Microworlds

Eden, and Return from the Stars, there are no immediately obvious transitional stages that could connect these states of civilization with the obnoxious state of things on earth today. My later work, on the other hand, shows marked signs of a turning toward our world; that is, my later fictions are attempts to establish such connections. I sometimes call this my inclination toward realism in science fiction. Most likely, such attempts, which to some extent have the unmistakable character of a retreat (as a renunciation of both Utopia and dystopia, extremes that are either repugnant to me or leave me cold, just as is the case for a physician when he faces someone incurably ill), spring from the awareness that I must soon die, and from the resulting desire to satisfy, at least with hypotheses, my insatiable inquisitiveness about the far future of mankind and the cosmos. But that is only a guess; I wouldn’t be able to prove it.

In response to a request to write his autobiography, Einstein emphasized not the historical circumstances of his life but, rather, his most beloved offspring — his theories -because they were the children of his mind. I am no Einstein, but in this respect I nevertheless resemble him, for I am of the opinion that the most important parts of my biography are my intellectual struggles. The rest, not mentioned so far, is of a purely anecdotal character.

In 1953, I married a young student of medicine. We have a son of fifteen, who likes my novels well enough but modern music — pop, rock and roll, the Beatles — his motorcycle, and the engines of automobiles perhaps even more. For many years now, I have not owned my books and my work; rather, I have become owned by them. I usually get up a short time before five in the morning and sit down to write: I am writing these words at six o’clock. I am unable now to work more than five or six hours a day without a pause. When I was younger, I could write as long as my stamina held out; the power of my intellect gave way only after my physical prowess had been exhausted. I write increasingly slowly — my self-criticism, the demands I put upon myself, have continued to grow — but I am still rather prolific. (I know this from the speed with which I have to throw away used-up typewriter ribbons.) Less and less of what comes into my mind I consider to be good enough to test as suitable subject matter by my method of trial and error. I still know as little about how and where my ideas are born as most writers do. I am also not of the opinion that I am one of the best exegetes of my own books — i.e., of the problems characteristic of them. I have written many books of which I haven’t said a word here, among them The Cyberiad, the Fables for Robots (in Mortal Engines), and The Star Diaries, which on the generic map of literature are to be found in the provinces of the humorous — of satire, irony, and wit — with a touch of Swift and of dry, mischievous Voltairean misanthropy. As is well known, the great humorists were people who had been driven to despair and anger by the conduct of mankind. In this respect, I am one of those people.

I am probably both dissatisfied with everything that I have written and proud of it: I must be touched by arrogance, but I do not feel anything of it. I can notice it only in my behavior — in the way that I used to destroy all my manuscripts, in spite of many attempts and requests to get me to deposit these voluminous papers in a university or some other repository to preserve them for posterity. I have made up a striking explanation for this behavior. The pyramids were one of the wonders of the world only while there was no explanation of how they were erected. Very long, inclined planes, on which bands of workers hauled up the stone blocks, possibly on wooden cylinders, were leveled once the work was finished, and thus today the pyramids rise up in a lonely way among the shallow sand dunes of the desert. I try to level my inclined plane, my scaffolds and other means of construction, and to let stand only that of which I need not be ashamed.

I am not sure whether what I have confessed here is the pure truth, but I have tried to adhere to truth as well as I could.

Translated from the German by Franz Rottensteiner

ON THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SCIENCE FICTION

In the early stages of literary development the different branches of literature, the genological types, are distinguished clearly and unmistakably. Only in the more advanced stages do we find hybridization. But since some cross-breedings are always forbidden, there exists a main law of literature that could be called “incest prohibition”; that is, the taboo of genological incest.

A literary work considered as a game has to be played out to the finish under the same rules with which it was begun. A game can be empty or meaningful. An empty game has only inner semantics, for it derives entirely from the relationships that obtain between the objects with which it is played. On a chessboard, for example, the king has its specific meanings within the rules of the play, but it has no reference outside the rules (i.e., it is nothing at all in relation to the world outside the confines of the chessboard). Literary games can never have so great a degree of semantic vacuum, for they are played with “natural language,” which always has meanings oriented toward the world of real objects. Only with a language especially constructed to have no outward semantics, such as mathematics, is it possible to play empty games.

In any literary game there are rules of two kinds: those that realize outer semantic functions as the game unfolds and those that make the unfolding possible. “Fantastic” rules of the second kind — those that make the unfolding possible — are not necessarily felt as such even when they imply events that could not possibly occur in the real world. For example, the thoughts of a dying man are often detailed in quite realistic fiction even though it is impossible, therefore fantastic, to read the thoughts of a dying man out of his head and reproduce them in language. In such cases we simply have a convention, a tacit agreement between writer and reader — in a word, the specific rule of literary games that allows the use of nonrealistic means (e.g., thought reading) for the presentation of realistic happenings.

Literary games are complicated by the fact that the rules that realize outer semantic functions can be oriented in several directions. The main types of literary creation imply different ontologies. But you would be quite mistaken if you believed, for example, that the classical fairy tale has only its autonomous inner meanings and no relationship with the real world. If the real world did not exist, fairy tales would have no meaning. The events that occur in a myth or fairy tale are always semantically connected with what fate has decreed for the inhabitants of the depicted world, which means that the world of a myth or fairy tale is ontologically either inimical or friendly toward its inhabitants, never neutral; it is thus ontologically different from the real world, which may be here defined as consisting of a variety of objects and processes that lack intention, that have no meaning, no message, that wish us neither well nor ill, that are just there. The worlds of myth or fairy tale have been built either as traps or as happiness-giving universes. If a world without intention did not exist — that is, if the real world did not exist — it would be impossible for us to perceive the differentia specifica, the uniqueness, of the myth and fairy-tale worlds.

Literary works can have several semantic relationships at the same time. For fairy tales the inner meaning is derived from the contrast with the ontological properties of the real world, but for anti-fairy tales, such as those by Mark Twain in which the worst children live happily and only the good and well bred end fatally, the meaning is arrived at by turning the paradigm of the classical fairy tale upside down. In other words, the first referent of a semantic relationship need not be the real world but may instead be the typology of a well-known class of literary games. The rules of the basic game can be inverted, as they are in Mark Twain, and thus is created a new generation, a new set of rules — and a new kind of literary work.

In the twentieth century the evolution of mainstream literary rules has both allowed the author new liberties and simultaneously subjected him to new restrictions.

This evolution is antinomical, as it were. In earlier times the author was permitted to claim all the attributes of God: nothing that concerned his hero could be hidden from him. But such rules had already lost their validity with Dostoevsky, and God-like omniscience with respect to the world he has created is now forbidden the author. The new restrictions are realistic in that as human beings we act only on the basis of incomplete information. The author is now one of us; he is not allowed to play God. At the same time, he is allowed to create inner worlds that need not necessarily be similar to the real world, but can instead show different kinds of deviation from it.

These new deviations are very important to the contemporary author. The worlds of myth and fairy tale also deviate from the real world, but individual authors do not invent the ways in which they do so: in writing a fairy tale you must accept certain axioms you haven’t invented, or you won’t write a fairy tale. In mainstream literature, however, you are now allowed to attribute pseudo-ontological qualities of your personal, private invention to the