Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

As is usually the case in science fiction, a theme defined by a certain devised structure of occurrences (in this instance pertaining to a journey in time) undergoes a characteristic cognitive-artistic involution. We could have demonstrated this for any given theme, but let’s take advantage of the opportunity at hand.

At first, authors and readers are satisfied by the joy of discerning the effects of innovations still virginal as far as their inherent contradictions are concerned. Then, an intense search is begun for initial situations that allow for the most effective exploitation of consequences that are potentially present in a given structure. Thus, the devices of chronomotion begin supporting, e.g., theses of history and philosophy (concerned with the “ergodicity” or nonergodicity of history). Then, grotesque and humorous stories like Frederic Brown’s “The Yehudi Principle” (1944) appear: this short story is itself a causal circle (it ends with the words that it began with: it describes a test of a device for fulfilling wishes; one of the wishes expressed is that a story “write itself,” which is what just happened). Finally, the premise of time travel serves frequently as a simple pretext for weaving tales of sensational, criminal, or melodramatic intrigue; this usually involves the revival and slight refurbishment of petrified plots.

Time travel has been used so extensively in science fiction that it has been divided into separate subcategories. There is, for example, the category of missent parcels that find their way into the present from the future: someone receives a “Build-a-Man Set” box with “freeze-dried nerve preparations,” bones, etc.; he builds his own double, and an “inspector from the future,” who comes to reclaim the parcel, disassembles, instead of the artificial twin, the very hero of the story; this is William Tenn’s “Child’s Play” (1947). In Damon Knight’s “Thing of Beauty” (1958) there is a different parcel — an automaton that draws pictures by itself. In general, strange things are produced in the future, science fiction teaches us (e.g., polka-dotted paint as well as thousands of objects with secret names and purposes not known).

Another category is tiers in time. In its simplest form it is presented in Anthony Boucher’s “The Barrier” (1942), a slightly satiric work. The hero, traveling to the future, comes to a state of “eternal stasis,” which, to protect its perfect stagnation from all disturbances, has constructed “time barriers” that foil any penetration. Now and then, however, a barrier becomes permeable. Rather disagreeable conditions prevail in this state, which is ruled by a police similar to the Gestapo (Stapper). One must be a slightly more advanced science-fiction reader to follow the story. The hero finds his way immediately into a circle of people who know him very well, but whom he does not know at all. This is explained by the fact that in order to elude the police he goes somewhat further back in time. He at that time gets to know these very people, then considerably younger. He is for them a stranger, but he, while he was in the future, has already succeeded in getting to know them. An old lady, who got into the time vehicle with the hero when they were fleeing from the police, meets as a result her own self as a young person and suffers a severe shock. It is clear, however, that Boucher does not know what to do with the “encountering oneself motif in this context, and therefore makes the lady’s shock long and drawn out. Further jumps in time, one after another, complicate the intrigue in a purely formal way. Attempts are begun to overthrow the dictatorial government, but everything goes to pieces, providing in the process sensationalism. Antiproblematic escapism into adventure is a very common phenomenon in science fiction; authors indicate its formal effectiveness, understood as the ingenious setting of a game in motion, as the skill of achieving uncommon movements, without mastering and utilizing the problematic and semantic aspects of such kinematics.

Such authors neither discuss nor solve the problems raised by their writing, but, instead, “take care” of them by dodges, employing patterns like the happy ending or the setting in motion of sheer pandemonium, a chaos that quickly engulfs loose meanings.

Such a state of affairs is a result of the distinctly “ludic” or playful position of writers; they go for an effect as a tank goes for an obstacle: without regard for anything incidental. It is as if their field of vision were greatly intensified and, simultaneously, also greatly confined. As in Tenn’s story, the consequences of a “temporal lapse” in a postal matter are everything. Let us call such a vision monoparametric. At issue is a situation that is bizarre, amusing, uncanny, logically developed from a structural premise (e.g., from the presupposition of “journeys in time,” which implies a qualitative difference in the world’s causal structure). At the same time such a vision does not deal with anything more than that.

This can be seen readily from an example of “maximal intensification” of the subject of governments in time or “chronocracy,” described by Isaac Asimov in his novel The End of Eternity (1955). “The Barrier” showed a single state isolating itself in the historical flow of events, as once the Chinese attempted to isolate themselves from disturbing influences by building the Great Wall (a spatially exact equivalent of a “time barrier”). The End of Eternity shows a government in power throughout humanity’s entire temporal existence. Inspector-generals, traveling in time, examine the goings-on in individual epochs, centuries, and millennia, and by calculating the probability of occurrences and then counteracting the undesirable ones, keep in hand the entire system — “history extended in a four-dimensional continuum” — in a state of desirable equilibrium. Obviously, presuppositions of this sort are more thickly larded with antinomies than the plumpest pig is with bacon. While Asimov’s great proficiency is manifested by the size of the slalom over which the narrative runs, it is, in the end, an ineffably naïve conception because no issues from philosophy or history are involved. The problem of “closed millennia,” which the “tempocrats” do not have access to, is explained when a certain beautiful girl, whom an inspector falls in love with, turns out to be not a lowly inhabitant of one of the centuries under the dominion of the tempocracy, but a secret emissary from the “inaccessible millennia.” The time dictatorship as a control over the continuum of history will be destroyed, and a liberated humanity will be able to take up astronautics and other select suitable occupations. The enigma of the inaccessible millennia is remarkably similar to the “enigma of the closed room” found in fairy tales and detective stories. The various epochs about which the emissaries of the chronocracy hover also recall separate rooms. The End of Eternity is an exhibition of formal entertainment to which sentiments about the fight for freedom and against dictatorship have been tacked on rather casually.

We have already spoken about the “minimal time loop.” Let us talk now, simply for the sake of symmetry, about the “maximal” loops.

A. E. van Vogt has approached this concept in The Weapon Shops of Isher (1949,1951), but let’s expound it in our own way. As is known, there is a hypothesis (it can be found in Feynman’s physics) that states that positrons are electrons moving “against the tide” in the flow of time. It is also known that in principle, even galaxies can arise from atomic collisions, as long as the colliding atoms are sufficiently rich in energy. In accordance with these presuppositions we can construct the following story: in a rather distant future a celebrated cosmologist reaches, on the basis of his own research as well as that of all his predecessors, the irrefutable conclusion that, on the one hand, the cosmos came into being from a single particle and, on the other, that such a single particle could not have existed. Where could it have sprung from? Thus he is confronted with a dilemma: the cosmos has come into being, but it could not come into being! He is horrified by this revelation, but, after profound reflection, suddenly sees the light: the cosmos exists exactly as mesons sometimes exist; mesons, admittedly, break the law of conservation, but do this so quickly that they do not break it. The cosmos exists on credit! It is like a debenture, a draft for material and energy which must be repaid immediately, because its existence is the purest one-hundred-percent liability both in terms of energy and in terms of material. Then, just what does the cosmologist do? With the help of physicist friends he builds a great “chronogun,” which fires one single electron backward “against the tide” in the flow of time. That electron, transformed into a positron as a result of its motion “against the grain” of time, goes speeding through time, and in the course of this journey acquires more and more energy. Finally, at the point where it “leaps out” of the cosmos — i.e., in a place in which there had as yet been no cosmos — all the terrible energies it has acquired are released in that tremendously powerful explosion which brings about the universe! In this manner the debt is paid off. At the same time, thanks to the largest possible “causal circle,” the existence of the cosmos is authenticated, and a person turns out to be the actual creator of that very universe! It is possible to complicate this story slightly; for example, by telling how certain colleagues of the cosmologist, unpleasant and envious people, meddled in his work, shooting on their own some lesser particles backward against the tide of time. These particles exploded inaccurately when the cosmologist’s positron was producing the cosmos, and because of this that unpleasant rash came into being that bothers science so much today, namely, the enigmatic quasars and pulsars, which are not readily incorporated into the corpus of contemporary knowledge. These, then, are the “artifacts” produced by the cosmologist’s malicious competitors. It would also be possible to tell how humanity both created and depraved itself, because some physicist shot the chronogun hurriedly and carelessly and a particle went astray, exploding as a nova in the vicinity of the solar system two million years ago, and damaging by its hard radiance the hereditary plasma of the original anthropoids, who therefore did not evolve into “man good and rational” as “should have happened” without the new particle. In other words, the new particle caused the degeneration of Homo sapiens — witness his history.