Microworlds

“The Space Flight Revolution” (by William Sims Bainbridge), Science-Fiction Studies 6, no. 18 (July 1979): 221-222.

“Two Ends of the World” (by Antoni Slonimski), review in Quarber Merkur 57 (July 1982); in English: The Missouri Review 7, no. 2 (1984), pp. 238-242.

Copyright

“Reflections on My Life,” The New Yorker, January 30, 1984, copyright © 1984 by Stanislaw Lem; reprinted by permission. “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction,” Science-Fiction Studies, Spring 1973, copyright © 1973 by R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case — with Exceptions,” Science Fiction Commentary, July-September 1973, copyright © 1972 by Stanislaw Lem and Franz Rottensteiner. “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” Science-Fiction Studies, March 1975, copyright © 1975 by R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. “The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of Science-Fiction Structuring,” Science-Fiction Studies, Spring 1974, copyright © 1974 by R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. “Metafantasia: The Possibilities of Science Fiction,” Science-Fiction Studies, March 1981, copyright © 1981 by SFS Publications. “Cosmology and Science Fiction,” Science-Fiction Studies, July 1977, copyright © 1977 by R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. “Todorov’s Fantastic Theory of Literature,” Science-Fiction Studies, Fall 1974, copyright © 1974 by R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. “Unitas Oppositorum: The Prose of Jorge Luis Borges,” Science Fiction Commentary, April 1971, copyright © 1971 by Stanislaw Lem and Franz Rottensteiner. “About the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic,” Science-Fiction Studies, 1983, copyright © 1983 by SFS Publications.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to: Permissions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, Orlando, Florida 32887.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lem, Stanislaw.

Microworlds: writings on science fiction and fantasy.

“A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.”

Bibliography: p. 279

1. Science fiction — History and criticism — Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Fantastic fiction — History and criticism — Addresses, essays, lectures.

I. Rottensteiner, Franz. II. Title.

PN3433.8.L4 1984 809.3’876 84-12837

ISBN 0-15-159480-5

ISBN 0-15-659443-9 (Harvest/HBJ : pbk.)

Designed by Mark Likgalter

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvest/HBJ edition 1986

A B C D E F G H I J

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Notes

1

Michel Butor once expressed the opinion that a team of science-fiction writers should cooperate in the construction of a fictitious world, because such an undertaking is beyond the powers of any single individual. (This was supposed to explain the poor quality, the one-dimensionality of the existing science fiction.) I did not take those words of Butor’s seriously when I read them. And yet I have, although many years later and by myself, tried to realize the basic essence of this idea as described above. And in Borges, too — in his “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — you can read of a secret society that creates a fictitious world in all its particulars, with the intent of turning our world into the imagined one.

2

I shall add the autobiographical element in my discursive writings to this enumeration. In brief, I am a disenchanted reformer of the world. My first novels concerned naive Utopias, because in them I was expressing a desire for a world as peaceful as that described in them, and they are bad, in the sense in which a vain and erroneous expectation is stupid. My monograph on science fiction and futurology is an expression of my disappointment with a fiction and a nonfiction that pretend to be scientific, when neither of them turns the attention of the reader in the direction in which the world is in fact moving. My Philosophy of Chance is a failed attempt to arrive at a theory of the literary work based on empiricism; it is successful inasmuch as I taught myself with the help of this book what factors cause the rise and the decline in the fortunes of literary works. My Summa Technologiae, on the other hand, is proof of the fact that I am not yet a despairing reformer of the world. For I do not believe that mankind is for all times a hopeless and incurable case.

3

This essay is a rewritten chapter (“Sociology of Science Fiction”) from my Fantastyka i futurologia (Science Fiction and Futurology). I have polemically sharpened the original text in several instances, and added the later review of Dick’s work, which is absent from the book. I confess that I made a blunder when I wrote this monograph, since then I knew only Dick’s short stories and his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I believed that I could rely on reviews published in the fanzines of other novels by Dick, with the result that I considered him merely a “better van Vogt,” which he is not. This mistake was due to the state of science-fiction criticism. Every fifth or eighth book is praised as “the best work of science fiction in the whole world,” its author is presented as “the greatest science-fiction author ever,” great differences between works are minimized and annulled, so much so that in the end Ubik may be regarded as a novel that is just a little better than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Naturally, what I say does not justify my mistake, because no criticism is a substitute for reading the books concerned. However, my words still describe the circumstances responsible for causing my error, because it is a physical impossibility to read every science-fiction title, so that there must be a selection; as you can see, one cannot rely on science-fiction criticism to make this selection.

4

It is quite difficult to shake off either a bad or a good tradition, once it is established. In The Issue at Hand, James Blish complains that English criticism surpasses American, and that this difference of level can be seen also on another plane — according to Blish, English publishers treat science-fiction authors with a consideration scarcely