Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

The emergence of such necessities and restrictions often goes unnoticed in science fiction. If scientific facts are not simplified to the point where they lose all validity, they are put into worlds categorically, ontologically different from the real world. Since science fiction portrays the future or the extraterrestrial, the worlds of science fiction necessarily deviate from the real world, and the ways in which they deviate are the core and meaning of the science-fiction creation. But what we usually find is not what may happen tomorrow but the forever impossible, not the real but the fairy-tale-like. The difference between the real world and the fantastic world arises stochastically, gradually, step by step. It is the same kind of process as that which turns a head full of hair into a bald head: if you lose a hundred, even a thousand hairs, you will not be bald; but when does balding begin — with the loss of 10,000 hairs or 10,950?

Since there are no humans that typify the total ideal average, the paradox of the balding head exists also in realistic fiction, but there at least we have a guide, an apparatus in our head that enables us to separate the likely from the unlikely. We lose this guide when reading portrayals of the future or of galactic empires. Science fiction profits from this paralysis of the reader’s critical apparatus, because when it simplifies physical, psychological, social, economic, or anthropological occurrences, the falsifications thus produced are not immediately and unmistakably recognized as such. During the reading one feels instead a general disturbance; one is dissatisfied; but because one doesn’t know how it should have been done, one is often unable to formulate a clear and pointed criticism.

If science fiction is something more than just fairy-tale fiction, it has the right to neglect the fairy-tale world and its rules. It is also not realism, and therefore has the right to neglect the methods of realistic description. Its genological indefiniteness facilitates its existence, since it is supposedly not subject to the whole range of the criteria by which literary works are normally judged. It is not allegorical; but then it says that allegory is not its task: science fiction and Kafka are two quite different fields of creation. It is not realistic; but then, it is not a part of realistic literature. The future? How often have science-fiction authors disclaimed any intention of making predictions! Finally, it is called the Myth of the Twenty-first Century. But the ontological character of myth is antiempirical, and though a technological civilization may have its myths, it cannot itself embody a myth. For myth is an interpretation, a comparatio, an explication, and first you must have the object that is to be explicated. Science fiction lives in but strives to emerge from this antinomical state of being.

A quite general symptom of the sickness in science fiction can be found by comparing the spirit in ordinary literary circles to that in science-fiction circles. In the literature of the contemporary scene there is today uncertainty, distrust of all traditional narrative techniques, dissatisfaction with newly created work, general unrest that finds expression in ever new attempts and experiments; in science fiction, on the other hand, there is general satisfaction, contentedness, pride; and the results of such comparisons must give us some food for thought.

I believe that the existence and continuation of the great and radical changes effected in all fields of life by technological progress will lead science fiction into a crisis, which is perhaps already beginning. It becomes more and more apparent that the narrative structures of science fiction deviate more and more from all real processes, having been used again and again since they were first introduced and having thus become frozen, fossilized paradigms. Science fiction involves the art of putting hypothetical premises into the very complicated stream of sociopsychological occurrences. Although this art once had its master in H. G. Wells, it has been forgotten and is now lost. But it can be learned again.

The quarrel between the orthodox and heterodox parts of the science-fiction fraternity is regrettably sterile, and it is to be feared that it will remain so, since the readers that could in principle be gained for a new, better, more complex science fiction could be won only from the ranks of the readers of mainstream literature, not from the ranks of the fans. I do not believe that it would be possible to read this hypothetical, nonexistent, and phenomenally good science fiction if you had not first read all the best and most complex works of world literature with joy (that is, without having been forced to read them). The revolutionary improvement of science fiction is therefore always endangered by the desertion of large masses of readers. And if neither authors nor readers wish such an event, the likelihood of a positive change in the field during the coming years must be considered as very small, as, indeed, almost zero. It would then be a phenomenon of the kind called in futurology “the changing of a complex trend,” and such changes do not occur unless there are powerful factors arising out of the environment rather than out of the will and determination of a few individuals.

Postscript. Even the best science-fiction novels tend to show, in the development of the plot, variations in credibility greater than those to be found even in mediocre novels of other kinds. Although events impossible from an objective-empirical standpoint (such as a man springing over a wall seven meters high or a woman giving birth in two instead of nine months) do not appear in non-science-fiction novels, events equally impossible from a speculative standpoint (such as the totally unnecessary end-game in Disch’s Camp Concentration) appear frequently in science fiction. To be sure, separating the unlikely from the likely (finding in the street a diamond the size of your fist as opposed to finding a lost hat) is much simpler when your standard of comparison is everyday things than it is when you are concerned with the consequences of fictive hypotheses. But though separating the likely from the unlikely in science fiction is difficult, it can be mastered. The art can be learned and taught. But since the lack of selective filters is accompanied by a corresponding lack in reader-evaluations, there are no pressures on authors for such an optimization of science fiction.

Translated from the German by Franz Rottensteiner and Bruce R. Gillespie, with R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin.

On reading In Search of Wonder by Damon Knight and The Issue at Hand by James Blish, a couple of questions, the answers to which can be found nowhere, came to my mind. [3] This essay is a rewritten chapter (“Sociology of Science Fiction”) from my Fantastyka i futurologia ( Science Fiction and Futurology ). I have polemically sharpened the original text in several instances, and added the later review of Dick’s work, which is absent from the book. I confess that I made a blunder when I wrote this monograph, since then I knew only Dick’s short stories and his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I believed that I could rely on reviews published in the fanzines of other novels by Dick, with the result that I considered him merely a “better van Vogt,” which he is not. This mistake was due to the state of science-fiction criticism. Every fifth or eighth book is praised as “the best work of science fiction in the whole world,” its author is presented as “the greatest science-fiction author ever,” great differences between works are minimized and annulled, so much so that in the end Ubik may be regarded as a novel that is just a little better than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Naturally, what I say does not justify my mistake, because no criticism is a substitute for reading the books concerned. However, my words still describe the circumstances responsible for causing my error, because it is a physical impossibility to read every science-fiction title, so that there must be a selection; as you can see, one cannot rely on science-fiction criticism to make this selection.