Stanislaw Lem - Microworlds

In our times, scientific works grow old very fast. The Internal Constitution of the Stars by A. Eddington enthralled me when I read it forty years ago, and it is still a magnificent book, but it must be read now as (genuine!) science fiction, because nothing in it corresponds any more with our present knowledge. In my opinion the same may happen with Cosmology Now: please take this remark as an hommage. This volume will remain readable, indeed exciting, but very little of its aesthetically appealing, lucid simplicity in its development of the model of the universe will survive the changes to come. I say this as a dilettante and a heretic who knows more about the history of science than about cosmology. The first conquerors of new knowledge always find it easier to proclaim that “God may be subtle, but He is not malicious” because the biggest hurdles are discovered by the next generation of scientists. But it seems to me that one of the main theses of Cosmology Now will remain valid: that the universe is a continued explosion extended over a time of twenty billion years that appears as a majestic solidification only to the eyes of a transient being like man. The question whether we are living in a rhythmically pulsating universe or in a cosmos that will finally dissolve into vacuum still remains to be answered. The pendulum of mutually exclusive opinions goes on swinging.

2. Now then, what is the relationship between cosmology and science fiction? The facts are clear: both universes, that of the writers and that of the scientists, grow ever more apart. The estimations of the “density of cosmic civilization” show this most evidently. The scientists, even the founders of CETI (Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligences), feel compelled to attribute ever smaller figures to the psychozoic density in the cosmos, because the accumulating negative results of the “sky listening” (for signals) force them to do so. Science fiction takes not the slightest notice of such changes. Therefore for science fiction one of the biggest riddles of contemporary cosmology, the silentium universi, doesn’t exist at all. But it would be totally wrong to reduce the divergence of the two universes to only one parameter, the one mentioned. Science fiction started its escape from the real cosmos even before the question was formulated why the universe remains silent so stubbornly. This flight has by now evolved into a “steady state”; science fiction has encapsuled itself so much against the space of cosmology that it is unwilling to receive any signals; that is to say, any news from the field of science, with the exception of what manages to make the front pages of the newspapers (such as the tale of the black holes). This encapsulement took place when the authors got hold of two fantastic, very convenient inventions: unlimited travel in time, and unlimited travel in space. Thanks to time travel and faster than light the cosmos has acquired such qualities as domesticate it in an exemplary manner for storytelling purposes; but at the same time it has lost its strange, icy sovereignty. Science fiction doesn’t know of the cosmos of colliding galaxies, the invisible stars sucked in by the curvature of space, the pulsating magnetic fields. Nevertheless, there is in science fiction not a single one of the civilizations of the “third stage” postulated by CETI, the civilizations that are, thanks to their applied science of astral engineering, able to control stellar energies. As far as their content is concerned, most of the civilizations in science fiction correspond to the state predicted for earth in 2000 or 2300, although structurally they have remained arrested instead in the nineteenth century, with their colonizatory tactics of conquest and their strategies of war, whose magnification is due only to the principle of “Big Bertha,” the German supergun that shelled Paris during the First World War. Science fiction has not the slightest idea what could be done with a power of the magnitude of a sun, if it isn’t used exclusively for the destruction of inhabited planets. And in science fiction, cosmic civilizations have no intellectual culture at all, because a future-oriented movement that claims to probe into the farthest future, and makes its home in a realm of naïvely contaminated, amateurish ideas on “primitive slave societies,” must be held totally lacking in credibility. Science-fiction criticism often talks of a “sense of wonder” that the field is supposed to generate, but upon close examination that “wonder” divulges its close relationship to the tricks of a stage magician. As popular fiction, science fiction must pose artificial problems and offer their easy solution. The astonishing results of contemporary cosmology, which border on paradox, are of no use to science-fiction writers, because they cannot be tucked into the narrow fixed frame of the artificial cosmos. Any comparison, including that with the stage magician, isn’t quite exact; the magician doesn’t aim at anything beyond the production of some tricks, whereas the self-imprisonment that is characteristic of science fiction has made it unable to describe real space any more.

To do justice to science fiction, which looks so shabby when compared to the background of cosmology, it is necessary to explain its dilemma further. The sins of individual authors have always been relatively small. The development of the totally false, domesticated universe was a gradual process of self-organization, and therefore all together are responsible for the final deformation — and nobody. Thanks to the first science-fiction invention, all occurrences in space have become easily reversible, but the authors who “just” want to shine with a new version of time travel have forgotten the larger context. It is particularly due to these unnoticed relationships that nature was softened in the cruelty of the irreversible flow of time that is its hallmark. In order that space might not be used as another cruelty to man, it was “short-circuited” by another invention, i.e., annihilated. The fact that a domestication of the cosmos has taken place, a diminution that whisked away those eternally silent abysses of which Pascal spoke with horror, is masked in science fiction by the blood that is so liberally spilled in its pages. But there we already have a humanized cruelty, for it is a cruelty that can be understood by man, and a cruelty that could finally even be judged from the viewpoint of ethics -granted that one could take this blood seriously at all. By looking at it this way, we come to understand what science fiction has done to the cosmos; for it makes no sense at all to look at the universe from the viewpoint of ethics. Therefore, the universe of science fiction is not only minuscule, simplified, and lukewarm, but also has been turned toward its inhabitants, and in this way it can be subjugated by them, losing thereby that indifference which causes man to project continually new enigmas to be solved and secrets to be lifted, in the vain hope to get there the answer to the question of his own meaning. In the universe of science fiction there is not the slightest chance that genuine myths and theologies might arise, because the thing itself is a bastard of myths gone to the dogs. The science fiction of today resembles a “graveyard of gravity,” in which that subgenre of literature that promised the cosmos to mankind dreams away its defeat in onanistic delusions and chimeras — onanistic because they are anthropocentric. The task of the science-fiction author of today is as easy as that of the pornographer, and in the same way. Now that all the real stops to the satisfaction of their impulses have been pulled, they can have their fling. But with the stops has disappeared the indescribable richness that can be conveyed only by real life. Where anything comes easy, nothing can be of value. The most inflamed desire must finally end in miserable dullness. Once the credible, the real barriers have been blown up, the process of falsification must go on; artificial barriers must be erected, and in this manner the stuffed waxworks come about, the miserable ersatz that is supposed to be cosmic civilizations.