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Logic is the perfect vacuum, admitting no impurities but capable of breeding absurdities. A Nazi war criminal sets himself up as Louis XVI in the wilds of South America where he decrees German to be French and Argentina to be imperial Spain. A Huxleian world in which sexual indulgence has resulted in a "genitocracy" is suddenly cooled off by Nosex, a drug that turns lovemaking into drudgery. Sex as a recreation and mainstay of the economy is replaced by eating, with its own pornography and taboos. People who eat fruit while kneeling, for example, are branded perverts.
Lem's rationalists have a weakness for rationalizing. A man who considers himself a genius of the highest order also believes that such elite members of the race are never recognized. In another story Lem overloads the probability theory to suggest playfully that no one should exist. Each man's chances of being, says Lem's Professor Kouska, is a "teragigamegamulticentillion-to-one shot." In physics, one chance in a centillion is considered an impossibility because there are fewer than a centillion seconds before the end of the universe. The origin of this fact is unclear. But who's counting?
Lem plays his most sophisticated games when he reflects on the production of artificially intelligent beings. Indeed, God himself is considered as a vast cybernetic mind that may be the legacy of a first-generation universe that died billions of aeons ago. The machines of this universe were the laws of nature, a perfect solution to the problems of spare parts and maintenance. As for the problems of an unnatural nature, Lem writes that "if one considers 'artificial' to be that which is shaped by an active Intelligence, then the entire Universe that surrounds us is already artificial. " With such delightful leaps of the imagination, Lem outdistances nearly all of the most popular star trekkers. He is the Borges of scientific culture, whose "mortal engines" promise that mystery will not end with the last flesh-and-blood human. Reading A Perfect Vacuum, one can easily imagine banks of Lemian cybernoids arguing whether man exists and how many science-fiction writers could fit on the head of a microchip. — R.Z. Sheppard
Excerpt
"If one is to believe the author — and more and more they tell us to believe the authors of science fiction! —the current surge of sex will become a deluge in the 1980s . . .