Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

It cannot be maintained that Dick has evaded all the traps set for him: he has more defeats than victories in his work, but the latter determine his rank as an author. His successes are due to his intuition. Average science-fiction authors form their hells of existence, their flaming grounds to head for, in social institutions, especially police-tyrannies-plus-brainwashing, as from Orwell’s school, but Dick makes his out of ontological categories. The primary ontological elements — space and time — are Dick’s instruments of torture, which he uses with great versatility. In his novels he constructs hypotheses that are prima facie wholly nonsensical (because of the contradictions they contain) — worlds that are at the same time determinist and indeterminist, worlds where past, present, and future “devour” each other, a world in which one can be dead and alive at the same time, and so on.

But in the first world even the “precogs” prove to be powerless to evade their own cruel end, which they foresaw themselves. Their wonderful gift only makes their torture harder to bear. In the second world time becomes a Laocoon’s snake that strangles its inhabitants. The third world embodies the saving of Chiang Tsi, who, upon waking, posed the famous question of whether he is Chiang Tsi who has just dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreams that he is Chiang Tsi. Dick writes about a technological realization of an ontological problem that has always occupied philosophers (i.e., the controversy between subjectivists and objectivists) so that it may be considered as an earnest problem of the (far) future, and not just a speculative question.

The common opinion that philosophical problems can never change directly into technological feats is an illusion caused by the relatively brief period of the technological era. In the year 1963 I discussed this problem in my Summa Technologiae, in the chapter entitled “Phantomatics.” One possible way to build a synthetic reality is to “encapsulate” the consciousness by connecting the brain of the person in question to a computerlike apparatus in the same way as it is connected normally to real environments through the senses and nerves — i.e., with feedback. The most interesting puzzle is whether a “phantomatically imprisoned” man can divine the real state of things, whether he can distinguish the machine-simulated environment from the real one, by means of any one experiment. From either a logical or an empirical standpoint, it seems that the person could not make a correct diagnosis if the program of the machine was insufficiently developed. In a civilization which has such phantomatic techniques, there may be much mind-napping. But also there may be many legal uses of such methods, so that a person could witness while awake as many happenings as could be programmed, and since in principle there are no obstacles, the phantomated person would realize the counter-empirical (he could, subjectively, live through many metamorphoses of his body).

In Dick’s book Ubik, we find a literary variant of a similar project. He deals with a biotechnological method that is complicated by the fact that it allows dying people to remain in a specific state between life and death — i.e., “half-life.” Dick develops a quite horrible game, so that it is not clear at the end which of the main characters lie in half-life and which live in normal reality. The action zigzags. With different ideas of what the reader is led to believe to be true. Also there are such macabre effects as the dissolution of earth and jumping back in time. You can find similar things in science fiction, but this masterly, gripping guidance of the play, in particular the behavior of all the characters, is psychologically depicted without fault. The border that separates the adventure novel from mainstream literature is transgressed in Ubik, something I want to prove later in this essay.

Now I want to review the “message” that several of Dick’s novels communicate to us in an unequivocal way, embedded in the action. He seems to want to prove an equation, in the form of “We exist, therefore we are damned,” and this equation is supposed to be valid for all worlds, even for impossible ones. His novels are the results of pessimistic ontological speculations about how the face of men would change if total revolutions in the basic categories of existence occurred (e.g., revolutions in the space-time system, in the relationship between dreaming and waking, etc). The result is the same, since insofar as these changes are induced by biotechnologies or drugs (as in Palmer Eldritch) they can only worsen the fatality of earthly existence. The greater a technological innovation is, says Dick, the more horrible its consequences.

In his first “major” novel, Solar Lottery, Dick has not yet tried to destroy the fundamentals of existence completely. He “shyly” introduces a new sociotechnology in which all men are supposed to have an equal chance to gain political power, because the allocation of power depends upon a comprehensive lottery. As can be expected, the result is a new kind of misery and inequality. Thus Dick has good reasons to sacrifice logic and causality; he shows that even the variants of existence that violate causality and logic are inherent in the invariance of texture and doom. One could call Dick an inverted apologist for “progress,” because he connects unlimited progress in the field of the instrumentally realizable with bottomless pessimism in the field of human consequences of such progress in civilization. His novels are pieces of fantastic belles-lettres, but his underlying philosophy of life is not fantasy. Dick seems to foresee a future in which abstract and highbrow dilemmas of academic philosophy will descend into the street so that every pedestrian will be forced to solve for himself such contradictory problems as “objectivity” or “subjectivity,” because his life will depend upon the result. With all his “precogs,” “cold-packs,” and “Pen-fields,” he tells us, “And if you could achieve the impossible, it would not alleviate your misery one bit.”

Dick’s main characters are engaged in a battle not only for their lives, but also to save the basic categories of existence. They are doomed to failure in advance. Some exhibit the patience of Job, who gazed quietly into the face of what was coming, since everything that can happen to a man had already happened to him. Others are valiant wrestlers, striving after power, while still others are small and petty people, officials, and employees. Dick mans all his misleading worlds with contemporary Americans. Probably this is the reason why they seem so living and authentic — because there is a feedback between them and the world surrounding them. The authenticity of these people corroborates the fantastic background, and, vice versa, the background makes the normal people seem especially noteworthy and true to life. Dick’s main characters do not become greater during the apocalyptically terrifying action of his novels; they only seem greater — or more human — because the world around them gets ever more inhuman (that is, more incomprehensible to the mind of man).

There are moments when they have a tragic effect. In the Greek sense tragedy is inescapable defeat, with several ways of being defeated. Some of these ways, if a man chooses one of them, give the opportunity symbolically to save an inestimable value. For one of Dick’s heroes, the love of a woman or a similar human feeling is the kind of value that is worth saving, a value to be guarded even if the world goes to pieces. They are the last islands of spiritual sanity in a world gone mad, a world that heaps on them objects used in ways other than originally intended and that thus become instruments of torture and objects that spring from the sphere of the most trivial consumer goods and behave like things obsessed (e.g., a tape recorder or a spray can). Dick’s main characters engage in conferences with monsters, which, however, are not little BEMs (“bug-eyed monsters,” the embodiment of trash), because an aura of grotesque and dramatic worth clings to them, and they have the dignity of misshapen, tortured creatures. With the example of such monsters — one of which is Palmer Eldritch — we can see how Dick vanquishes truth; in the shape of a mutilation, he makes simple the macabre and the primitive by giving them a trace of fragile humanity.