Bruce Stirling's article about Stanislav Leme's “Pointer of Knowledge”

You are a simple guy from some wilderness in Alabama.
Since childhood, you were tormented by vague doubts and a joyless feeling of your own potential, but you never realized it.

One happy day you open the works of one pair of writers. They are well known (for foreigners), so that their books are available even in your town. This is Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Reading them, you understand: here it is!

This is the sign you have been waiting for! This is your destiny - to become a "Russian writer"!

Having caught fire, you thoroughly study this pair until you consider that you understand perfectly what they wrote about. You heard that they are well known in Russia, but, apparently, they are not too keen on them. (Fortunately, thanks to some jokes of genetics, you happened to be a genius). It is enough for you to be their successor, but writing a more sophisticated style, of course, for contemporaries. And you write several such books, publish them, and people adore them. People in Alabama come to you with pride and say that you have bypassed Tolstoy.
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Then, after several years of ever-growing success, an unusual letter arrives. It is from Russia! The Russians have read your books in translation, and they wish to admit you to the membership of the Union of Writers of the USSR! Incomprehensible, you think! Of course, living in the wilderness of Alabama, it is too difficult to get publications of contemporary Russian writers. But, hell, Tolstoy wrote a long time! Now these Russians must be writing like no other!

Then a package arrives with modern Soviet books, a multi-colored pile, tied with a red ribbon. You open them and - oh, God! They are about ... COMMUNISM! This is all - stupid stereotypical waste paper! On the red heroes of three meters tall, and strong men, admiring their tractors, and mothers who give sons to their Fatherland, and fathers who give sons to their Motherland.

... By suppressing anger, you look at the rest at random - oh God, this is terrible.

Then they call from the Literary Gazette and ask if you want to make a few comments about the writings of your new comrades. “Of course!” You kindly say. “It’s as clear as day that you all are going the wrong way! This is not literature, but just a bunch of boring agitprop nonsense imposed by your stupid tyrannical publishers!

If Tolstoy were alive, he would kick your helpless Marxist asses! All this illiterate crap about communist heroes and workers breaking production records is silly tales with which not to fool even a child! Want to know the true potential of Soviet writers? Read something from mine if you can! Then call back! ”

And, of course, they called back. But, damn it, someone from the cones in the Union of Writers lost his temper and in disgrace expelled you from the Union of Writers, having called in every way ... saying that you ask, a worthless lousy clever man and a weapon of capitalism.

After that, you sometimes start writing, and even criticism. And, of course, after that you become rude and harmful.

It was really.

Except that it was not Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It was Wells and Olaf Stapledon. These were not Russian novels, but science fiction, and instead of the Union of Writers - SFWA. And Alabama was Poland. And you were Stanislav Lem.

Lem was cut from the heart of the American NF in 1976. Since then, many other writers have left SFWA, but they were excluded because they were Communists. Lem, of course, continued to gain wide popularity, mainly from pompous critics who cannot be found in a bookstore in the sky-fi department. Recently, the Lemovsky Macromir, a collection of critical essays, was published. For those of us who have not been privy to the dispute in the seventies, this is a book that sheds light on the real state of things.

Lem compared himself to Robinson Crusoe, unmistakably claiming that he had to erect the entire entire whole structure of "science fiction" from scratch. He had the ancient wreckage of a shipwrecked ship of Wells and Stapledon, which is under the arm, where he raided the instruments years later. (We have collected records from digging up Friday’s rubbish, Australian critic Franz Rottensteiner)

These essays are the work of a lonely person. We can appreciate the diligence of Lemov's attempts, such as the “Structural Analysis of Science Fiction”: a Pole writing in German, the Austrians about the French semantic theory. The maelstrom of the mind. After these superhuman interaction efforts, you thought that people should reduce the chasm and get closer - out of pity, if not for something else.

But Lem’s ideology, both political and literary, is simply threateningly terrible. What Lem called science fiction books is not at all like the American NF, just like a dolphin does not look like a reptile. Certain competitive skirmishes and beatings were inevitable.

Lem was not very interested in "fiction" in itself.

He became interested in science - the structure of the universe. A brief autobiographical work, “Reflection on My Life,” made it clear that Lem had been like that from the very beginning. The ignition of his literary activity was not literature, but the medical texts of his father — the magical world of skeletons and brains, and multi-colored saline entrails. Lem's earliest work during high school was not “stories”, but a careful series of imaginary documents: “certificates, passports, diplomas ... encrypted records and cryptograms ...”

For Lem, science fiction is a form of thought experiment documented on paper — the point of knowledge.

Everything else is secondary, this is the purposefulness that gives his work her fierce energy. This is a real “literature of ideas,” freeing the heart as insignificant, unscientific, but piercing the skull like an icicle.

Surrendering to his passions, Lem may never have written "human stories." But its main reason for avoiding this is astounding. The massacres during the Nazi occupation of Poland, as Lem said, led him to such a literary description of humanity as a species. “In those days, all the written laws previously used in literature were crushed and refuted. The immense futility of human life, influenced by massacres, cannot be expressed by artistic techniques in which a person or small groups of people constitute the essence of the story. ”

A shocking statement, and one of those people in other, happier countries will ponder. The meaning of this belief, of course, is incredibly extreme. Works Lem marked decisive extremism. He frantically fought for the idea with the energy of a drowned man clutching at a straw.

Content, plot, human values, character description, internal conflict were completely ruthlessly rejected.

In criticism, however, Lem continued to live and studied the wrecks carried to the shore with a cynical look.

American science fiction, he said, was hopelessly compromised because its narrative structure is rubbish: detective stories, crime thrillers, fairy tales, illegitimate myths. Such banal and vulgar methods do not fully fit the grand scale of science fiction themes, reducing it to cheap tricks of the variety magician.

Lem despised them, believing that a person should not seek entertainment in secondary magic. Stanislav Lem is not a merry fellow. Strange, but for the science fiction he was little fond of incomprehensible. He showed no need for secrets, curiosities, strange ... He is blind to the fruits of imagination. This, for example, led him to deny most of the work of Borg. Lem claimed that "the best works of the Borg are created as mathematical proofs." “This is a tautology, for Lem the mathematical proofs are what the best works should strive for. In the notes to the essay, Borg Lem left a strange statement that when no one agrees with this, philosophy will automatically become fiction. ” Lem’s literature is a philosophy, and a change of course for the sake of sensations alone is a scam.

American science fiction, therefore, has a network of crooks, and their leaders fool everyone almost like snake-fat sellers. Lem adheres to pedantry, but throwing it into the water when it comes to the work of Philip Dick: "A seer among the charlatans." Lem’s mind was completely overwhelmed by Dick’s reading, and he tried to find some ideas in his ideology that would reduce ontological delusions in a clear drawing.

This is a futile attempt, full of condescension and confusion, like a choreographer analyzing James Brown.

Works are written to enchant, entertain, educate, transmit cultural values, explore the life, behavior, morals and nature of the human heart. What Stanislav Lem writes, however, is designed to burn mental flaws with ruthless coherent light. How can someone do this and keep releasing similar “literature”? Lem tried writing novels. The novels, alas, looked strange, without unplayed characters in them.

Then he discovered this: a smile of fortune.

The collections “Perfect Vacuum” and “Imaginary Magnitudes” are lemovses masterpieces. The first contains reviews of books, the second - prefaces to various scientific books. The “books” reviewed never existed in reality, and were humorously titled, such as, for example, “Necrobes,” written by “Caesars Strzibisz.” But here Lem found literary constructions, not “stories,” but a mix of prose, familiar and enjoyable to the reader.

Of course, it’s a bit dry to read the whole book of “prefaces”, which are usually wonderful snacks before the main course. But this is due to the author's sense of freedom, his apparent enjoyment of those thorns that have become between him and his Grail. These charming works, witty, original, extremely provocative, highly not having an interest in people. People will read them only after decades. And not because they are written as works of art, but because their composition serves its purpose with an ominous elegance of the automaton.

Here Lem evaded irrevocable choice. This is the choice that every science fiction writer faces. Will the writer write the Real Books, accidentally turned out to be fiction, or will he create rough and not amenable to improvement NF artifacts, which are not “artistic works”, but merely fantastic texts? The argument in favor of the first path will be those of the Real Readers, that is, the majority who refuse to notice the uncovered NF.

How Lem must have been jubilant when he received a plentiful publishing advertisement from Time and Newsweek (not to mention income after currency exchange in Poland). Thanks to his work as a literary critic, he bewitched American sorcerers by getting a piece of cake and eating it publicly on the holy pages of the NY Review of Books.

This is a good trick that is difficult to perform, requiring ideas that burn so brightly that their radiance would be irresistible. This capable loner deserves some envy of the local Writers Union. But this is just a trick, and the main question is still unresolved: "What is NF?"

And what is it for?