagonists of the Strugatskys remain loyal to their
humanist principles and preserve their personal integrity, even if the
world around them falls apart, either under the onslaught of the
forces of history or under the influence of incomprehensible alien
influences (as in their masterpiece Roadside Picnic). Their love for and
understanding of small, unimportant people, the common man, is
what is an essential quality in some of the greatest SF writers,
View from Another Shore : European Science Fiction Page 2
