Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

Morally it is quite questionable whether the false belief of these people that they are still living normal lives should be maintained — but this problem is irrelevant because a much more important one displaces it: i.e., his next-of-kin prefers the situation in which the patient lives to his death; though at the same time nobody could call it an agreeable situation. People are not content to keep the patient alive, because, from the point of view of people in the normal world, he is leading only a half-life isolated from the real world. They want to reach him, to talk to him, listen to him, etc. This is technically possible, but only under the most extraordinary conditions. Pseudoreality makes up an integral whole for the patient; therefore if someone who exists outside intrudes, the patient experiences this intrusion as an anomaly in his environment. The “quest” cannot reach into pseudo-reality in a fully plausible and harmless way. This is important if a patient such as Runciter’s wife is conscious of the situation. But it is extremely important if he or she does not know it — as in the case of Joe Chip.

Two curious phenomena must still be explained: (1) the “mad” behavior of pseudoreality, and (2) the manipulation by one man in cold storage of the consciousness of his fellow sufferers. (In Ubik the problem is the curious relationship formed among Emily, Runciter’s wife, Joe Chip, and the strange man named Jorg.)

The first phenomenon is a realistic presentation of a fictitious technology. We may, in advance, claim that whichever way the technology of reality-fission will be realized, it must be subject to certain malfunctions because no technology is invulnerable to malfunctions. The fact that at some time a breakdown in the production of pseudoreality will occur can be regarded as a realistic prediction, since none of today’s predictions can tell us what kind of mishaps will happen. Ubik’s author was justified in describing the “breakdowns” and “defects” of pseudoreality at his own discretion. Different types of disasters may occur.

In pseudoreality certain anomalies of the flow of time and space might happen, and both have a dreamlike character, i.e., they resemble what we experience in dreams. This type of creation of “reality breakdowns” seems to be correct insofar as (according to what we said before) the main source of the information that makes up pseudoreality is the brain of the man lying in cold storage; in this way we can account for the fact that each relaxation of the direction of psychic processes by the simulator correlates with changed appearances in the mind of the patient. He will experience this as a change of environment, as if in a dream. (At this point I should like to remark that as a rule a dream is not recognized as such by the dreamer; for this reason Joe Chip also does not think of such an interpretation of the events around him.)

We may assume that the “overgrowth” of one consciousness by another occurs because a lot of people are lying in cold storage and, for economic reasons, not everyone is allotted a separate simulator. Rather, a handful of people is always connected with a multichannel machine. Even if one circuit is insulated from the others, it may happen that electrical impulses flash across, or cause the induction of another current; subjectively, this may be experienced as the “devouring” of one consciousness by another, neighboring, one.

The last question to be answered is: who is really lying in cold storage: Runciter or Joe Chip? Because of all the facts found in Ubik, one may conclude that both men lie in cold storage — that all the men on the moon were killed by the explosion and subjected to cold-storage treatment.

Quod erat demonstrandum — and in several places we have “filled” the gaps left in the novel. But it would not be correct to speak in earnest about such “gaps.”

First, an author need not necessarily describe the technological details in a novel. As is well known, writers of contemporary novels do not describe the principles that underlie the functions of refrigerators, radios, and cars, and in these novels we would look in vain for the information that all the main characters are “vertebrates” and “mammals.” The basic assumption of Ubik is a technology of split reality, and it is not particularly important what kind of technology caused this split, so it need not be described in detail. It can occur in many ways; the technological details have secondary importance. The most important detail is that in a world where split reality has already been realized, its inhabitants face new, previously unknown dilemmas and must solve problems having the greatest impact. The existence of such a technology changes the ontological perspective of life and, as Ubik shows convincingly, the problem is not just that of people put in cold storage because they are severely injured. In principle, anyone can be incarcerated in a pseudoworld for his whole life. Whether this is legal or illegal is a problem of jurisprudence, not philosophy. In a world with split reality, general knowledge shows that, as well as the normal level of reality, other levels may exist, levels that may exist for some other people — or for everybody. As always, this is a question of the price to be paid for so-called progress (in Ubik, progress in the battle against death).

At any rate, the point set out above is a perspective from which the novel may be seen as a science-fiction work that depicts the human consequences of a biotechnological revolution. Perhaps it is not superfluous to remark in the second place that observers who watch the spectacle of a highway catastrophe do not usually indulge in reflections that call into question the facts of civilization and the history of technology; when people are looking at destroyed cars and maimed bodies they do not think about the price that has been exacted in human lives because Otto once invented the four-stroke engine and other inventors put this motor into the body of an old coach. So we may doubt whether the above technological exegesis is really necessary and whether we may think that Dick should of his own accord fill the gaps in technological detail that I have tried to fill.

Rather, I believe that Dick left no gaps in the novel, and in fact that the technological explanation is superfluous. It pursued only one object: I wanted to demonstrate that the novel is coherent as science fiction as well and that contradictions and loose ends in its structure are not in question. If technological details abounded in Ubik they would interfere with our reading; they do not add anything relevant to the text, and they can only rationalize it in a way that the author does not like. From the point of view of an artist, he is correct, for this novel is not “futurological” science fiction, though it may be read as such. However, Dick has taken a different point of view: he renounces all “empirical justifications” and “scientific” foundations. Primarily Ubik is a poetic achievement; we may draw this conclusion from the fact that the biotechnological premise, as outlined above, could also be the basis of a novel whose factual details were impeccable but, despite all this, a blind shell as a work of art. The contradictions in Ubik need not be defended at all costs by appealing to technological authority. The novel has neither gaps nor signs of the author’s negligence. The “contradictions” form a mode of expression that serves to expose to full daylight the messages that are stressed by affection and a special philosophy of life. In a word, they are metaphors that should not be examined for empirical content, even if that seems possible. As I could show, even if they withstand logical and scientific tests, this is not their main value as an experience that can be exchanged with the currency of practical knowledge. This experience is called catharsis.