VITRIFAX:

This one hasn't been translated into English, and I doubt that anyone will make the effort any time soon, given that Lem has more or less disowned it and nobody seems to consider it very good. I certainly haven't read it. However, I include it here because I have seen a dubbed and brutally re-edited version of a German-language movie that was loosely based on it, entitled First Spaceship on Venus. The movie (at least in the obviously mangled form in which I saw it) is pretty silly, though some of the production values could be worse. Basically: Alerted to a possible invasion threat by a mysterious message dug up in the Gobi Desert, an international crew of astronauts travel to Venus, wander around for a while in a landscape resembling models of decayed teeth, get attacked by blobs of goop, and encounter a lot of little silver balls on sticks.

Some of the details of the Venusian environment in the movie are recognizably Lemian, particularly the little silver balls on sticks, which are probably supposed to be synthetic insects of the sort that show up so often in Lem's work.

Some time after I encountered the movie, I saw it insulted at great length in a particularly funny episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a (recently defunct) TV show dedicated to showing bad movies and making fun of them. It's the only connection I know of between Lem and MST3K, though I'd pay good money to see an all-puppet dramatization of The Cyberiad directed by Joel Hodgson. There's some sort of deep kinship, I think, between Trurl and Klapaucius, and Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo.

In what seems to be the very near future, an American astronaut is recruited to make sense of some mysterious deaths at a beach resort, and has a series of (literally) highly improbable adventures, involving terrorism and decongestants. I've seen both this and The Investigation described as parodies of the mystery genre, though mystery fans might just regard them as shaggy-dog stories. Lem's central point in both of them is a favorite theme, that in a world in which so many things happen, some of them are bound to be outrageously unlikely.

In Polish and most other languages, this novel has a title that translates to The Cold (referring to the illness, not the temperature). The Chain of Chance is the title of the English-language edition.

A spaceship crash-lands on an eerie and unexplored planet. The ship's nameless and almost interchangeable crew, referred to only by occupation (before long I was thinking of them as "Kirk," "Spock," and so forth in spite of myself), attempt to repair the ship and figure out their surroundings.

The planet is inhabited by odd creatures that they call "doublers," but the details of doubler civilization that they see around them make absolutely no sense whatsoever--that is, until they meet a doubler who is willing to communicate. In the last few chapters of the book, they quickly breach the language barrier and learn the whole truth about the planet's sad situation. The story, to me, comes across as simplistic and clumsy.

When Eden appeared in the US it had no indication anywhere of when it was originally written. Consequently, many American Lem fans thought it was a new novel, and were puzzled by its lack of sophistication compared with Fiasco. Actually, this is one of Lem's earlier SF novels, and it shows, though the descriptive passages already exhibit the intense imagination and disorienting atmosphere that infuses the corresponding parts of his best work.

The intrepid Ijon Tichy, earthbound this time, stars in this brief, funny, disturbing satirical novel. Tichy attends the Futurological Congress of the title, a grand prognostic conference in Costa Rica, only to find a pitched battle going on in the streets, involving "Love Thy Neighbor bombs" that flood the area with pacifying drugs. He takes refuge in the sewers, has elaborate hallucinations from the drugs in the air, then is shot and loses consciousness.

When Tichy awakens, he learns that he has been gravely injured and frozen to await future medical developments, and that he has been revived in a changed world, a paradise in which want and misery seem extinct. But when he begins to suspect that not all of the delights he sees are genuine, and obtains a drug capable of pushing aside the veil of illusion, the snowballing breakdown of reality that ensues is of a scale reminiscent of Philip K. Dick (whose work Lem lauds in Microworlds). Unfortunately, the ending of The Futurological Congress is lame (this is also true of some of Dick's best novels, come to think of it--it's hard to give the breakdown of reality satisfactory dramatic closure), but until then it's excellent.

Lem used other forms of the Rip van Winkle trope in Return from the Stars and Fiasco. In the US, today, it's usually considered a primitive device, beloved of early SF writers who didn't know how to depict a future civilization convincingly from the inside. However, Lem illustrates that there's considerable life left in it, much as did Woody Allen in Sleeper. Like the Robot or the Visitor from Another Planet, the Sleeper is one of the canonical outsiders of SF, someone whose alienation allows him, her, or it to sniff out the flaws in a world that seems fine to its longtime inhabitants.

Highcastle is an account, intentionally somewhat fragmentary, of Lem's childhood in the 1920s and 1930s in the city of Lvov (then in Poland, now in Ukraine).

Stanislaw Lem, it appears, was a slightly odd kid, smart but not a star student, shy and pear-shaped but not particularly ostracized, given to solitary pursuits never confessed to his friends at school. These included collecting broken pieces of machinery and constructing homemade mechanisms both functional and nonfunctional, but the most remarkable was a recreation performed only during class, under cover of a textbook: the creation of elaborate documents of authorization for imaginary activities to be performed by nonexistent people.

It's easy to see in this the seed of such work as A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude. Throughout, it's possible to play the game of spot-the-childhood-influences, from Lem's toddler passion for destroying clockwork devices (like Ijon Tichy's weird Grandfather Jeremiah) and his later sympathy for broken and discarded machines (as in "The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius" and several stories in The Cyberiad), to his fear of bugs (which recalls the "synsect" menaces portrayed in "The Upside-Down Evolution", Peace on Earth, and The Invincible).

Lem and others have made these connections, though Lem seems to feel a certain amount of shame at making his childhood self bear the burden of his later development as a writer. When writing Highcastle, Lem set himself the impossible task of letting his memories speak for themselves without the embellishment of hindsight. He berates himself repeatedly for failing to do this, but at times he actually comes close to succeeding--as in the first chapter's initial passage, in which he describes climbing on his father like a "Lilliputian" and exploring the contents of the otolaryngologist's pockets. Later on, he temporarily abandons the project completely and drops into a typically Lemian rant about the peril of total freedom in art.

Highcastle deals more with settings and things than with people. There are portraits of his father, of the washerwoman he adored as a child, and of his friends and teachers at school. His mother is curiously absent as a vivid presence, though she was apparently there the whole time. The stars of the narrative are the objects of his childhood and places in Lvov. Highcastle itself is a historic ruin in a park where Lem and his classmates would occasionally spend the precious minutes of a cancelled class.

The book concludes with an account of Lem's adolescent military training (preparation, he says, for "a war like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870") and a poignant epilogue in which he mentions that "nobody died when I was little." Throughout the book is the presence, most often unspoken but occasionally explicit, of the sudden end to Lem's childhood universe that occurred when the Nazis invaded Poland. It's hard for me to imagine what a childhood with such a definite, terrifying full stop (at the age of 18) would seem like in retrospect, but Highcastle makes it easier to imagine. Lem clearly considers it a separate and special period of his life. He wrote Highcastle with the feeling that he had failed to do the period justice in an earlier book, called Time Not Lost (not yet translated into English), which, from what I've been able to figure out, seems to be an early autobiographical novel.

Highcastle, whether in spite of or because of its narrative oddities (I'm not sure which), is a charming book, and one of major interest to Lem fans.

In Nazi-occupied Poland, in 1940 (not 1939, as the dust jacket states, since Germany invaded in the fall and it's clearly early in the year), a doctor just out of medical school is recruited to work at a mental hospital. Once there, he discovers lamentable conditions and psychiatrists with peculiar personality disorders, and romanticizes the simple life of the electrical substation operator, Woch. Eventually, the Nazis' plans for the hospital become clear, and the psychiatrists have to take action.

This was Lem's first novel, though it wasn't his first to be published (that was The Astronauts). It's much better than his earliest science fiction, or, at least, what little of his earliest SF I've been able to read (except for his early comic work, such as the stories from the '50s in The Star Diaries, which are already brilliant). I didn't find it as fascinating as Lem's later SF, but it's a good novel that suffers only by comparison with that brilliant work. I think Lem learned to write well before he learned to write serious SF well.

The spaceship Invincible lands on a distant planet, investigating the loss there of another ship, the Condor. It isn't long before they discover the cause of the trouble: a swarm of hostile robot insects. The theme is one that found its fullest expression, much later, in "The Upside-Down Evolution," printed in One Human Minute.

It's hard to tell whether this novel is any good, since the English translation is a rather graceless one by Wendayne Ackerman, which I suspect is a double translation via German [update: reader Alex Paige says it probably wasn't]. (Ackerman headed the team that wrote the seemingly illiterate translations of the interminable Perry Rhodan series of German pulp novels. To be fair, they apparently pumped out one of those every few weeks, and the source material was hardly stellar. She does an infinitely better job here, though that's not saying much. Her husband was Forrest J. Ackerman, the science-fiction fan to end all fans. A previous version of this page claimed that Forrest Ackerman was dead; he's not-- again, thanks to Alex Paige for noticing that I hadn't fixed that.)

Beneath the Colorado Rockies lies the final incarnation of the U.S. Pentagon, the last bastion of Earth's old bureaucratic civilization, ever since a paper-eating germ destroyed it above ground. In this underground labyrinth wanders a man who is on some sort of mission, except that he isn't quite sure what the mission is, or who he's working for or against. Nobody else in there seems much more enlightened, which doesn't keep them from energetically scheming against each other with machinations and devices out of a B-grade spy thriller. Eventually we get intimations that the man's wanderings may be completely predetermined, that countless others have been on his pointless mission before him.

It doesn't sound hilarious, but it is. Think of James Bond crossed with Kafka and Waiting for Godot.

These stories about Lem's perennial comic hero Ijon Tichy appeared in later Polish editions of The Star Diaries. One of them is a satirical space adventure much like Tichy's earlier travels, and another is a seeming sequel to the history-repair story; in this one, Tichy creates the whole universe, and his incompetent associates once again botch the job. Most of these, though, are lower-key stories in which Tichy stays on Earth and interacts with his eccentric friends. One of the most arresting is a somber tale in which Tichy encounters a man who has invented a rather horrific variety of immortality.

This collection of essays will certainly be of interest to Lem fans, but they'll mean less unless you've read some of his other work first. There is an excerpt from his (now available!) childhood memoir Highcastle, but most of it consists of his controversial essays on science fiction. He bashes American SF over and over (rather more than is really fair, I think); most of the mid-century giants of American SF get a pie in the face.

A major exception is Philip K. Dick, whom Lem considers a rare "magician among the charlatans"; one of the essays in the book is in praise of Dick's wonderful, disorienting novel Ubik. (Incidentally, aficionados of things Phildickian may particularly enjoy Lem's The Futurological Congress.) Another essay is in praise of Roadside Picnic, a novel by Russian authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

This is a collection of short stories by Lem, chosen and assembled by the prolific translator and editor Michael Kandel, on the common theme of robots.

The first part of the book consists of a series of "Fables for Robots" that were added to the 1972 Polish edition of The Cyberiad. They're set in the wild, robotic Cyberiad universe, but they don't star Trurl and Klapaucius; the stories are simpler and the tone is more naïve, as in fairy tales intended for robot children. "Two Monsters" and "The White Death" describe a period in which humans, resentful of their escaped mechanical creations, carry out a vengeful campaign of extermination against them (an epoch hinted at by Trurl's electronic bard in The Cyberiad). The best are "How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface," which concerns the effort to recapture a nasty human who has stolen the key necessary to wind up a princess; and "Automatthew's Friend," in which a robot inserts a tiny, prolix "electrofriend" into his ear and later decides that its advice is not always welcome.

The others are a Pirx story, "The Hunt," that is also included in More Tales of Pirx the Pilot; an Ijon Tichy story, "The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius," in which Tichy visits a home for mentally ill robots; and a really stunning piece of work, "The Mask," a highly unusual love story.

(Update, 2003: A friend reports that an episode of the ingenious TV cartoon Futurama was essentially a loose adaptation of "The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius". The show has done material seemingly inspired by The Star Diaries and even Solaris as well.)

This little book is described as a collection of reviews of nonexistent books along the lines of A Perfect Vacuum, but only the first selection, "One Human Minute," is unambiguously of this form. It's a nice satire on instant publishing, being a review of a book which catalogs, quantitatively, what all of humanity is doing in an average minute. (Since reading this, I've noticed that some very similar books actually exist, though the day seems to be their chosen time unit.) It would be an unremarkable chapter in A Perfect Vacuum.

The last of the three, "The World as Cataclysm," is an essay on the role of chance and contingency in the universe, written as a fictitious lecture; it's nothing that hasn't been said better as nonfiction, in my opinion.

The really interesting essay of the three, and the one with the greatest connection to the rest of Lem's work, is the middle one, "The Upside-Down Evolution." Lem announces that, by unspecified means, he's gotten hold of "a military history of the twenty-first century," and proceeds to describe the advent and evolution of warfare by micro- and nano-robots. It's a theme that harks back to the early Lem novel The Invincible and even some of the stories in The Cyberiad, as well as late work such as Fiasco and especially Peace on Earth, which recycles this essay.

The English edition of Peace on Earth appeared fairly recently, and it's often listed as untranslated, but actually it's now out in paperback as well as hardcover.

His corpus callosum inconveniently sliced in two, Ijon Tichy struggles to tell the story of his disastrous mission to the Moon to spy on the global arms race, which was automated and exported there some time ago. It turns out that the war machines have been busy. Lem was writing about the weirder possibilities of nanotechnology, or at least microtechnology, long before it was cool. Here he puts to comic-satirical use some of the ideas outlined in the essay "The Upside-Down Evolution" from One Human Minute (early in the novel, Tichy recalls receiving a copy of this essay in the mail). Tichy indeed brings about peace on Earth, but the price--and not just to him--is rather high.

I don't think that the symptoms of a split cerebrum are very accurately described, but, then, this is an Ijon Tichy story. It's not quite as tight as The Futurological Congress -- Lem does meander somewhat describing the absurd spy skulduggery surrounding Tichy's mission-- but, all in all, this is a funny and well-constructed piece of satire.

Lem's fascination with bogus ancillary material, demonstrated amply in Imaginary Magnitude and One Human Minute, also bears fruit in A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of reviews of nonexistent books.

The "reviews" are all over the map. Some are science-fictional reviews of books not yet written, such as "Non Serviam," a monograph on the science of personetics, in which entire communities of sentient individuals are created within a computer. Others are parodies of self-annihilating literary pretentiousness, such as the review of "Toi," a book consisting entirely of insults aimed at the reader. Some of the books, such as "Les Robinsonades," seem to have been written by the insane; others, such as "U-Write-It," are obviously motivated solely by profit. And, of course, Lem doesn't forget to include a scathingly negative review of his own book.

Astronaut Hal Bregg returns to an Earth vastly changed during his absence, thanks to time dilation; everyone now has violent impulses removed by a process called "betrization." He has an ill-starred love affair, is haunted by memories of the deaths of his shipmates, and contemplates whether or not he should follow the surviving ones back into space. The novel begins powerfully, with a glorious sequence in which Bregg wanders aimlessly through a futuristic city, overwhelmed by visual impressions that he cannot even interpret. Unfortunately, once the love story takes over, it's hard to shake the impression that this is an unimpressive mainstream novel with the word "automobile" globally replaced by "gleeder." The flashback scenes are well-written, however, and one surprising scene in a robot junkyard prefigures the story "The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius," collected in Mortal Engines.

Like Microworlds, this little book will be mostly of interest to established Lem fans, though they'll certainly find it fascinating. It consists of an introduction by Swirski surveying Lem's work (with a catalog of recurring themes that is interestingly orthogonal to mine), two interviews with Lem (one primarily about his artistic choices, the other primarily about his futurological opinions), and an essay by Lem called "Thirty Years Later".

This last is of particular interest to the English-speaking Lem reader, because it contains a newly translated excerpt from Lem's 1961-63 futurological work Summa Technologiae (never published in English), along with commentary from Lem in 1991 about how well the predictions in that chapter have held up. The particular chapter was about "virtual reality," or, as Lem called it, "phantomatics." In 1991 this had just become a topic of major popular concern, spawning books of critical theory and cautionary/escapist movies and TV shows, most of the latter recycling ideas from the "cyberpunk" SF movement of the 1980s. Lem argues that his prognoses prefigured the VR phenomenon by thirty years, and highlights some of his earlier right and wrong guesses.

It's interesting to look back at Lem's looking back with the perspective of nine more years. The promise and terror of VR are really still somewhat marginal issues as of the year 2000. Crude versions of virtual reality (good enough to induce vertigo) are everyday fixtures in game arcades, and put to practical use in some specialized contexts. The entertainment industry is taking advantage of the fact that almost any image can be synthesized digitally for the TV and movie screen. But the mass phantomatic invasion that Lem claimed was imminent in 1991 has not yet arrived, though there has been another rash of movies about it-- what might be called virtual virtual reality! (Also, I've heard that Ivan Sutherland demonstrated a working "VR helmet" not that much worse than today's models in the late 1960s.)

It's at least true that Lem was somewhat ahead of pop culture in thinking hard about the subject, and his thinking is rather more realistic than some of the recent work. Paisley Livingston makes these points and others.

A Stanislaw Lem Reader also has an excellent bibliography of works by Lem and of critical sources.