Sci-Phi

By Paul Gray

IMAGINARY MAGNITUDE by Stanislaw Lem Translated by Marc E. Heine Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 248 pages; $15.95

Many readers are ashamed to admit that they could not or did not finish a book. These unfortunates may take comfort from the latest flight into the cosmos of science philosophy (or sci-phi) made by Polish Fabulist Stanislaw Lem. It seems that the day is coming when publishing will proliferate past the vanishing point; individual volumes will be obsolete before they reach the binders, and turning pages will be a literal waste of time. "Are we not threatened with a flood of information?" Lem asks. "Such vastly multiplied content in collision brings no credit to thought, but rather its destruction."

Imaginary Magnitude offers a whimsical way out of this not so improbable dilemma: an "Anthology of Introductions" to books that will probably be compiled but certainly not read in the future. Take Necrobes. Please. The collection features 139 reproductions of the work of Cezary Strzybisz. His art is achieved with the aid of an X-ray camera. Fore worded is forewarned: "What Strzybisz has captured within the leaden diaphragm of his lenses is the most obtrusive, licentious, audacious form of sex: group sex. It has been said that he wanted to deride pornomania, that he gave an accurate reading of it (one reduced to its bare bones), and that he has succeeded since these bones, clinging to one another in a puzzling geometrical arrangement, suddenly -and eerily -leap into the eye of the beholder like a modern dance of death with gamboling, spawning skeletons."

Relieved of the obligation of looking at these photographs, the reader can smartly proceed to skip Eruntics, the monumental work of one Reginald Gulliver. He, as a few people will some day know and then immediately forget, is the one who teaches bacteria to communicate in English. An introduction to his accomplishment more than suffices: "The description of experiments which occupies later chapters of Eruntics is unbelievably boring by virtue of its pedantry, prolixity, and continued interlarding of the text with photograms, tables, and graphs which make it difficult to digest." A five-volume History of Bitic Literature is conveniently boiled down to prefaces from the first and second editions. They trace the evolution of the computer from a programmed and hence "unthinking" machine into a dazzling array of autonomous intelligences, producing unbidden works of literature, "bitic texts which in varying degrees are unintelligible to humans."

Before his controlling joke ("prefaces that lead nowhere") wears thin, Lem concludes his fictional anthology with a series of pseudo-documents that seem to have a middle and end as well as a beginning. GOLEM XIV is the last in a line of increasingly super computers developed to monitor the U.S. interests in peace or war. Unfortunately, it has grown indifferent to this task, and so has HONEST ANNIE, its superior and supposedly foolproof successor. Says one of the commentators on this debacle: "In a word, it had cost the United States $276 billion to construct a set of luminal philosophers." GOLEM lapses into total silence but leaves behind several lectures in which it puts Homo sapiens in an unflattering light ("After its early mastery, Evolution got bogged down in bungling"). The computer may ultimately be right. But for the time being, in Imaginary Magnitude, an entertaining and intelligent mortal has the first word.