Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future

216 Pages·2015·1.599 MB·English

by  Peter Swirski

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).