Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  A Perfect Vacuum.

  But I will not be satisfied with the stuff gained this way, and I cast these remnants aside.

  My working methods are additionally complicated and enriched by my having from time to time written quasi-scientific works that were not intended as scaffoldlike supports for fiction but meant seriously as independent books on the theory of literature (but they are along empirical lines that are alien to specialists in the humanities). And I have produced Science Fiction and Futurology (1970), which is an acerbic criticism and theory of science fiction; and skeptical futurology, like Summa Technologiae (1964), which doesn’t amass many speculations about the wonderful or terrible things of the near future but, rather, attempts to pursue a few radical ideas to their utmost limits; and the Dialogues (1957), about the horizons and chances of cybernetics implicit in the system; and essays on various topics, such as Biology and Values (1968) and Applied Cybernetics: An Example from the Field of Sociology[2] (1971) — a discussion of the pathology of socialism.

  Later, it turned out that several of the ideas that occurred to me during the writing of these works and that I used as hypotheses and examples — i.e., much of what I encountered on my chosen intellectual way during the process of writing — could also be put to good use in fiction. At first, this happened in a totally unconscious manner. I noticed it only when it was pointed out to me; that is, my critics discovered the similarities and were of the opinion that I oscillated with full consciousness between serious discussion and fantastic literature, when I myself was not aware of such a seesawing. Once my attention was drawn to this phenomenon, I sometimes browsed in my own books with an eye toward this possibility of exploitation or cross-fertilization.

  In looking back, I see clearly that in my middle period as a writer I wrote fiction without any regard for the existence of some continuity between the imagined worlds and our world. In the worlds of Solaris, Eden, and Return from the Stars, there are no immediately obvious transitional stages that could connect these states of civilization with the obnoxious state of things on earth today. My later work, on the other hand, shows marked signs of a turning toward our world; that is, my later fictions are attempts to establish such connections. I sometimes call this my inclination toward realism in science fiction. Most likely, such attempts, which to some extent have the unmistakable character of a retreat (as a renunciation of both Utopia and dystopia, extremes that are either repugnant to me or leave me cold, just as is the case for a physician when he faces someone incurably ill), spring from the awareness that I must soon die, and from the resulting desire to satisfy, at least with hypotheses, my insatiable inquisitiveness about the far future of mankind and the cosmos. But that is only a guess; I wouldn’t be able to prove it.

  In response to a request to write his autobiography, Einstein emphasized not the historical circumstances of his life but, rather, his most beloved offspring — his theories -because they were the children of his mind. I am no Einstein, but in this respect I nevertheless resemble him, for I am of the opinion that the most important parts of my biography are my intellectual struggles. The rest, not mentioned so far, is of a purely anecdotal character.

  In 1953, I married a young student of medicine. We have a son of fifteen, who likes my novels well enough but modern music — pop, rock and roll, the Beatles — his motorcycle, and the engines of automobiles perhaps even more. For many years now, I have not owned my books and my work; rather, I have become owned by them. I usually get up a short time before five in the morning and sit down to write: I am writing these words at six o’clock. I am unable now to work more than five or six hours a day without a pause. When I was younger, I could write as long as my stamina held out; the power of my intellect gave way only after my physical prowess had been exhausted. I write increasingly slowly — my self-criticism, the demands I put upon myself, have continued to grow — but I am still rather prolific. (I know this from the speed with which I have to throw away used-up typewriter ribbons.) Less and less of what comes into my mind I consider to be good enough to test as suitable subject matter by my method of trial and error. I still know as little about how and where my ideas are born as most writers do. I am also not of the opinion that I am one of the best exegetes of my own books — i.e., of the problems characteristic of them. I have written many books of which I haven’t said a word here, among them The Cyberiad, the Fables for Robots (in Mortal Engines), and The Star Diaries, which on the generic map of literature are to be found in the provinces of the humorous — of satire, irony, and wit — with a touch of Swift and of dry, mischievous Voltairean misanthropy. As is well known, the great humorists were people who had been driven to despair and anger by the conduct of mankind. In this respect, I am one of those people.

  I am probably both dissatisfied with everything that I have written and proud of it: I must be touched by arrogance, but I do not feel anything of it. I can notice it only in my behavior — in the way that I used to destroy all my manuscripts, in spite of many attempts and requests to get me to deposit these voluminous papers in a university or some other repository to preserve them for posterity. I have made up a striking explanation for this behavior. The pyramids were one of the wonders of the world only while there was no explanation of how they were erected. Very long, inclined planes, on which bands of workers hauled up the stone blocks, possibly on wooden cylinders, were leveled once the work was finished, and thus today the pyramids rise up in a lonely way among the shallow sand dunes of the desert. I try to level my inclined plane, my scaffolds and other means of construction, and to let stand only that of which I need not be ashamed.

  I am not sure whether what I have confessed here is the pure truth, but I have tried to adhere to truth as well as I could.

  Translated from the German by Franz Rottensteiner

  ON THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SCIENCE FICTION

  In the early stages of literary development the different branches of literature, the genological types, are distinguished clearly and unmistakably. Only in the more advanced stages do we find hybridization. But since some cross-breedings are always forbidden, there exists a main law of literature that could be called “incest prohibition”; that is, the taboo of genological incest.

  A literary work considered as a game has to be played out to the finish under the same rules with which it was begun. A game can be empty or meaningful. An empty game has only inner semantics, for it derives entirely from the relationships that obtain between the objects with which it is played. On a chessboard, for example, the king has its specific meanings within the rules of the play, but it has no reference outside the rules (i.e., it is nothing at all in relation to the world outside the confines of the chessboard). Literary games can never have so great a degree of semantic vacuum, for they are played with “natural language,” which always has meanings oriented toward the world of real objects. Only with a language especially constructed to have no outward semantics, such as mathematics, is it possible to play empty games.

  In any literary game there are rules of two kinds: those that realize outer semantic functions as the game unfolds and those that make the unfolding possible. “Fantastic” rules of the second kind — those that make the unfolding possible — are not necessarily felt as such even when they imply events that could not possibly occur in the real world. For example, the thoughts of a dying man are often detailed in quite realistic fiction even though it is impossible, therefore fantastic, to read the thoughts of a dying man out of his head and reproduce them in language. In such cases we simply have a convention, a tacit agreement between writer and reader — in a word, the specific rule of literary games that allows the use of nonrealistic means (e.g., thought reading) for the presentation of realistic happenings.

  Literary games are complicated by the fact that the rules that realize outer semantic functions can be oriented in several directions. The main types of literary creation imply different ontologies. But you would be quite mistaken if you believed, for e
xample, that the classical fairy tale has only its autonomous inner meanings and no relationship with the real world. If the real world did not exist, fairy tales would have no meaning. The events that occur in a myth or fairy tale are always semantically connected with what fate has decreed for the inhabitants of the depicted world, which means that the world of a myth or fairy tale is ontologically either inimical or friendly toward its inhabitants, never neutral; it is thus ontologically different from the real world, which may be here defined as consisting of a variety of objects and processes that lack intention, that have no meaning, no message, that wish us neither well nor ill, that are just there. The worlds of myth or fairy tale have been built either as traps or as happiness-giving universes. If a world without intention did not exist — that is, if the real world did not exist — it would be impossible for us to perceive the differentia specifica, the uniqueness, of the myth and fairy-tale worlds.

  Literary works can have several semantic relationships at the same time. For fairy tales the inner meaning is derived from the contrast with the ontological properties of the real world, but for anti-fairy tales, such as those by Mark Twain in which the worst children live happily and only the good and well bred end fatally, the meaning is arrived at by turning the paradigm of the classical fairy tale upside down. In other words, the first referent of a semantic relationship need not be the real world but may instead be the typology of a well-known class of literary games. The rules of the basic game can be inverted, as they are in Mark Twain, and thus is created a new generation, a new set of rules — and a new kind of literary work.

  In the twentieth century the evolution of mainstream literary rules has both allowed the author new liberties and simultaneously subjected him to new restrictions.

  This evolution is antinomical, as it were. In earlier times the author was permitted to claim all the attributes of God: nothing that concerned his hero could be hidden from him. But such rules had already lost their validity with Dostoevsky, and God-like omniscience with respect to the world he has created is now forbidden the author. The new restrictions are realistic in that as human beings we act only on the basis of incomplete information. The author is now one of us; he is not allowed to play God. At the same time, he is allowed to create inner worlds that need not necessarily be similar to the real world, but can instead show different kinds of deviation from it.

  These new deviations are very important to the contemporary author. The worlds of myth and fairy tale also deviate from the real world, but individual authors do not invent the ways in which they do so: in writing a fairy tale you must accept certain axioms you haven’t invented, or you won’t write a fairy tale. In mainstream literature, however, you are now allowed to attribute pseudo-ontological qualities of your personal, private invention to the world you describe. Since all deviations of the described world from the real world necessarily have a meaning, the sum of all such deviations is (or should be) a coherent strategy or semantic intention.

  Therefore we have two kinds of literary fantasy: “final” fantasy, as in fairy tales and science fiction, and “passing” fantasy, as in Kafka. In a science-fiction story, the presence of intelligent dinosaurs does not usually signal the presence of hidden meaning. The dinosaurs are, instead, meant to be admired as we would admire a giraffe in a zoological garden; that is, they are intended not as parts of an expressive semantic system, but only as parts of the empirical world. In The Metamorphosis, on the other hand, it is not intended that we should accept the transformation of human being into bug simply as a fantastic marvel, but, rather, that we should pass on to the recognition that Kafka has with objects and their deformations depicted a sociopsychological situation. Only the outer shell of this world is formed by the strange phenomena; the inner core has a solid nonfantastic meaning. Thus a story can depict the world as it is, or interpret the world (attribute values to it, judge it, call it names, laugh at it, etc.), or, in most cases, do both things at the same time.

  If the depicted world is oriented positively toward man, it is the world of the classical fairy tale, in which physics is controlled by morality, for in a fairy tale there can be no physical accidents that result in anyone’s death, no irreparable damage to the positive hero. If it is oriented negatively, it is the world of myth (“Do what you will, you’ll still become guilty of killing your father and committing incest”). If it is neutral, it is the real world — the world that realism describes in its contemporary shape and that science fiction tries to describe at other points on the space-time continuum.

  It is the premise of science fiction that anything shown shall in principle be interpretable empirically and rationally. In science fiction there can be no inexplicable marvels, no transcendences, no devils or demons — and the pattern of occurrences must be verisimilar.

  And now we come near the rub, for what is meant by a verisimilar pattern of occurrences? Science-fiction authors try to blackmail us by calling upon the omnipotence of science and the infinity of the cosmos as a continuum. “Anything can happen” and therefore “anything that happens to occur to us” can be presented in science fiction.

  But it is not true, even in a purely mathematical sense, that anything can happen, because there are infinities of quite different powers. Let us leave mathematics alone, however. Science fiction can be either “real science fiction” or “pseudo-science fiction.” When it produces fantasy, like Kafka’s, it is only pseudo-science fiction, because it then concentrates on the content to be signaled. What meaningful and total relationships obtain between the telegram “Mother died, funeral Monday” and the structure and function of the telegraphic apparatus? None. The apparatus merely enables us to transmit the message, which is also the case with semantically dense objects of a fantastic nature, such as the metamorphosis of man into bug, that nevertheless transmit a realistic communication.

  If we were to change railway signals so that they ordered the stopping of trains in moments of danger not by blinking red lights but by pointing with stuffed dragons, we would be using fantastic objects as signals, but those objects would still have a real, nonfantastic function. The fact that there are no dragons has no relationship to the real purpose or method of signaling.

  As in life we can solve real problems with the help of images of nonexistent beings, so in literature can we signal the existence of real problems with the help of prima facie impossible occurrences or objects. Even when the happenings it describes are totally impossible, a science-fiction work may still point out meaningful, indeed rational, problems. For example, the social, psychological, political, and economic problems of space travel may be depicted quite realistically in science fiction even though the technological parameters of the spaceships described are quite fantastic in the sense that it will for all eternity be impossible to build a spaceship with such parameters.

  But what if everything in a science-fiction work is fantastic? What if not only the objects but also the problems have no chance of ever being realized, as when impossible time-travel machines are used to point out impossible time-travel paradoxes? In such cases science fiction is playing an empty game.

  Since empty games have no hidden meaning, since they represent nothing and predict nothing, they have no relationship at all to the real world and can therefore please us only as logical puzzles, as paradoxes, as intellectual acrobatics. Their value is autonomous, because they lack all semantic reference; therefore they are worthwhile or worthless only as games. But how do we evaluate empty games? Simply by their formal qualities. They must contain a multitude of rules; they must be elegant, strict, witty, precise, and original. They must therefore show at least a minimum of complexity and an inner coherence; that is, it must be forbidden during the play to make any change in the rules that would make the play easier.

  Nevertheless, ninety to ninety-eight percent of the empty games in science fiction are very primitive, very naïve one-parameter processes. They are almost always based on only one or two rules, and in most cas
es it is the rule of inversion that becomes their method of creation. To write such a story you invert the members of a pair of linked concepts. For example, we think the human body quite beautiful, but in the eyes of an extraterrestrial we are all monsters: in Sheckley’s “All the Things You Are” the odor of human beings is poisonous for extraterrestrials, and when they touch the skin of humans they get blisters, etc. What appears normal to us is abnormal to others — about half of Sheckley’s stories are built on this principle. The simplest kind of inversion is a chance mistake. Such mistakes are great favorites in science fiction: something that doesn’t belong in our time arrives here accidentally (a wrong time-mailing), etc.

  Inversions are interesting only when the change is in a basic property of the world. Time-travel stories originated in that way: time, which is irreversible, acquired a reversible character. On the other hand, any inversion of a local kind is primitive (on earth humans are the highest biological species, on another planet humans are the cattle of intelligent dinosaurs; we consist of albumen, the aliens of silicon; etc.). Only a nonlocal inversion can have interesting consequences; we use language as an instrument of communication; any instrument can in principle be used for the good or bad of its inventor. Therefore the idea that language can be used as an instrument of enslavement, as in Delany’s Babel-17, is interesting as an extension of the hypothesis that world view and conceptual apparatus are interdependent; i.e., because of the ontological character of the inversion.

  The pregnancy of a Virgo Immaculata; the running of 100 meters in 0.1 seconds; the equation 2 × 2 = 7; the pan-psychism of all cosmic phenomena postulated by Stapledon: these are four kinds of fantastic condition.

  It is in principle possible, even empirically possible, to start embryogenesis in a virgin’s egg; although empirically improbable today, this condition may acquire an empirical character in the future.