Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

In Ubik, the twitching world reminds us of the “will” of Schopenhauer, will gone mad; spurned into everlasting time explosion and implosion, devouring itself. As an aside, measured by the yardstick of Dick’s black pessimism, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of life seems to be real joie de vivre. Dick sees our world as the best of the worst, and there are no other worlds. According to him, we are everywhere damned, even where we cannot go. Dick once said that he does not consider himself a limitless pessimist. Possibly, though conscious of reason in the cosmos, he does not draw the nihilistic conclusion because he does not ascribe an exclusively negative value to the agony of man. But this is my private speculation . [6] This applies only to the novels by Dick that I know: Solar Lottery , The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch , Our Friends from Frolix 8 , Now Wait for Last Year , Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , Ubik , and Galactic Pot-Healer . In addition, I have read several of Dick’s short stories, mainly in science-fiction magazines.

Dick’s planets, galaxies, men, children, monsters, elevators, and refrigerators are all symbols of a language that, mix it as you please, always crystallizes into the same form of a mene tekel.

With that I don’t want to say that Dick’s novels — even his best, like Ubik — are faultless masterpieces. The surfaces of his books seem quite coarse and raw to me, connected with an omnipresence of trash. I like what he has to say in one chapter more than what a page shows, and that is why his work forces me into fast reading. Upon looking his details in the face, one beholds several inconsistencies, as in looking at an Impressionist’s painting from too close. Dick cannot tame trash; rather, he lets loose a pandemonium and lets it calm down on its way. His metaphysics often slips in the direction of cheap circus tricks. His prose is threatened by uncontrolled outgrowths, especially when it boils over into long series of fantastic freaks, and therefore loses all its function of message. Also, he is prone to penetrate so deeply into the monstrosities he has invented that an inversion of effect results: that which was intended to strike us with horror appears merely ridiculous, or even stupid.

With that I’ll stop this immanent review of Dick’s work and pass over to its sociological aspect. The science-fiction environment is unable to separate and make distinct the types of works that are being born into it. This environment is incapable of distinguishing clearly between the work of Dick, which is artistically bunched together into sense, from that of van Vogt, which collapses into nonsense. On a higher plane a title like The World of Null-A belongs to Dick, not to van Vogt, although it was the latter who actually wrote it; but only with Dick can we talk about a “non-Aristotelian” logic, whereas this title is merely tacked onto van Vogt’s book without any justification. In its actions the science-fiction environment is by no means chaotic; obeying its own laws and regulations, it extols the stupid and denigrates the valuable until both meet “halfway” -on the level of insignificant trifles. In science fiction, Dick has not been honored according to his merits. Some people acknowledged the entertainment values of his novels, and one of the best living science-fiction critics, Damon Knight, also spoke about Dick’s distorted pictures of contemporary reality (in In Search of Wonder) when he reviewed Solar Lottery and some other early books by Dick.

But that was all the praise this author came to hear. Nobody saw that his “unchecked growth” is quite strikingly similar in content and form to what goes on in the Upper Realm. Judged according to the problems he deals with, Dick’s novels belong to that stream of literature that explores the no man’s land between being and nothing — in the double sense.

(a)

We can count Dick’s novels as part of the prose that is today called “Literature of Ideas” or “Literature of Possibilities.” This type of experimental prose tries to probe the neglected, latent, untouched, as-yet-unrealized potentialities of human existence, mainly in the psychological sphere. Probably one can find fountains of such prose in, among others, the works of Musil (Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften — The Man Without Qualities) in which the outer world, randomly manifesting itself, affixes to the individual, so that he remains a soul “without qualities.” In such books as his Le Voyeur, Robbe-Grillet tries other tactics; this prose seems to fit the motto Quod autem potest esse totaliter aliter — “that which, however, can be something wholly different” (which in Poland is represented by J. Andrzejewski in his Miazga, a work that is written partly in the future subjunctive mood and therefore describes what could possibly happen, and not what has unconditionally happened), which has its parallels with Dick’s work. Robbe-Grillet proceeds from the typical science-fiction blueprint of “parallel worlds,” but whereas most science-fiction writers flatten this motif into unbearable trash, running over it like a steamroller, Dick knows how to raise the problems that grow from this inspiration to a fitting level of complexity. Therefore he is an original representative of the Literature of Ideas in science fiction — a wide field, but one with which I cannot deal here exhaustively.

(b)

In connection with Dick, we can think of authors like Beckett, because of the “unhealthy curiosity” that both have for death, or, more exactly, for the flow of life as it approaches its end. Beckett “is content” with natural processes that will devour man from the inside, slowly and continually (as when growing old, or becoming a cripple). Dick devotes himself to grander speculations, in the true spirit of the genre he is working in.

We could say many interesting things about his “theory” of half-life (not as a sensible empirical hypothesis, but as a variety of fantastic-ontological speculation) but, once again, I cannot dig too deep into an exegesis of a desacralized eschatology.

We draw these two parallels to show how an area of creation, closed into a ghetto, suffers from the situation of its own isolation. For such parallel courses of evolution are not accidental coincidences. It is the spirit of time that mirrors itself in them, but science fiction knows only short-lived fashions.

The peculiarity of Dick’s work throws a glaring light upon relationships within the science-fiction milieu. All science-fiction works have to give the reader the impression of being easy to read, as has all fiction. Science-fiction works before which two hundred Nobel Prize winners in the department of physics kneel down are worthless for the science-fiction market if, in fact, the precondition of being able to evaluate a work of science fiction is a minimum of knowledge. Therefore it is best for science-fiction books not to contain any deep meaning — either physical or metaphysical. But if the author smuggles any sense into his work, it must not stir the phlegmatic and indolent reader, or else this invaluable man will stop reading because of a headache. [7] Each society is stratified according to its own pattern. In each society there are powers of selection with local effects to attract and repel individuals. Among others, such mass processes give rise to different readerships for widely differing varieties of literature. If one compared the intelligence and level of education of the average science-fiction reader in the United States and in the Soviet Union, one would draw the conclusion that the Russians know more about literature and are more intelligent than the Americans. However, this would be a fallacy; the selection processes of science-fiction readership in Russia and in the United States have taken different courses, because of the different traditions that prevail in the two countries in regard to the broader questions of the duties and psychosociological status that literature, as a whole, must play in society. Certainly the United States has the same percentage of bright boys and girls as Russia has but intelligent readers there approach science fiction far less often than they do in Russia. The deeper meaning is admitted only if it is “harmless,” if we can neglect it entirely while reading. The following anecdote may explain this problem: If many colored flags are put upon the masts of a ship in the harbor, a child on the shore will think that this is a merry game and perhaps will have a lot of fun watching, although at the same time an adult will recognize the flags as a language of signals, and know that it stands for a report on a plague that has broken out on board the ship. The science-fiction readership equals the child, not the adult, in the story.