Fiasco (1986) ****

Fiasco is the sort of rich, complex (but not overlong) novel that gets better every time you re-read it, picking up subtext and nuances of foreshadowing. The first, long chapter, called "Birnam Wood," is set in the time of Pirx the Pilot in a lavishly imagined wilderness on Saturn's moon Titan. A strange inorganic evolution performs feats unknown on worlds contaminated with life, and haulers cheat death in giant robot striders of the sort familiar to Japanese anime fans (though I doubt that the connection is intentional, given Lem's tastes). As in several of the Pirx stories, the difficult conditions of operations on Titan have been exacerbated by poor planning and bureaucratic inertia.

All this is prologue for the novel proper, in which a man from that era, stranded on Titan and flash-frozen by his strider's emergency "vitrifax", wakes up centuries later on board a starship headed for the planet Quinta, in a solar system behind the Coal Sack. Quinta is thought to be inhabited by an intelligent civilization in a developmental "window" in which communication will be possible. The starship is the centerpiece of a project of unimaginable expense and technological sophistication, performed by a dazzling human civilization seemingly capable of miracles. Titan has been stripped bare just to carry the lasers that provide first-stage propulsion, and the ship is to return to Earth in a reasonable time via a complex time-travel maneuver, involving "sidereal engineering" on a conveniently located black hole.

The explorers have at their disposal centuries of speculation about means of interspecies communication, and a supercomputer whose intelligence is at a maximum imposed by fundamental physical limits. None of this is any help, though, when the target planet turns out to be in the throes of some sort of global war. Near-planet space is blanketed by signal jamming and nasty nanomechanical weapons which attack the visitors and their probes, and attempts at contact reveal that the natives are not at all eager for conversation. The ship's vaunted computer is good enough at reasoning, but its motives can only mirror the increasingly desperate impulses of its users. I shouldn't go into further detail; let me just say that as you might well guess from the novel's title, it doesn't turn out well, and the depiction of the humans' response to the situation is less than flattering.

Interwoven with the story of the deepening tragedy are fascinating discourses on extraterrestrial civilization, artificial intelligence, and even future gravitational physics. Here, as elsewhere (particularly Imaginary Magnitude and His Master's Voice), Lem displays a skill that is very rare among science-fiction writers, namely the ability to make stuff up that has the sound of scientific plausibility.

There is a hard-headed core of SF fans who appreciate a slightly different set of skills, namely the ability to write imaginative, fantastic stories in which the events involved are all driven by accurately described processes and phenomena known to present-day science. Often called "hard SF", this is a specialized subgenre within science fiction. Its most devoted fans tend to argue that anything else is not really science fiction, though, unless they have extensive professional training in the fields of science involved, often they do not realize what is actually accurate and what isn't, beyond the most clichéd errors. (For instance, people with physics or engineering backgrounds frequently award the hard-SF label to stories with wildly screwed-up biology.)

The struggle of the hard SF writer is to get everything precisely right, without turning the story into a dull lecture in the process. To make the game easier, some invoke a rule that the author is allowed one free assumption, from which everything else has to follow via known rules strictly applied. [1]

This is not what Lem does, except, arguably, in some of the Pirx stories. Even in his relatively non-comic work such as Fiasco, he pulls all manner of new and unknown science out of thin air. The people (and machines) of future ages have discovered many things, and Lem enthusiastically displays them to us in incredibly long expository passages, of the sort that textbooks on fiction writing will tell you are poison. He throws neologisms around with gusto that would faze the most plot-resolution-starved Star Trek: The Next Generation writer. He cites nonexistent authorities, propounds wild theories from academies of the future, and puts dialogue in characters' mouths that makes sense only in some unspecified future context. And it works. If you or I tried it, it would come out as mush.

For instance, what, exactly, is the "Holenbach interval" that gets bandied about so frequently in Fiasco? We know that it has something to do with quantum gravity, that it allows one to perform acts super-technological and cataclysmic, and that it is associated with "anomalons" and "teratrons". Nothing like it exists in any extant physical theory. Superficially, it seems that it ought to evoke groans as intense as those resulting from the Star Trek crew using "spatially-inverted tetrions" to get out of a jam, or somebody "reversing the polarity of the neutron flow" on Doctor Who.

However, it's all in how you use it. The trouble with "spatially-inverted tetrions" is not that they are a goofily-named bit of bafflegab, but that they exist in a conceptual vacuum, and, for all we know, they could do anything.

The "Holenbach interval", on the other hand, has some well-defined properties that allow drama. It's a tool and a weapon, an obvious analogy for nuclear energy. You can use it only given certain technological prerequisites, but its principles are easily grasped by physicists once they've gotten the idea. It is involved in the technological manipulation of black holes. The explorers have devices, brought along for other purposes, that happen to be amenable to its exploitation, and the Quintans are on a scientific track that may well lead to its discovery before long. Scientists who study the development of civilizations have speculated extensively on what the discovery of it could portend in various situations. These properties are not all logical consequences of a single allowed assumption, or if they are, the one assumption isn't being shown to us; but they are related in ways familiar to us, which have the appearance of sense and logic.

It's more than that, however. Most good SF novelists have mastered the art of imagining things that work this way; it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of any good science fiction. Lem goes further: his imaginings have not just the appearance of sense and logic, but the appearance of scientific research. He seems to understand the subculture that he is fictionalizing. His scientists, at least in the works in which he isn't parodying science fiction, aren't the Promethean basement inventors or megalomaniacs that even some good SF writers tend to produce. His miracle technologies and grand syntheses don't arise when a lone genius in peril shouts "Eureka", but when a lot of people with personal agendas do a lot of arguing and collaboration.

What Lem is doing here is a much more sophisticated version of the trick that has made Michael Crichton a best-selling novelist. Crichton's stories are rarely even remotely scientifically plausible, but Crichton knows how scientifically plausible things look and sound, and he can evoke the necessary sensations, flattering the reader and setting up a big-budget movie in the process. Lem takes the same idea a step further: he knows how scientifically plausible things are logically related to one another and socially related to other endeavors. He can concoct castles in the air that seem even on some reflection to have the same solidity as the earthbound variety. When he drops a lengthy condensation of an imagined academic dispute into a novel, it's clear that he's studied many instances of the genuine article. The result is something that both works as satire, and provides solid background for the story.

The way that Lem does it is obviously not for all tastes. When he stops the novel for an expository passage, many readers will balk. To me, those are some of the most fascinating passages in Lem's fiction (and I enjoy the works that are nothing but this sort of expository passage, such as Imaginary Magnitude). Made-up science that works this well is, as far as I am concerned, high art, though perhaps it is art with a limited audience.

[1] I should mention that the term "hard SF" is also often used in a looser way, simply to mean "SF that applies particular attention to scientific or technological details." Fiasco would fit nicely into such a classification. Back

When Fiasco appeared in America in the 1980s (during Ronald Reagan's second term as president), it was described by US book critics as a satire of the Strategic Defense Initiative (or "Star Wars") project to gird the globe with a space defense against ballistic missiles. Actually, Fiasco's concerns are much broader than that description implies, but there are certainly elements of cold-war commentary contained within it. The natives of the planet Quinta seem to be in a very advanced stage of arms-race escalation, but Lem doesn't let the humans off the hook as calm and superior observers who have progressed beyond such childish things. Once they acknowledge the existence of the conflict and start to figure out the rules of the game, it starts to suck them in.

Stanislaw Lem was often able to conceal criticism of the Communist system under which he labored, with methods frequently used by novelists in authoritarian countries. The absurdities of the system were translated into the doings of Americans, or aliens, or robots. In the first case, he could take advantage of a certain (if, as it turned out, inexact) symmetry in military and clandestine matters. Lem has always been a connoisseur of tricks with mirrors, and the cold war was the biggest mirror-game around, in which each side saw a threatening, distorted reflection in the other, and the exigencies of strategy demanded that they mimic each others' actions. When Lem satirized America in His Master's Voice or Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, he may have actually been making fun of the USSR and Poland, but the results are oddly familiar to an American reader nevertheless.

Fiasco doesn't name any of the 20th-century parties to the cold war directly, but it is full of sinister mirrors. Peace on Earth satirizes the arms race far more directly than Fiasco, and an eerily specific description of an SDI-like debacle shows up in a passage in His Master's Voice, which was written over a decade before SDI was actually proposed.