A PERFECT VACUUM by Stanislaw Lem
Translated by Michael Kandel; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 229 pages; $8.95
The two-cultures debate of nearly a generation ago is all but forgotten. The sharp exchanges between the bowlered ranks of C.P. Snow, the novelist who gave contemporary fiction the beautiful technocrat, and the disciples of Literary Critic F.R. Leavis now seem like an intellectual border dispute. In retrospect it was not much of a contest. The powers of technology and social engineering either bypassed or rolled over their academic challengers. Today many defenders of the humanities even drop terms like the uncertainty principle and entropy as loose literary metaphors.
Yet there are writers who truly comprehend the vocabulary of science. Thomas Pynchon made physical laws part of the structure of Gravity's Rainbow, and science-fiction novelists routinely construct their speculative entertainments from the hard-and software of physics and chemistry. Among the masters of the genre is Stanislaw Lem, a mordant, satirical Pole whose novels and stories have been praised by readers as disparate as Critic Leslie Fiedler and Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Lem has written nearly 30 books, and his European sales are in the millions. (Ten of his works have been translated into English; most of them were published by New York's Seabury Press.)
A Lem story can have the crushing gravity of a collapsing star. His sentences are frequently dense with logic and his points aphoristic: "The progress of human knowledge was a gradual renunciation of the simplicity of the world." Lem's own worlds are complex, twittering word machines ingeniously wired to philosophy, probability theory, cybernetics and literary conventions, which he parodies brilliantly. Unlike most science-fiction writers, he animates his creatures with lively explanations, as in the Cartesian send-up from The Cyberiad: "Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water, and electrolyte seeped into his head and, bubbling, set up a current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud and thought the following thought:—Apparently, I am!"
If Lem has a major theme, it is the implications of artificial intelligence. What is natural and unnatural, what is imaginary and what is real—and does it really matter—are questions that stream through the pages of A Perfect Vacuum like ghostly neutrinos. Each story is cast in the form of a review of a nonexistent book. Lem, of course, is both reviewer and conceiver of the unwritten texts. Some are fairly straightforward social and literary satires. Les Robinsonades dismisses Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a puritanized fiction based on a brutish factual account of a castaway (which it was), and presents a New Robinson who is not nostalgic for a lost culture. He re-creates his world from scratch, dreaming into being a manservant named Snibbins and a three-legged female companion called Wendy Mae. The course of true creation never runs smoothly. "Thus the logically perfect hero," writes Lem, "outlines a plan that later will destroy and mock him—can it be, as the human world has done to its Creator?"