Stanislaw Lem through the Lens of Fiasco
Preamble
If you think about it, being a truly great science fiction author necessitates being ahead of your time. For a while, no one was further ahead than the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem. The catch is that he often did not like what he saw there.
As a result, his novels manage to be crushing and inspiring at the same time. Crushing because Lem’s outlook on most science fiction concepts is relentlessly bleak, inspiring because his tragedies are constructed with so much imagination and insight that they are, in their own way, refreshing in a way that few Utopias can match.
Case in point: Fiasco. It’s not merely a cautionary tale of some technology and/or ideology going fundamentally awry; it’s the logical conclusion of all such tales up to that point. The story, mainly consisting of two very different missions in space, features a non-stop showcase of ambitious concepts and futuristic technologies in which almost everything that could go wrong does.
But this is not all the novel accomplishes. It also shows a glimpse of other parts of Lem’s repertoire outside the Science Fiction writings that made him internationally famous. Some of his other works lean more into the surreal, others are tragicomic satires, and what makes Fiasco unique is that it features almost all of Lem’s talents in a single package;
There are dense and technical debates in some parts and surreal allegories in others while also displaying enough confident wit to steer some of its more outlandish developments into the borderline comedic. As a well-rounded novel with a bit of everything, it makes a great introduction to an author who might not appear very approachable, either because the range of his output seems daunting or conversely because some might stereotype him merely as a “generic” sci-fi author.
In this review, I do not simply want to summarize and discuss the book's plot. I will refrain from spoiling too many specifics of later parts of the story, especially the ending.
I mainly want to highlight the different aspects and themes of the novel and how they can be placed within the broader context of Stanislaw Lem’s writing and the science fiction genre as a whole.
Birnam Wood, Structure and Themes
Structurally, the novel is not always straightforward, but it’s no postmodern labyrinth of metafiction either.
The first section of the book “Birnam Wood” was based on an unpublished short story, a fact reflected in its structure and pacing.
Taking place on Saturn’s moon Titan, Birnam Wood introduces the protagonist of the novel, a space pilot named Angus Parvis, and follows his (mis)adventures involving a delivery mission involving giant robots, along with the search for another missing pilot.[1]
As its origins suggest, it forms its own small dramatic arc, which, besides introducing the main character, is only very loosely connected to the rest of the story plot-wise. It’s not the only part that is somewhat of a digression; two other short stories are interwoven into the narrative at later points, as tales told or read by the characters in-universe.[2]
That is not to say that those parts feel out of place or unnecessary; They all carry a lot of thematical weight. Birnam Wood, in particular, establishes the tone of the work, that mixture of mesmerizing speculation about distant worlds and technological achievements balanced against chilling concerns about topics such as the desolation and hostility of space and the looming possibility of humanity itself becoming the most unreliable aspect of its endeavours.
From the giant robotic “Digla”, modelled after the human form but failing to accurately emulate human movement due to their physical dimensions alone, to the bizarre and deceptive alien “forest”, the first part of the novel serves as an introduction to one of the main themes throughout the story, this being the application of human reasoning and standards where they are out of place. Human perception is fine-tuned for survival on Earth in particular, but space doesn’t always play by those same rules.
And aliens, far from simply being an allegory about human political systems or societies, evoke a sense of true otherness, a staple of Lem’s work. Alien life forms will soon become a vital point of the story, but they are entirely absent in Birnam Wood. People are perfectly capable of messing up on their own.
I won’t go into details about how exactly things go wrong, but what makes the cascade of problems so relatable is how they insidiously creep up over time in a way that anyone working a job involving complex systems will recognize as familiar.
As a rule, the novel’s tragedies don’t happen because of malice or even complete stupidity and seldom is a technical concept or idea portrayed as inherently bad on principle. The devil is in the details, in bureaucratic squabbles, momentary lapses in judgement, cut corners and unforeseen combinations of circumstances, which sets Lem’s style of tragedy apart from edgy and fundamentally mean-spirited fiction.
Even though this story is cynical about many things, it is not at all joyless. Lem might not be a bright-eyed futurist, but that doesn’t stop him from describing his creations, however doomed they are, in awe-inspiring detail. The key lies in the combination of boundless imagination paired with a practical and sceptical approach to technology. I am not the biggest fan of Giant Robot fiction, but I would assume that fans of Mecha Anime and similar works would probably get a kick out of Lem’s vivid and detailed description of robot piloting and its numerous challenges… even if it ends badly.
It can’t be denied that much of Lem’s writing reads like an almost reactionary response to “soft” escapist science fiction that takes human achievements for granted and in which technology is treated like magic. His style is the result of a decades-long struggle with the very core of the genre. Lem’s critical principles, as well as his general outlook on fiction, are worth analyzing, and understanding them greatly enhances the enjoyment of his writing.
Science Fiction: A Love/Hate Relationship
Stanislaw Lem was a critic as much as he was a writer. When he started reading (primarily American) science fiction novels in the sixties, the genre was nearly synonymous with pulpy adventure. To say that he wasn’t a fan of the style would be an understatement. In a series of searing reviews and essays[3], Lem described the genre as “vulgar mythology” unworthy of the term “science” and equally unworthy as literature. There’s a bitterness here, but who can blame him?
At the time, Poland was starting to free itself from post-war Stalinism, and pieces of Western culture started making their way into Eastern Europe. Imagine the high hopes that Lem, someone whose mind seemed always preoccupied with the future and the societal effects of science, must have had when he learned that in America, there was not just a genre but a whole subculture of literature dealing with the future of mankind, potential advances of science and their metaphysical conundrums. And then imagine his disappointment when he was instead confronted by an overall cartoonish landscape of swashbuckling in space, little green men, robot rebellions and so on. The critical questions about humanity’s future were answered with broad cliches or swept under the rug entirely.
This was especially unacceptable to Lem, whose values concerning writing were, above all, pragmatic. His opinion was basically that fiction has an important and practical role to play in society and culture; if “normal” literature had been exploring moral, spiritual and psychological conundrums for centuries, it follows that science fiction would naturally do the same for science and futurism. And it just wasn’t doing this - even though, and this was the biggest insult, plenty of stories pretended they did. They didn’t produce plausible predictions or coherent arguments but mere distractions, still disguised as science.
These critiques mainly fell on deaf ears at the time. Most readers had no intention of viewing science fiction as serious or important literature; Fairy tales in space were all they wanted, and many still want it today until, at some point, we started to almost naturally accept the low- or high-brow status of particular genres or even media themselves. But to Lem, this was an issue that could and should be fixed.
This need was both the point of Lem’s critical arguments as well as the niche many of his novels attempted to fill. However, whether or not that succeeded is very much up for debate.
In the end, it seems Stanislaw Lem mostly gave up on the genre; in his later interviews, he claimed to have mostly stopped reading science fiction literature.
He might not have been satisfied, but he certainly left his mark. Authors that he singled out from the mountain of pulp, Philip K Dick, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and to some extent Olaf Stapledon, have been recognized as influential writers.
I would even argue that the science fiction that Lem wanted has, in fact, been achieved here and there, even if it would never truly dominate the market, if only for the reason that Lem was after the sort of quality that inherently defies mass production. But they are out there, works which pride themselves on the amount of research utilized, which approach their vision of progress with an eye for rigorous logic and practical challenges and do so without shying away from more complicated or uncomfortable implications of the subject matter. And it’s not like they struggle to find an audience. Personally, I would count authors such as Neil Stephenson, Andy Weir and Peter Watts as authors carrying on the legacy of Stanislaw Lem in the modern era of Science Fiction.
Ice Cold Pragmatism
Returning to the novel, Birnam Wood concludes with Parvis in a truly hopeless situation. The kind of crisis that, in another story, would lead to some ingenious technological breakthrough at the last moment or some Deus Ex Machina swooping in. But nothing of the sort happens. For Parvis, there’s only the painful realization that a few simple, unwise decisions have doomed the mission and, most likely, himself.
There’s only one way “out”: A red button, described earlier in ominous detail, which activates the crude cryostasis machine called the “Vitrifax”.
The Vitrifax is one of the more disturbing depictions of cryostasis I can think of, a harsh last-resort procedure that reduces its victims to disfigured remains. At the time of the prologue, no one has actually figured out how to de-thaw them without killing them for good.
But that’s the joke; It doesn’t matter if it’s a half-baked method that barely works, as long as maybe at some point in the future, it can be made to work retroactively.
I don’t think it would be counted as a spoiler to reveal that technology eventually advances enough to bring our protagonist back from the dead for the main portion of the book.
But, of course, it’s not that simple. It turns out that after a few hundred years, the paperwork about who some disfigured frozen corpse used to be tends to get mixed up. It also happens that so much of a body might be unusable that it has to be stitched together from multiple frozen corpses for a revival to work. Naturally, centuries of pretty much brain death also leave one’s psyche in a severely messed up state with blocked, confused or simply vanished memories. In short… is what emerges after all that time and all these bizarre ordeals truly the same Angus Parvis, in part or at all?
It’s a chilling concept, but unfortunately, it's not completely realized. The issue of individuality would have been more effective if the novel's first part had developed our protagonist in more detail besides being a competent but slightly overeager space pilot. The reader never really gets to know him before everything goes south.
Towards Quinta
The novel's main plot starts around 200 years after the Birnam Wood episode. Significant technological progress has been made, not only in the field of unfreezing corpses. A technology called “sidereal” engineering” has emerged, which involves the manipulation of gravity itself as a source of energy, as a weapon and propulsion system for more capable spaceships.
Two such ships serve as the primary setting for the remainder of the story. The first is the Eurydice, a ship that happened to swing by Titan when the frozen bodies were recovered and sure could use an additional freshly de-thawed crewmember for a very important mission:
Humanity has detected signs of intelligent life on a planet designated as “Quinta”, although no proper communication has occurred. The expedition's primary goal is establishing actual first contact as smoothly and peacefully as the situation permits. But before all that, getting to Quinta requires “a series of special manoeuvres”, as the book puts it, the major one being a ride through warped space-time around an oscillating black hole. This, along with the actual reconnaissance of the planet, will be accomplished on the Hermes, a smaller ship carried by the Eurydice.
The section detailing those early parts of the mission isn’t the book’s most thrilling. The reader is introduced to the crew of the Hermes, such as Steergard, the captain, Arago, the priest, Nakamura, the physicist and a few others, but even then, the story isn’t really about the characters. It’s more concerned with the general context of the mission, expounded in great detail, which hinges on the classical pessimistic interpretation of the Fermi Paradox with few elaborations or speculative additions: “We don’t encounter alien life because advanced civilizations have a tendency to wipe themselves or each other very quickly before we have a chance to see them.” The problem is that if you’ve read your share of science fiction, you’ve probably heard that one before.[4]
The main consequence of this approach is that it puts the mission on a mostly unpredictable timer. Success depends on catching signs of intelligence early and initiating contact at the “right time”. Arrive too soon, and the aliens might not be ready to understand anything about your civilization. Arrive too late, and they might have grown dangerous, or they might have already destroyed themselves with their increasingly powerful technology. And because both receiving transmissions and travel take their sweet time on an interstellar scale, this could very well happen while en route.
So when the ship arrives near Quinta, it’s not only unclear what they will encounter but also if there’s even anything left to make contact with.
This is the point where, for the sake of spoilers, I'm ending my chronological summary of the story and will instead focus on the broader themes and a few specific highlights.
The Kitchen Sink Approach
First Contact stories come in many forms, often focusing on one particular aspect or issue that humanity might encounter when dealing with an alien civilization. For example, the topic of language (Arrival), the evolution of society and technology (Dragon’s Egg), or plain old direct conflict (too many to count).
For these stories, the circumstances of contact, or the premises of the setting itself, tend to lead the characters involved quickly and often quite cleverly towards the theme that a particular work will explore.
Fiasco refuses to do this. Lem recognizes the multitude of possibilities and sees a more significant problem emerging: There are just too many approaches and possibilities. This is the driving challenge within the novel. As the mission gets closer to Quinta, more and more information is revealed… but how much of it is useful? How much of it is intentional? How can it be interpreted? The specialists on board all have competing theories, ideas and expectations, many of which are presented to the reader. Still, no one is quite able to make a convincing case. It’s a mess because it’s designed to be messy and lets Lem dive into a lot of topics in short succession without slowing down.
The sheer range of ideas presented is what makes the book fascinating and, I believe, a great place to start for getting familiar with Lem’s output, even if this is not his most iconic novel. That honour goes, of course, to Solaris, which is absolutely a phenomenal novel but also somewhat restricted by its single-mindedness. Dealing with the topic of consciousness, communication and the distinctly human perspectives and needs embedded in our purportedly “objective” sciences, the story is chiefly concerned with expounding those ideas and not much else.
Other novels like His Master’s Voice and Chain of Chance are also constructed around other very specific issues, all “novels of ideas” to the point of occasionally becoming essayistic. What they all have in common is that if one isn’t engaged by the issue itself, there isn’t that much more on offer. Characters tend to be rather passive, with little room for engagement, and there are no elaborate plots or escalating stakes to pull the reader into the action either.
Fiasco, on the other hand, was a novel written as a commission for a publisher, giving it a somewhat different feel. Here, Lem is not exclusively processing a distinct obsession. Instead, it’s simply that people liked the previous novels and just wanted more of that. So they got more of just about everything; if one idea doesn’t grab you, perhaps one of the dozen other ones will, and as the complications of the plot pile up and the characters get more and more cornered, the novel develops a remarkable feeling of building tension and escalation, broken up only by excerpts from few books the protagonist reads in his free time.
A Crew of Archetypes
I will not pretend that you’ll find many engaging characters in Fiasco (or in most of Lem’s books, for that matter).
Paradoxically, Lem is great at writing about the psychology of people, highlighting thought patterns, biases, needs and desires, but does not fare as well when characterizing a person. The distanced metaphysical view and the pragmatic structure of his stories tend to impede the more personal episodes of introspection found in much literary fiction.
The crew in Fiasco, from the captain to the priest, exists as a means of presenting specific viewpoints and ideas within the story, while the protagonist, the only non-specialist and still rattled by the effects of cryostasis, acts as a mostly neutral party, pulling the different viewpoints together for the reader.
Both of these patterns are another staple of Lem’s style. They can be found even in books not focused on scientific or metaphysical concepts, such as the early novel The Hospital of the Transfiguration, about a doctor in a Polish mental hospital during the nazi occupation. This was a novel dealing with harrowing themes, skillfully depicting the increasing oppression, but still, there was not much to the protagonist as an individual. He was more of an everyman representation, a stand-in for all who found themselves caught up in the madness of the war.[5]
How much of a flaw his approach to characters actually is, or even whether it is a flaw at all, honestly depends on what sort of values a reader expects to extract from fiction.
Much classical literature views insight into the mind of the individual as the primary goal of a novel, and anything else, such as plot devices, fantasy elements, or fictional technologies, are merely tools to facilitate this. But among the more ambitious works of science fiction, we find works that challenge this need for individual psychological intimacy without giving up their claim to social relevance. How sensible is it, they ask, to concern ourselves primarily with individuals when dealing with topics that will affect the entire species? And does this shift in perspective alone justify the disqualification from being considered high literature when the themes themselves remain important?
As a science fiction writer, Lem would like you to know that he views such discrimination as unjustified.
And perhaps it is this trend toward elaborate ideas and less elaborate characters which resulted in one of the novel’s most interesting characters being not a human but DEUS, the ship’s AI.
In the setting of Fiasco, Moore’s law has been pushed to its final limits. Computer components have shrunk to atomic size, and computation speed has reached its physical limits to the point that the speed of light itself has become a bottleneck for construction. If a computer is too big (i.e. non-microscopic), the electric signals don’t travel fast enough to keep up.[6]
This is why the computers featured in the novel are computers of the “last” generation: The last because nothing better is even theoretically possible in terms of hardware.
The resulting computers are super fast and, of course, fully conscious… or are they? According to Fiasco, that’s a bit of a trick question. Lem shows us glimpses of the AI research that has led to the creation of DEUS, and part of the motivation was the familiar ambition that even if we don’t yet understand the principles of our own consciousness, maybe creating fully conscious AI would give us the answer as a byproduct. It doesn’t. Presented as a kind of sarcastic punchline, the reader is told of the first awakening of a fully conscious AI and how, when its creators asked it about its consciousness, it had no idea what they were even talking about.
It’s a spot-on satire of overblown expectations, fiddling with black boxes and hoping for convenient shortcuts. We do not understand the human brain.
By the time AI becomes good enough to emulate human thought, it would also be too complex to practically understand, and we’d end up facing its mountains of convoluted computations that, just as helplessly as we face the convoluted processes of our biology, the AI meanwhile would operate on a level of abstraction from which it can no longer trace back where exactly consciousness came into play, just as we can’t tell which neurons our brain fired in order to form a thought.
It is impressive how many of these theoretical concerns ring true in the recent AI boom, now that we have language models with several billion parameters, fed with mountains of data and capable of parsing language in a way that is sensible except not really, using some way to interpret the system that might just not be our way… and how exactly do we want to copy “our way” anyway given its many obvious flaws?
In a sense, the issue with artificial intelligence is similar to that of alien intelligence that Lem highlights in Fiasco (and Solaris): Do we actually have any use for something truly different from us?
Apart from the philosophical problems, a key section of the story is also concerned with more practical issues.
Nothing as dramatic as a robot rebellion or DEUS deciding the crew is expendable; the problem is far more elementary. Again, I don’t want to spoil the exact twist (the reader getting caught off guard just like the characters is part of the experience) but highlight some of its implications:
If you are dealing with an intelligence that does not view problems exactly as humans do and reasons about them at vastly higher speeds, then even if it is technically on your side, its behaviour will be basically unpredictable from a human perspective. This is an obvious issue in situations in which collaboration is vital, but at the same time, if all decisions and computations need to be overseen by humans directly, then the whole point of computation speed would go down the drain.
The reality of automation is that it is in some sense about relinquishing control, and the issue arising from that is not so much regaining control as it is remaining aware enough of the process to know when regaining control would even be necessary.
Does the novel present solutions to those problems? Not really, but that too is part of the point according to Lem’s vision of the science fiction genre: To be science-like, Science fiction cannot be “partisan” in its presentation of facts and the speculations arising from them.
According to this view, the ideal science fiction novel takes the form of an elaborate and rigorous thought experiment, carefully measuring its speculative elements against existing knowledge and documenting the results authentically. Pleasure derives from truthfulness. Choosing style over substance or answering sweeping questions with answers that are merely convenient to the plot (or the author’s views) would, so to speak, contaminate the metaphorical laboratory conditions. You follow the evidence, and if the result doesn’t conform to traditional storytelling structures or lacks a “proper” conclusion, then that’s just how it is.
It’s a drastic take, but certainly intriguing. There is just one problem: Stanislaw Lem was no scientist.
Lem and “Hard” Science Fiction
First, some theoretical groundwork: Science Fiction is a complex genre and debates about which works are how “hard” have been around for ages. In general, the concept of hard science fiction is taken to mean a work attempting to correctly represent the current state of scientific knowledge at the time the work was written.
At first glance, Stanislaw Lem seems like a proponent for precisely this style of writing, but yet much of his own writing paradoxically does not feature especially realistic science. In Fiasco, most mentions of scientific principles are of the broad strokes variant, and it’s not entirely clear what the most important applied science in the story, “sidereal engineering”, actually is, which steers the classification more towards “soft”.
And this is no isolated incident throughout his novels in general. Some of this could be accounted for through Lem’s style and taste changing over the decades, but going by his interviews, he certainly didn’t seem to compromise his principles.
This makes for a curious situation: Lem, the critic, seems to be setting a bar that Lem, the writer, doesn’t seem to be able to clear.
So what happened here? An illusion of grandeur? Were his criticisms more appeals to others than goals of his own?
It’s absolutely possible that Lem may have simply overestimated himself. Still, he accomplished something much of the genre did not, especially at the time. In my interpretation, the reason that his novels remain relevant is not because of how much science is incorporated but because of how science is treated. It’s a form of commentary about science that highlights an important distinction:
There’s science as a body of knowledge on the one hand, and then there’s science as a methodology and philosophy on the other.
Traditionally, hard science fiction is all about utilizing knowledge, but Lem always seemed more interested in the workings of science itself. It is not so much about whether this or that technology, type of civilization or natural law actually exists, but rather how we, as a scientifically minded society, would approach and handle its existence. How something is theorized, the struggles of delineation and definition, and its broader consequences once knowledge is established.
That’s Lem’s angle: An angle from which science fiction can deal with ideas and concepts as strange and absurd as those in any fantasy setting, but by treating them as scientific, by reasoning logically and systematically about them, they are yet again positioned in the context of science. The science is in the attitude, and the rigour with which that attitude is applied (in his own words, “the realistic descriptions of fictitious technology”) separates it from what is commonly called technobabble.
Furthermore, by applying these lines of scientific reasoning to the (seemingly) absurd, Lem reminds us that if Science Fiction deals with science, it also ought to deal with its limitations, with the interpretation of information, with the difficulties of models and predictions when faced with something genuinely new or disruptive. These confrontations with the unexpected or ambiguous provide the essential conflicts in many of his novels; they are about seeing the scientific method in action, the process of discovery and understanding and the possibility of that process failing.[7]
In a way, this can be seen as social science fiction masquerading as technical science fiction. And viewing Fiasco in this context, Lem’s sidereal engineering is more than just another plot device for the sake of getting the characters to Quinta. Even if it seems like that at first, it is revealed that the technology and the fictional scientific context of its discovery are themselves potential problems for the mission. The humans don't know what the Quintans want or how closely they are watching them. But if they are under close scrutiny, the longer the spaceship orbits their planet, and the more often the Humans use sidereal technology in their attempts to investigate their situation, the higher the risk that the Quintans might discover the principles of sidereal engineering just by observation. At that point, they would instantly become an existential threat.
Here, technology isn't portrayed as just some gadget that one side may or might not grant the other. Unlike a material object, a scientific principle can't be hidden or denied. It's right there for anyone with the right equipment asking the right questions, and no one knows how far behind the Quintans actually are, turning the unpredictability of scientific progress into yet another source of tension.
Shuffling the Stakes
What's also interesting about the previous observations is that they reverse a classic dynamic in most first-contact science fiction: It's usually the alien side with all the truly revolutionary technology.
From the classical storytelling standpoint, this is a natural approach that lets the reader grow familiar with the fictional technology of the book at the same pace as the characters themselves. But besides narrative convenience, this also tends to introduce a default moral framework: It's the powerful, potentially oppressive other against the disadvantaged humans and with humanity in the position of the underdog, the audience is quick to accept extreme strategies and actions as reasonable. You do what you have to do to survive.
But when it’s evident from the start that, even when faced with bizarre alien technology, humanity clearly wields the bigger stick, the questions of morality and responsibility in a first-contact scenario start hitting differently.
Fiasco showcases this argument in its most extreme form. The Hermes could blast the entire planet Quinta to pieces at any point the crew wanted to. Their challenge isn’t staying alive but not providing the history books with humanity’s first genocide in space. Especially since humanity is doing fine. There is no dire looming threat that drove them to Quinta, and there is nothing they specifically have to gain by coming there. No, the Theseus was sent here mostly out of curiosity, to gain knowledge. But even so, they might have to go to extreme lengths to force contact.
Granted, the Quintans seem genuinely uncooperative, perhaps even antagonistic, but even antagonism implies some sort of common conception to disagree over. The final twist to the problem is that the difference in firepower between the human and the alien side is so great that even outright aggression is hard to identify. When a few of the Theseus’ probes are destroyed while investigating Quinta, the crew's reaction isn’t terror. It’s “Are we even sure that was an attack?”. Opinions are divided, and similar issues of interpretation arise in other venues of communication as well.
All of that is to be expected. Fiasco is, in the end, a book about strange problems with strange solutions that end up causing more strange problems. Where other stories take shortcuts, Fiasco enumerates the roadblocks. Still, even though this might seem cynical and stubborn, it feels like an honest story about issues Stanislaw Lem earnestly believes humanity could face someday. Even when every choice appears wrong, it's not like the plot makes characters act like idiots to force a worse outcome. “Would you have had a better idea in this situation?” seems to be the implicit challenge to the reader.
A challenge that is continually posed right up until the novel's disturbing climax.
Conclusion: The Fiasco Flowchart
This is as much as I can discuss without giving away too many spoilers. To wrap things up, I want to elaborate on an assertion I made at the start of this review: That Fiasco is not just generally an amazing Science Fiction novel well worth your time, but also that it can be seen as a culmination of most of Stanislaw Lem's earlier writing, both in terms of style and themes, into one (almost)[8] final story.
This finality, that sense of looking at a sort of “Best of Lem”, makes, in turn, a great starting point for new readers: A central hub from which a large number of further directions can be chosen.
Let's say you just finished the novel, got hopelessly hooked on Lem, and want to know what to read next. You're in luck. You can pick any of the themes that Fiasco brings to the table, and chances are there is more where that came from.
- Were the philosophical conundrums about the nature of alien intelligence the most intriguing parts?
Then, the obvious novel to read next is the much-lauded Solaris. - Are the more mundane problems of interpreting and sending information more up your alley?
How about His Master's Voice, another work of scientific satire? - Would you want a story more focused on weird and speculative alien technology?
The Invincible was an influential work in this niche and is also similar to Fiasco in terms of general themes. - Fiasco was also not Lem's first foray into exploring supercomputers and humanity's potential relationship with AI.
Similar themes are explored in the novella Golem XIV, translated into English as part of the collection Imaginary Magnitude. - Do you like following specific characters and want to know who that “Pirx” guy was, who came up multiple times in the first part of the book?
Two volumes of his adventures have been translated into English: Tales of Pirx the Pilot and More Tales of Pirx the Pilot. - But let's say you weren't interested in the technical details and preferred the more surreal fantasy feel of Fiasco's two story-within-a-story intermissions. There's more of that, too!
The Cyberiad is a collection of “robot fables”, heavy on allegory and symbolism without any “hard” science fiction aspirations. In a similar vein, Lem also wrote a social satire that commits fully to weirdness and absurdism called Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. This one is an overlooked gem, in my opinion.
I guess this wasn't actually a flowchart, but it could be easily expanded into one, as any of these other novels can again lead to further corners of Lem's work, and as with many other great authors, once you start, it's hard to stop. There is, of course, nothing wrong with starting with Solaris, which was my, and I suspect most people's, first Stanislaw Lem novel just based on its popularity. It just doesn't connect as elegantly to as many other works.
No matter which of his novels you read, it will most likely feature the same wariness, if not pessimism, towards the future that pervades Fiasco, although maybe not to the same extreme extent. Yet I don’t see Lem as a complete nihilist. I don’t believe that he thought the sort of worst-case scenarios he so often described are inevitable for humanity in its current state, only that we should never underestimate the risks of innovation, even if they might seem far-fetched now.
Diving Deeper
As for me, I won't be done with Stanislaw Lem for a long while.
Recently, I’ve gotten my hands on quite a few of his more obscure works, both fiction and non-fiction, that lack an English translation altogether. It is strange how much material from someone who was once called “the most widely read science fiction writer in the world” remains pretty much unavailable in the West, and I think it's worth the time to do some “Lemology” and present at least a detailed summary of those works to a wider audience.
It's going to be an exciting project.
^ Pilot Pirx, a recurring character and protagonist of several of Lem's short stories. ^ It's worth noting that fictional books are somewhat of a fascination of Lem's. Not only are books within books featured in some of his other novels as well,[1] he has written two books worth of reviews and introductions for fictional books and texts. ^ Many of which[2] were printed in Fanzines such as Australia's Science Fiction Review and later collected in book form as Microworlds. ^ Perhaps the perspective seemed more exotic in 1986, but considering that the question of “where is everybody” arose around 1950, this too seems unlikely. ^ Nevertheless, the book felt so authentic that some reviewers and commentators mistook it for being at least partially autobiographical. ^ While the limits themselves are undoubtedly real, I am not convinced that Lem sufficiently considered the potential of parallel processing in his analysis. ^ This also ties in with another of his views regarding Science Fiction - That it should investigate reality but not attempt to simplify it.[3] ^ Fiasco was the second to last work of fiction Lem wrote.[4] However, I am unsure if Lem intended to make it some grand culmination of his fiction career.
^ In Solaris, he conjures up an entire bibliography of “Solaricism”, for example. ^ Lem's most expansive work on literary science fiction criticism is a monograph of almost 1000 pages released in two volumes called Fantastyka i futurologia (Science Fiction and Futurology). It's the origin of most of the essays in Microworlds but has never been completely translated into English. ^ A telling example is Lem's critique of Flowers for Algernon. He viewed the novel as flawed, not because he objected to the scientific accuracy of the treatments described in the book but because their existence should have caused a greater stir in society at large. ^ The last was Peace on Earth, published one year later in 1987.
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