STANISLAW LEM Philosopher of the Future Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 51 Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies Editor David Seed, University of Liverpool Editorial Board Mark Bould, University of the West of England Veronica Hollinger, Trent University Rob Latham, University of California Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College, University of London Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading Andy Sawyer, University of Liverpool Recent titles in the series 30. Mike Ashley Transformations: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazine from 1950–1970 31. Joanna Russ The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews 32. Robert Philmus Visions and Revisions: (Re)constructing Science Fiction 33. Gene Wolfe (edited and introduced by Peter Wright) Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe 34. Mike Ashley Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazine from 1970–1980 35. Patricia Kerslake Science Fiction and Empire 36. Keith Williams H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies 37. Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon (eds.) Queer Universes: Sexualities and Science Fiction 38. John Wyndham (eds. David Ketterer and Andy Sawyer) Plan for Chaos 39. Sherryl Vint Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal 40. Paul Williams Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds 41. Sara Wasson and Emily Alder, Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010 42. David Seed (ed.), Future Wars: The Anticipations and the Fears 43. Andrew M. Butler, Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s 44. Andrew Milner, Locating Science Fiction 45. Joshua Raulerson, Singularities 46. Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel (edited, translated and with an introduction by Peter Swirski) 47. Sonja Fritzsche, The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film 48. Jack Fennell, Irish Science Fiction 49. Peter Swirski and Waclaw M. Osadnik (eds), Lemography: Stanislaw Lem in the Eyes of the World 50. Gavin Parkinson (ed.), Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics STANISLAW LEM Philosopher of the Future PETER SWIRSKI LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2015 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU UK www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk Copyright © 2015 Peter Swirski The right of Peter Swirski to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writ- ten permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78138-186-1 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-466-8 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound in the European Union by BooksFactory.co.uk Contents Contents List of Figures vi Cogito Ergo Lem 1 PART I: BIOGRAPHY 1 Life and Times 8 2 In the Kaleidoscope of Books 27 PART II: ESSAYS 3 Game, Set, Lem 70 4 Betrization Is the Worst Solution… Except for All Others 97 5 Errare Humanum Est 119 6 A Beachbook for Intellectuals 141 PART III: CODA 7 Fiasco 166 8 Happy End of the World! 181 Appendix: Stanislaw Lem Books 187 Works Cited 190 Index 196 v Figures Contents 1. Lem and Wisława Szymborska in the 1950s. (credit: Wisława Szymborska Foundation) 57 2. Lem and wife Barbara in the garden at the back of Lem’s house in Kliny, Cracow (1992). (credit: Peter Swirski) 58 3. Lem and Peter Swirski in the garden at the back of Lem’s house in Kliny, Cracow (1992). (credit: Peter Swirski) 59 4. Lem and Peter Swirski in the garden at the back of Lem’s house in Kliny, Cracow (caught off-guard when camera flash malfunctioned) (1992). (credit: Peter Swirski) 60 5. Lem and Ewa Lipska in Cracow on the fateful day of 9/11 (2001). (credit: Ewa Lipska and Danuta Węgiel) 61 6. Peter Swirski at the Lem tombstone at the Salwatorski Cemetery in Cracow (2011). (credit: Peter Swirski) 62 7. Lem tombstone at the Salwatorski Cemetery in Cracow (2011). (credit: Peter Swirski) 63 8. Lem Street in Cracow (2014). (credit: Peter Swirski) 64 9. Stanislaw Lem’s Garden of Experiments in Cracow (2014). (credit: Peter Swirski) 65 10. Stanislaw Lem’s Garden of Experiments Library (2014). (credit: Peter Swirski) 66 11. Stanislaw Lem’s Garden of Experiments Library Book Selection (2014). (credit: Peter Swirski) 67 vi This book is dedicated to Arthur Asa Berger Mark Shackleton and Waclaw M. Osadnik In my conception, a literary work is a MODEL, and the investigator’s task is to determine a set of pro- cesses characteristic of the work and/or of processes related to it. Stanislaw Lem Cogito Ergo Lem Cogito Ergo Lem A Hard Nut to Crack—Pas de Deux—The Blink of the Cosmic Eye A Hard Nut to Crack “I’m a hard nut to crack for literary critics”, snickered Lem during a 1984 interview, openly dissatisfied with their incapacity to mete out cognitive justice to his works.1 In 1992, during two days of discussions that would eventually form the core of my A Stanislaw Lem Reader (1997), he let his frustration ring even louder. “I prefer to answer interdisciplinary inquiries from the borderline of phi- losophy of science and literature rather than get bogged down in questions concerning my own (science) fictional works”, he told me point blank. “The former approach is certainly more fruitful” (117). It is true that humanists face a major challenge when enter- ing the critical lists with Lem. They square off not only with a virtuoso storyteller but also with a science-savvy philosopher who, more often than not, saw his novels as narrative models of the sociocultural constants and statistical aberrations that bedevil our civilization in its inexorable technoscientific evolution. Given Lem’s intellectual demands—exemplified by his lifelong mantra that not Kelvin, Tichy, or Pirx, but knowledge was the hero of his books—it is not surprising that few critics earned passing grades for their endeavours.2 The example of Jerzy Jarzębski, the Polish editor of Lem’s Collected Works (1998), is representative in this regard. Turning the tables on the critic, Lem did not pull punches when he panned him for being, 1 In Engel. 2 See Ziembiecki. 1 2 STANISLAW LEM unable to perceive my work from the “epistemological angle”, for it is a side ingrained in biology, which is rather alien to him. Nota bene, Jarzebski [sic], acquainted with my “empirical theory of literature”, The Philosophy of Chance, and “Markiz w Grafie” (in the last of which I applied game theory to a geno- logical analysis of De Sade), did attempt to apply the method I proposed (the game theory’s structure, the structure of dynamic conflicts, and not the static structures of the classic structuralism) […] but I can tell from the content that he has no idea of what game theory is all about, that the notions of saddle-like payoff function and such, zero-sum and non-zero- sum games, etc. are completely foreign to him.3 Lem’s dissatisfaction persisted right until his death in 2006, even as, especially in Poland, critical studies of his writings were begin- ning to proliferate like the intellectronic “flies” in The Invincible. Since then, a new a crop of monographs, led by Maciej Płaza’s Of Cognition in the Works of Stanislaw Lem (2006), Paweł Majewski’s Between Animal and Machine: Stanislaw Lem’s Technological Utopia (2007), Paweł Okołowski’s Matter and Values: Stanislaw Lem’s Neo-Lucretianism (2010), to say nothing of Michał Cetnarowski’s voluminous anthol- ogy Lem’s Voice (2011), attests to the seemingly unstoppable interest in Lem’s works both in his native land and around the world.4 Pas de Deux As Lem would have been the first to point out, however, quan- tity does not necessarily translate into quality, especially when it comes to forging a set of interpretive keys to his cognitive vault. Indeed, it is difficult to allay the suspicion that, had he lived to this day, he would have remained as critical as before of literary scholars who remain disinterested in, or incapable of, picking up the heuristic gauntlet thrown at their collective feet by a writer who preferred to be called the philosopher of the future. Limited by and large to thematic and structural schemata, liter- ary criticism can hardly hope to render justice to Lem’s ambitions. 3 In Csicsery-Ronay (1986); for an example of Lem’s dismissal of English science-fiction criticism, see Swirski (2014), 71. 4 See Swirski and Osadnik (2014); for a review of some of the earlier Lem studies in Poland, see Swirski (1992).