Microworlds Read online

  In 1947, at the age of twenty-six, I became a junior research assistant for an organization called Konwersatorium Naukoznawcze (the Circle for the Science of Science), founded by Dr. Mieczyslaw Choynowski. To him I presented my most dearly held works: a theory of brain functions invented by me, and a philosophical treatise. He called both nonsense but took me under his tutelage. Thus, I was forced to read logic textbooks, scientific methodology, psychology, psychometrics (the theory of psychological testing), the history of natural science, and many other things. Although it was apparent that I couldn’t read English, I had to do the best I could with English-language books. These books proved so interesting that I had to crack them, dictionary in hand, as Champollion cracked his hieroglyphs. Since I had learned French at home and Latin and German in school, and had picked up some Russian, I somehow managed to get along. But to this day I can understand only written English. I can neither speak the language nor understand it when it is spoken. For the monthly Zycie Nauki (The Life of Science), I compiled surveys of scientific periodicals from the standpoint of the science of science. By doing so, I became involved in the wretched Lysenko affair, for in my survey I synopsized the controversy between him and the Soviet geneticists in what an official report from the ministry in charge of Polish universities called “a tendentious manner.” I held Lysenko’s doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics to be ridiculous, and I was proved right after several years, but my taking this position had rather painful consequences for our monthly. Something similar happened a little later, when I perceived in Norbert Wiener’s and Claude E. Shannon’s cybernetics a new era not just for technological progress but also for the whole of civilization. At that time, cybernetics was considered in our country to be a fallacious pseudoscience.

  In those years, I was particularly well informed about the latest developments in the various sciences, for the Krakovian circle functioned as a kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature from the United States (and, to some extent, from Canada) coming in to all the Polish universities. From the book parcels received I could borrow all the works that stirred my interest, including Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings. At night, I read everything voraciously, so that I could pass on the books as soon as possible to the people who were supposed to get them. On the basis of this reading, I wrote those of my novels that I can still acknowledge without shame — Eden (1959), Solaris (1961), The Invincible (1964), etc. They incorporate cognitive problems in fictions that do not oversimplify the world, as did my earliest, naïve science-fiction novels.

  My father died in 1954, and toward the end of the fifties I was able to acquire for us — myself and my wife — a small house on the southern outskirts of Kraków, which we still have. (Close to this house, a larger house, in a larger garden, is in the process of being built for us as I write these words.) In the late sixties, I first made contact with my future literary agent and kindred spirit, Franz Rottensteiner, from Vienna. Both of us were then writing many critical, often polemical essays for Anglo-American science-fiction “fanzines” (i.e., the amateur magazines published by the aficionados of science fiction), mostly for Bruce Gillespie’s Australian Science Fiction Commentary; that resulted in a certain popularity for both of us, even if it was of a negative sort, in the science-fiction ghetto. Today, I am of the opinion that we wasted our efforts. In the beginning, it was totally incomprehensible to me why so many authors were erecting, viribus unitis, a common prison for science fiction. I believed that, according to the law of large numbers alone, there had to be among so many a considerable group at the top, as far as both writing abilities and scientific qualifications were concerned. (For me, the scientific ignorance of most American science-fiction writers was as inexplicable as the abominable literary quality of their output.) I was in error, but it took me a very long time to recognize it.

  As a reader of science fiction, I expected something like what is called, in the evolutionary processes of nature, “speciation” — a new animal species generating a diverging, fanlike radiation of other new species. In my ignorance, I thought that the time of Verne, Wells, and Stapledon was the beginning, but not the beginning of the decline, of the sovereign individuality of the author. Each of these men created something not only radically new for their time but also quite different from what the others created. They all had enormous room for maneuvering in the field of speculation, because the field had only recently been opened up and was still empty of both writers and books. Each of them entered the no man’s land from a different direction and made some particular province of this terra incognita his own. Their successors, on the other hand, had to compromise more and more with the crowd. They were forced to become like ants in an ant hill, or industrious bees, each of which is indeed building a different cell in the honeycomb but whose cells are all similar. Such is the law of mass production. Thus, the distance between individual works of science fiction has not grown greater, as I erroneously expected, but has shrunk. The very thought that a Wells or a Stapledon could have written, alternately, visionary fantasies and typical mysteries strikes me as absurd. For the next generation of writers, however, this was something quite normal. Wells and Stapledon are comparable to the people who invented chess and draughts. They discovered new rules for games, and their successors have applied these rules with only smaller or larger variations. The sources of innovation have gradually become depleted; the thematic clusters have become fossilized. Hybrids have arisen (science fantasy), and the patterns and schemata of the literary form have been applied in a mechanical and ready-made way.

  To create something radically new, it was necessary to advance into another field of possibilities. I believe that in the first period of my career I wrote purely secondary things. In the second period (Solaris, The Invincible), I reached the borders of a field that was already nearly completely mapped. In the third period — when I wrote, for example, reviews of nonexistent books and forewords to works that, as I put it, ironically, in an interview, would be published “sometime in the future but that do not exist yet” — I left the fields already exploited and broke new ground. This idea is best explained by a specific example. A few years ago, I wrote a small book entitled Provocation. It is a review of a fictitious two-volume tome ascribed to a nonexistent German historian and anthropologist, whom I call Aspernicus. The first volume is titled Die Endlösung als Erlösung (The Final Solution Considered as Redemption), the second Fremdkörper Tod (Foreign Body Death). The whole thing is a unique historico-philosophical hypothesis about the as yet unrecognized roots of the Holocaust, and the role that death, especially mass death, has played in the cultures of all times up to the present day. The literary quality of my fictitious criticism (which is rather long, or it wouldn’t have filled even a small book) is beside the point here. What counts is the fact that there were professional historians who took my fancy for the review of a real book, as is attested to by attempts on the part of some of them to get hold of the book. To my mind, Provocation, too, is a kind of science fiction; I am trying not to limit the meaning of the name of this category of writing but, rather, to expand it.

  Nothing I’ve ever written was planned in an abstract form right from the start, to be embodied later in literary form. Nor can I claim that it was my intention to find other fields for development — that I set out with the intention of seeking them out for my imagination. But I can say something about the conception of an idea, the gravid state, the pains of giving birth, though I do not know the genetic make-up of the embryo or know how it is transformed into a phenotype — the finished work. Here, in the realm of the “embryogenesis” of my writing, considerable differences have developed in the course of some thirty-six years.

  My earliest novels (which I acknowledge as my own only with some discomfort) I planned and constructed according to a complete design. I wrote the novels in the Solaris group in a similar manner, which I myself cannot explain. The terminology of birth that I have used above may sound inappr
opriate, but it is somewhat apt. I am still able to point to passages in Solaris and Return from the Stars where I found myself, during the writing process, in the position of a reader. When Kelvin, the narrator of Solaris, arrives at the station hovering over the planet Solaris and finds it empty of human beings, and when he starts his search for the crew, and encounters the scientist Snow, who goes into a state of panic when he sees Kelvin, I had no idea why nobody had expected his arrival or why Snow behaved in this peculiar manner; indeed, I had no idea at all that some “living ocean” would cover the whole planet. All this was divulged to me in the same manner that it becomes dear to the reader in the course of reading the book -with the sole difference that it was I who created the novel. And in Return from the Stars I faced a wall when the returning astronaut frightens one of the first women he meets, and then the word “betrization” is used: that’s the treatment that human beings have undergone in the future world to rid them of their aggressive impulses. I didn’t know at first exactly what the word should mean, but I knew that there must be some unbridgeable difference between the civilization that the man left when he flew to the stars and the one that he found upon his return. The metaphor that takes its terms from the lexicon of embryology is thus not nonsense, for a woman who is with child knows that she carries an embryo, but she has no idea how the embryo is transformed from an ovum into a child. Considering myself to be a rationalist, I dislike such confessions, and I should prefer to be able to say that I knew everything I was doing — or, at least, a good deal of it — beforehand, and that I planned and designed it, but amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

  Nevertheless, something can be said about my creative method. First, there is no positive correlation between the spontaneity of my writing and the quality of the resulting work. I gave birth to Solaris and Return from the Stars in a similar manner, but I think that Solaris is a good book and Return from the Stars a poor one, because in the latter the underlying problems of social evil and its elimination are treated in a manner that is too primitive, too unlikely, and perhaps even false. (Even if the evil done to others with full intent could be suppressed pharmacologically — the book’s main premise — no chemical or other influence upon the brain could cause the unintended evil effects of all social dependencies, conflicts, and contradictions to disappear from the world, in the same manner that an insecticide can eliminate vermin.) Second, creative spontaneity is not a guarantee that there will be sure development of a whole narrative — i.e., a plot that can be finished without applying force. I have had to put more stories aside unfinished or drop them into the wastebasket than I have been able to submit to publishers. Third, this process of writing, which is characterized by the signs of a creation by trial and error, has always been arrested by blocks and blind alleys that forced me to retreat; sometimes there has even been a “burning out” of the raw materials — the manifold resources necessary for further growth — stored somewhere in my skull. I was not able to finish Solaris for a full year, and could do it then only because I learned suddenly — from myself — how the last chapter had to be. (And then I could only wonder why I hadn’t recognized it from the beginning.) And, fourth, even what I wrote spontaneously never received its final shape in the first thrust of work. I have never written a larger work (it is different with short stories) in a “linear” way right to the end in one sweep; rather, in the pauses between writing sessions — it is for purely physiological reasons impossible to sit at the typewriter all the time — I had new ideas that enriched what was already finished or was to be written soon; changed it; and complicated it with some new turn or complexity of plot.

  Practical experience — the result of wrestling with my writing over the years -has taught me never to force what I am working on if it has not ripened at least partly but, rather, to let it rest for some time (which may amount to periods of months, or even years) and let the thing mill around in my head. (A gravid woman knows that an early birth bodes nothing good.) This situation has put me on the horns of a dilemma, however, for, like nearly all writers, I often try to invent excuses for not writing. As is well known, laziness is one of the main barriers hindering everyone in his work. If I waited until I carried something in its definite form around in my head, I would never create anything.

  My method of creating (which I should like to call, rather, my behavior as a writer) has changed during the years, if only very slowly. I have learned to avoid the pure spontaneity of beginnings which motivated me to write something even when I had not the slightest idea what would come of the thing — its plot, its problems, its characters, etc. — because the instances in which I was unable to finish what I had begun were on the increase. Perhaps the imaginative space that was given me became gradually emptied, like a territory rich in oil, from which the black gold at first fountains in the air everywhere in geysers, no matter where one begins to drill; after some time, one has to use ever more complicated tricks and apply pressure to drive the remaining reserves up to the surface. The center of gravity of my work, then, gradually shifted in the direction of the gaining of a basic idea, a conception, an imaginative notion. I ceased to sit down at my typewriter whenever I had a quite small but ready beginning; instead, I started to produce an increasing number of notes, fictitious encyclopedias, and small additional ideas, and this has finally led to the things I am doing now. I try to get to know the “world” to be created by me by writing the literature specific to it, but not whole shelves of reference works of the sociology and the cosmology of some thirtieth century, not the fictitious minutes of scientific expeditions or other types of literature that express a Zeitgeist, the spirit of a time and a world, alien to us. After all, this would be an endeavor impossible to accomplish during the short life span of a human being. Nor do I now do what began in the first place rather as a joke — write criticism in the form of the reviews of nonexistent books or forewords to them (A Perfect Vacuum, Imaginary Magnitude). I do not publish these things any longer but use them to create my own knowledge of another world, a knowledge entirely subservient to my literary program — in other words, to sketch a rough outline that will be filled in later. I surround myself, so to speak, with the literature of a future, another world, a civilization with a library that is its product, its picture, its mirror image. I write only brief synopses or, again, critical reviews of sociological treatises, scientific papers, and technical reference works, and I describe technologies that have taken the place of literature after its final death, just as television has made obsolete the cinématographe of Lumière, and three-dimensional television will make obsolete the TV sets of today. There are also historicophilosophical papers, “encyclopedias of alien civilizations” and their military strategies — all of them, of course, in a kind of shorthand, or I would need the longevity of a Methuselah to create them. It may well be that I will publish something out of this “library for a given purpose” independently of the work for which it served as a frame and a source of information.[1]

  And where do I get all these facts, which I adorn with such enchanting titles as “The Trend of Dehumanization in Weapon Systems of the 21st Century” or “Comparative Culturology of Humanoid Civilizations”? In a certain sense, from my head; in another, not. I have invented several picturesque similes to illustrate for myself and others what my working method is like:

  (1)

  A cow produces milk — that is certain — and the milk doesn’t come from nothing. Just as a cow must eat grass in order to be able to produce milk, I have to read large amounts of genuine scientific literature of all kinds — i.e., literature not invented by me — and the final product, my writing, is as unlike the intellectual food as milk is unlike grass.

  (2)

  Just as the ape in Wolfgang Köhler’s psychological experiments wasn’t able to reach a banana hanging very high, and made a scaffold from junk — boxes lying around, etc. — in order to be able to climb up to the banana, I have to build up in subsequent moves and attempts an informa
tional “scaffold” that I must climb up to reach my goal.

  (3)

  The last simile is somewhat drastic and may appear to be very primitive, but it nevertheless contains some grain of the truth. A water closet has a reservoir that must be filled, and when the lever or button is pushed all the water flushes down in one stream. Thereafter, the reservoir is empty for a time, and until it has been filled again no impatient pushing of the button or the lever will cause the small Niagara to flush forth again. As far as my work is concerned, this image is appropriate, in that if I did not keep enriching my fictitious library there would come a state of depletion, and after that I would not be able to get anything more out of my mind — my information storehouse. I wrote

  A Perfect Vacuum

  — it contains fifteen fictitious book reviews — nearly without a pause, and after that my reservoir was empty. Indeed, the comparison can be dragged in a little further. Just as, if you push the button of a toilet too soon, there will flush down only inadequate Niagaras, I can squeeze a little more from my head after the writing of a book like