Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

Nevertheless, there can be circumstances that frustrate this process of natural selection. In biological evolution the result will be retrogression, degeneration, or at the very least developmental stagnation, typical of populations isolated from the outside world and vitiated by inbreeding, since these are most lacking in the fruitful diversity that is guaranteed only by openness to all the world’s influences. In culture an analogous situation leads to the emergence of enclaves shut up in ghettos, where intellectual production likewise stagnates because of inbreeding in the form of incessant repetition of the selfsame creative patterns and techniques. The internal dynamics of the ghetto may appear to be intense, but with the passage of years it becomes evident that this is only a semblance of motion, since it leads nowhere, since it neither feeds into nor is fed by the open domain of culture, since it does not generate new patterns or trends, and since, finally, it nurses the falsest of notions about itself, for lack of any honest evaluation of its activities from outside. The books of the ghetto assimilate themselves to one another, becoming an anonymous mass, while such surroundings thrust whatever is better downward toward the worse, so that works of differing quality meet one another halfway, as it were, in the leveling process forced upon them. In such a situation publishing success not only may, but must, become the sole standard of evaluation, since a vacuum of standards is impossible. Hence, where there are no ratings on the merits, these are replaced by ratings on a commercial basis.

Just such a situation reigns in American science fiction, which is a domain of herd creativity. Its herd character manifests itself in the fact that books by different authors become as it were different sessions of playing at one and the same game or various figures of the selfsame dance. It should be emphasized that, in literary culture as in natural evolution, effects become causes by virtue of feedback loops: the artistic-intellectual passivity and mediocrity of works touted as brilliant repel the more exigent authors and readers, so that the loss of individuality in science fiction is at once a cause and an effect of ghetto seclusion. In science fiction there is little room left for creative work that would aspire to deal with problems of our time without mystification, oversimplification, or facile entertainment: e.g., for work that would reflect on the place that reason can occupy in the universe, on the outer limits of concepts formed on earth as instruments of cognition, or on such consequences of contacts with extraterrestrial life as find no place in the desperately primitive repertoire of science-fiction devices (bounded by the alternative “we win”/“they win”). These devices bear much the same relation to serious treatment of problems of the kind mentioned as does the detective story to the problems of evil inherent in mankind. Whoever brings up the heavy artillery of comparative ethnology, cultural anthropology, and sociology against such devices is told that he is using cannon to shoot sparrows, since it is merely a matter of entertainment; once he falls silent, the voices of the apologists for the culture-shaping, anticipative, predictive, and mythopoeic role of science fiction are raised anew. Science fiction behaves rather like a conjurer pulling rabbits from a hat, who, threatened with a search of his belongings, pretends to think we are crazy to suggest this and indulgently explains that he is just performing tricks — after which we promptly hear that he is passing himself off in public for an authentic thaumaturge.

Is creative work without mystification possible in such an environment? An answer to this question is given by the stories of Philip K. Dick. While these stand out from the background against which they have originated, it is not easy to capture the ways in which they do, since Dick employs the same materials and theatrical props as other American writers. From the warehouse that has long since become their common property, he takes the whole threadbare lot of telepaths, cosmic wars, parallel worlds, and time travel. In his stories terrible catastrophes happen, but this, too, is no exception to the rule; lengthening the list of sophisticated ways in which the world can end is among the standard preoccupations of science fiction. But where other science-fiction writers explicitly name and delimit the source of the disaster, whether social (terrestrial or cosmic war) or natural (elemental forces of nature), the world of Dick’s stories suffers dire changes for reasons that remain unascertainable to the end. People perish not because a nova or a war has erupted, not because of flood, famine, plague, draught, or sterility, not because the Martians have landed on our doorstep; rather, there is some inscrutable factor at work that is visible in its manifestations but not at its source, and the world behaves as if it has fallen prey to a malignant cancer, which through metastases attacks one area of life after another. This is, be it said forthwith, apposite as a castigation of historiographic diagnostics, since in fact humanity does not as a rule succeed in exhaustively or conclusively diagnosing the causes of the afflictions that befall it. It is sufficient to recall how many diverse and in part mutually exclusive factors are nowadays adduced by experts as sources of the crisis of civilization. And this, be it added, is also appropriate as an artistic presupposition, since literature that furnishes the reader with godlike omniscience about all narrated events is today an anachronism that neither the theory of art nor the theory of knowledge will undertake to defend.

The forces that bring about world debacle in Dick’s books are fantastic, but they are not merely invented ad hoc to shock the readers. We will show this with the example of Ubik, a work which, by the way, can also be regarded as a fantastic grotesque, a “macabresque” with obscure allegorical subtexts, decked out in the guise of ordinary science fiction.

If, however, it is viewed as a work of science fiction proper, the contents of Ubik can be most simply summarized as follows:

Telepathic phenomena, having been mastered in the context of capitalistic society, have undergone commercialization like every other technological innovation. So businessmen hire telepathists to steal trade secrets from their competitors, and the latter, for their part, defend themselves against this “extrasensory industrial espionage” with the aid of “inertials,” people whose psyches nullify the “psi field” that makes it possible to receive others’ thoughts. By way of specialization, firms have sprung up that rent out telepathists and inertials by the hour, and the “strong man” Glen Runciter is the proprietor of such a firm. The medical profession has learned how to arrest the agony of victims of mortal ailments, but still has no means of curing them. Such people are therefore kept in a state of “half-life” in special institutions, “moratoriums” (“places of postponement” — of death, obviously). If they merely rested there unconscious in their icy caskets, that would be small comfort for their surviving kin. So a technique has been developed for maintaining the mental life of such people in “cold-pac.” The world which they experience is not part of reality, but a fiction created by appropriate methods. Nonetheless, normal people can make contact with the frozen ones, for the cold-sleep apparatus has means to this end built into it, something on the order of a telephone.

This idea is not altogether absurd in terms of scientific facts: the concept of freezing the incurably ill to await the time when remedies for their diseases will be found has already come in for serious discussion. It would also be possible in principle to maintain vital processes in a person’s brain when the body dies (to be sure, that brain would rapidly suffer psychological disintegration as a consequence of sensory deprivation). We know that stimulation of the brain by electrodes produces in the subject of such an operation experiences indistinguishable from ordinary perceptions. In Dick we find a perfected extension of such techniques, though he does not discuss this explicitly in the story. Numerous dilemmas arise here: should the “half-lifer” be informed of his condition? is it right to keep him under the illusion that he is leading a normal life?