Of Microchips and Men

By R.Z. Sheppard

A PERFECT VACUUM by Stanislaw Lem

Translated by Michael Kandel; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 229 pages; $8.95

The two-cultures debate of nearly a generation ago is all but forgotten. The sharp exchanges between the bowlered ranks of C.P. Snow, the novelist who gave contemporary fiction the beautiful technocrat, and the disciples of Literary Critic F.R. Leavis now seem like an intellectual border dispute. In retrospect it was not much of a contest. The powers of technology and social engineering either bypassed or rolled over their academic challengers. Today many defenders of the humanities even drop terms like the uncertainty principle and entropy as loose literary metaphors.

Yet there are writers who truly comprehend the vocabulary of science. Thomas Pynchon made physical laws part of the structure of Gravity's Rainbow, and science-fiction novelists routinely construct their speculative entertainments from the hard-and software of physics and chemistry. Among the masters of the genre is Stanislaw Lem, a mordant, satirical Pole whose novels and stories have been praised by readers as disparate as Critic Leslie Fiedler and Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Lem has written nearly 30 books, and his European sales are in the millions. (Ten of his works have been translated into English; most of them were published by New York's Seabury Press.)

A Lem story can have the crushing gravity of a collapsing star. His sentences are frequently dense with logic and his points aphoristic: "The progress of human knowledge was a gradual renunciation of the simplicity of the world." Lem's own worlds are complex, twittering word machines ingeniously wired to philosophy, probability theory, cybernetics and literary conventions, which he parodies brilliantly. Unlike most science-fiction writers, he animates his creatures with lively explanations, as in the Cartesian send-up from The Cyberiad: "Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water, and electrolyte seeped into his head and, bubbling, set up a current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud and thought the following thought:--Apparently, I am!"

If Lem has a major theme, it is the implications of artificial intelligence. What is natural and unnatural, what is imaginary and what is real--and does it really matter--are questions that stream through the pages of A Perfect Vacuum like ghostly neutrinos. Each story is cast in the form of a review of a nonexistent book. Lem, of course, is both reviewer and conceiver of the unwritten texts. Some are fairly straightforward social and literary satires. Les Robinsonades dismisses Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a puritanized fiction based on a brutish factual account of a castaway (which it was), and presents a New Robinson who is not nostalgic for a lost culture. He re-creates his world from scratch, dreaming into being a manservant named Snibbins and a three-legged female companion called Wendy Mae. The course of true creation never runs smoothly. "Thus the logically perfect hero," writes Lem, "outlines a plan that later will destroy and mock him--can it be, as the human world has done to its Creator?"

Logic is the perfect vacuum, admitting no impurities but capable of breeding absurdities. A Nazi war criminal sets himself up as Louis XVI in the wilds of South America where he decrees German to be French and Argentina to be imperial Spain. A Huxleian world in which sexual indulgence has resulted in a "genitocracy" is suddenly cooled off by Nosex, a drug that turns lovemaking into drudgery. Sex as a recreation and mainstay of the economy is replaced by eating, with its own pornography and taboos. People who eat fruit while kneeling, for example, are branded perverts.

Lem's rationalists have a weakness for rationalizing. A man who considers himself a genius of the highest order also believes that such elite members of the race are never recognized. In another story Lem overloads the probability theory to suggest playfully that no one should exist. Each man's chances of being, says Lem's Professor Kouska, is a "teragigamegamulticentillion-to-one shot." In physics, one chance in a centillion is considered an impossibility because there are fewer than a centillion seconds before the end of the universe. The origin of this fact is unclear. But who's counting?

Lem plays his most sophisticated games when he reflects on the production of artificially intelligent beings. Indeed, God himself is considered as a vast cybernetic mind that may be the legacy of a first-generation universe that died billions of aeons ago. The machines of this universe were the laws of nature, a perfect solution to the problems of spare parts and maintenance. As for the problems of an unnatural nature, Lem writes that "if one considers 'artificial' to be that which is shaped by an active Intelligence, then the entire Universe that surrounds us is already artificial. " With such delightful leaps of the imagination, Lem outdistances nearly all of the most popular star trekkers. He is the Borges of scientific culture, whose "mortal engines" promise that mystery will not end with the last flesh-and-blood human. Reading A Perfect Vacuum, one can easily imagine banks of Lemian cybernoids arguing whether man exists and how many science-fiction writers could fit on the head of a microchip. -- R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"If one is to believe the author -- and more and more they tell us to believe the authors of science fiction! --the current surge of sex will become a deluge in the 1980s . . .

On the field of battle remained three corporations -- General Sexotics, Cybordelics, and Intercourse International. When the production of these giants was at its peak, sex, from a private amusement, a spectator sport, group gymnastics, a hobby, and a collector's market, turned into a philosophy of civilization. McLuhan, who as a hale and hearty old codger had lived to see these times, argued in his Genitocracy that this precisely was the destiny of mankind from the moment it entered on the path of technology; that even the ancient rowers, chained to the galleys, and the woodsmen of the North with their saws, and the steam engine of Stephenson with its cylinder and piston, all traced the rhythm, the shape, and the meaning of the movements of which the sex of man -- that is to say, the sense of man-- consists. The impersonal industry of the U.S.A., having appropriated the situational wisdoms of East and West, took the fetters of the Middle Ages and made of them unchastity belts [and] set in motion antiseptic assembly lines off of which began to roll sadomobiles, succubuses, sodomy sofas for the home, and public gomorrarcades, and at the same time it established research institutes and science foundations to take up the fight to liberate sex from the servitude of the perpetuation of the species. Sex ceased to be a fashion, for it had become a faith; the orgasm was regarded as a constant duty, and its meters, with their red needles, took the place of telephones in the office and on the street . . .

In the course of the decade, synthetic sex came a long way from the first models, the inflatables and the hand-windups, to the prototypes with thermostats and feedback. The originals of these copies are long dead, or else are now decrepit crones, but teflon, nylon, dralon, and Sexofix have withstood the wear of time."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.