March 25, 2007 at 15:07Bruce Sterling's article on Stanislaw Lem “The Point of Knowledge”
- Transfer
You are a simple guy from some deaf in Alabama.
From childhood, you were tormented by vague doubts and a bleak feeling of your own potential, but you never realized it.
One happy day, you open the works of one pair of writers. They are well known (for foreigners), so their books are available even in your town. This is Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Reading them, you understand: here it is!
This is the sign you were waiting for! It is your fate to become a “Russian writer”!
Having caught fire, you thoroughly study this couple until you consider that you perfectly understood what they wrote. You heard that they are well-known in Russia too, but apparently they are not too keen on them there. (Fortunately, thanks to some jokes of genetics, you accidentally turned out to be a genius.) You just have to be their successor, but writing a more intricate style, of course, for contemporaries. And you write several such books, publish them, and people adore them. People in Alabama come up to you with pride and say that you went around Tolstoy.
Then, after several years of ever-increasing success, an unusual letter arrives. It is from Russia! The Russians have read your books in translation, and they want to accept you as members of the Union of Writers of the USSR! Incomprehensible, you think! Of course, living in the wilderness of Alabama, it is too difficult to get the publications of modern Russian writers. But hell, Tolstoy wrote for a long time! Now these Russians must be writing like no other!
Then comes a parcel with modern Soviet books, a multi-colored bale tied with a red ribbon. You open them and - oh, God! They are about ... COMMUNISM! This is all stupid stereotypical waste paper! About the red heroes of three meters high, and strong men, admiring their tractors, and mothers giving sons to the Fatherland, and fathers giving sons to the Motherland.
... Having suppressed anger, you look at the rest at random - oh God, this is terrible.
Then they call from Literaturnaya Gazeta and ask if you want to make some comments about the works of your new comrades. "Of course!" - you kindly pronounce. “It’s clear, like God's day, that all of you are going the wrong way! This is not literature, but just a bunch of boring propaganda nonsense, imposed by your stupid tyrannical publishers!
If Tolstoy were alive, he would kick your helpless Marxist asses! All this illiterate shit about heroes-communists and workers, breaking production records - silly tales that even a child cannot be fooled! Want to know the true potential of Soviet writers? Read some of mine if you can! Then call back! ”
And of course they called back. But, damn it, one of the cones in the Writers 'Union lost his temper and kicked you out of the Writers' Union in disgrace, calling you in every way ... saying that you are wondering, a worthless lousy clever man and an instrument of capitalism.
After that, you sometimes start to write, and even criticism. And, of course, after that you become rude and harmful.
It was really.
Except that it was not Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It was Wells and Olaf Stapledon. These were not Russian novels, but science fiction, and instead of the Writers' Union - SFWA. And Alabama was Poland. And you were Stanislav Lem.
Lem was carved from the heart of the American NF in 1976. Since then, many other writers have left the SFWA, but they have been expelled because they were Communists. Lem, of course, continued to gain widespread fame, mainly from high-profile critics who you will not find in a bookstore in the sky-fi department. Recently, Lemovsky's Macromir, a collection of critical essays, was published. For those of us who were not initiated into the dispute in the seventies, this is a book that sheds light on the actual state of things.
Lem compared himself to Robinson Crusoe, unmistakably claiming that he had to erect the entire whole structure of "science fiction" from scratch. He had the ancient wreckage of the shipwrecked vessel Wells and Stapledon, at hand, where he raided for tools years later. (We have collected notes thanks to digging his Friday in the trash, Australian critic Franz Rottensteiner)
These essays are the work of a lonely person. We can appreciate the zeal of Lemov’s attempts, such as “Structural Analysis of Science Fiction”: a Pole who writes in German, Austrians about French semantic theory. The whirlpool of the mind. After these superhuman efforts of interaction, you thought that people should reduce the abyss and get closer - out of pity, if not for the sake of something else.
But Lem’s ideology, both political and literary, is simply menacingly terrible. What Lem called science fiction books are not at all like the American NF, just like a dolphin is not like a reptile. Certain competitive skirmishes and thrashings were inevitable.
Lem was not very interested in "fiction" in itself.
He became interested in science - the structure of the universe. A brief autobiographical work, “Reflections on My Life,” made it clear that Lem was so from the very beginning. The fuse of his literary activity was not literature, but the medical texts of his father - a magical world of skeletons and brains, and multi-colored salted entrails. The earliest works of Lem during his studies in high school were not “stories”, but a thorough series of imaginary documents: “certificates, passports, diplomas ... encrypted notes and cryptograms ...”
For Lem, science fiction is a documented form of thought experiment - a point of knowledge.
Everything else is secondary, this is that determination that gives its work its frantic energy. This is a real “literature of ideas”, liberating the heart as insignificant, unscientific, but piercing the skull like an icicle.
Surrendering to his addictions, Lem probably never wrote “human stories”. But its main reason for avoiding this is astounding. The massacres during the Nazi occupation of Poland, as Lem said, led him to such a literary description of humanity as a species. “In those days, all written laws that had previously been used in literature were crushed and refuted. The immense futility of human life, which was influenced by mass killings, cannot be expressed by artistic methods in which the person or small groups of people make up the essence of the story. ”
A shocking statement, and one of those people in other, happier, countries, will reflect. The meaning of this belief is, of course, incredibly extreme. Lem's work is marked by decisive extremism. He frantically fought for the idea with the energy of a drowned man clutching at a straw.
Content, plot, human values, character description, internal conflict were wholly ruthlessly discarded.
In criticism, however, Lem continued to live and studied the wreckage carried ashore with a cynical look.
American science fiction, he said, is hopelessly compromised because its narrative structure is garbage: detective stories, crime thrillers, fairy tales, illegitimate myths. Such banal and vulgar methods are completely unsuitable for the grandiose scale of sci-fi themes, reducing it to cheap tricks of a pop magician.
Lem despised them, believing that a person should not seek entertainment in secondary magic. Stanislav Lem is not a merry fellow. Strange, but for the science fiction writer he was little interested in obscure. He showed no need for secrets, wonders, oddities ... He is blind to the fruits of the imagination. This, for example, led him to deny most of Borg's work. Lem stated that "Borg's best works are created as mathematical proofs." “This is a tautology, for Lem, mathematical evidence is what the best works should strive for. In the notes on the Borg essay, Lem left a strange assertion that when no one agrees with this, philosophy will automatically become fiction. ” Lem's literature is a philosophy, and a change of course for the sake of sensations alone is a scam.
American science fiction, therefore, has a network of crooks, and their figures fool around almost like sellers of snake fat. Lem adheres to pedantry, but throwing it in the water when it comes to the work of Philip Dick: "A Seer Among Quacks." Lem's mind was completely amazed at Dick's reading, and he tried to find some ideas lying in his ideology that would reduce the ontological nonsense in an understandable drawing.
This is a futile attempt, full of condescension and confusion, like the choreographer who analyzes James Brown.
The works are written to captivate, entertain, enlighten, convey cultural values, explore the life, behavior, morals and nature of the human heart. What Stanislav Lem writes, however, is created to burn mental flaws by a ruthless coherent light. How can someone do this and continue to produce similar “literature”? Lem tried to write novels. Novels, alas, looked strange, without unplayed characters in them.
Then he discovered this: the smile of fortune.
The collections “Perfect Vacuum” and “Imaginary Magnitudes” are Lemov’s masterpieces. The first contains reviews of books, the second - preface to various scientific books. The considered “books” never existed in reality, and were humorously entitled, such as, for example, “Necrobes” written by “Caesar Strzybs”. But here Lem found literary constructions, not “stories”, but a combination of prose, familiar and pleasant to the reader.
Of course, it’s a little dry to read a whole book of “preface”, which are usually wonderful snacks in front of the main course. But this is due to the author’s sense of freedom, his apparent enjoyment of the thorns that have become between him and his Grail. These charming works, witty, original, extremely provocative, highly lacking interest in people. People will only read them in decades. And not because they are written as works of art, but because their composition serves its purpose with the ominous grace of an automaton.
Here Lem shied away from an irrevocable choice. This is the choice that every sci-fi writer faces. Will the writer write Real Books that accidentally turned out to be science fiction, or will he create rough and non-improving NF artifacts that are not “works of art”, but just fantastic texts? The argument in favor of the first path will be the same Real Readers, that is, the majority who refuse to notice the undisguised NF.
How Lem should have been jubilant when he received abundant publishing advertisements from Time and Newsweek (not to mention earnings after currency exchange in Poland). Thanks to his work as a literary critic, he bewitched American sorcerers by receiving a piece of the pie and eating it publicly on the holy pages of the NY Review of Books.
This is a good trick that is difficult to perform, requiring ideas that burn so brightly that their radiance would be irresistible. This capable loner deserves some envy from the local Writers Union. But this is just a trick, and the main question is still unresolved: “What is NF?”
And what is it for?
From childhood, you were tormented by vague doubts and a bleak feeling of your own potential, but you never realized it.
One happy day, you open the works of one pair of writers. They are well known (for foreigners), so their books are available even in your town. This is Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Reading them, you understand: here it is!
This is the sign you were waiting for! It is your fate to become a “Russian writer”!
Having caught fire, you thoroughly study this couple until you consider that you perfectly understood what they wrote. You heard that they are well-known in Russia too, but apparently they are not too keen on them there. (Fortunately, thanks to some jokes of genetics, you accidentally turned out to be a genius.) You just have to be their successor, but writing a more intricate style, of course, for contemporaries. And you write several such books, publish them, and people adore them. People in Alabama come up to you with pride and say that you went around Tolstoy.
Then, after several years of ever-increasing success, an unusual letter arrives. It is from Russia! The Russians have read your books in translation, and they want to accept you as members of the Union of Writers of the USSR! Incomprehensible, you think! Of course, living in the wilderness of Alabama, it is too difficult to get the publications of modern Russian writers. But hell, Tolstoy wrote for a long time! Now these Russians must be writing like no other!
Then comes a parcel with modern Soviet books, a multi-colored bale tied with a red ribbon. You open them and - oh, God! They are about ... COMMUNISM! This is all stupid stereotypical waste paper! About the red heroes of three meters high, and strong men, admiring their tractors, and mothers giving sons to the Fatherland, and fathers giving sons to the Motherland.
... Having suppressed anger, you look at the rest at random - oh God, this is terrible.
Then they call from Literaturnaya Gazeta and ask if you want to make some comments about the works of your new comrades. "Of course!" - you kindly pronounce. “It’s clear, like God's day, that all of you are going the wrong way! This is not literature, but just a bunch of boring propaganda nonsense, imposed by your stupid tyrannical publishers!
If Tolstoy were alive, he would kick your helpless Marxist asses! All this illiterate shit about heroes-communists and workers, breaking production records - silly tales that even a child cannot be fooled! Want to know the true potential of Soviet writers? Read some of mine if you can! Then call back! ”
And of course they called back. But, damn it, one of the cones in the Writers 'Union lost his temper and kicked you out of the Writers' Union in disgrace, calling you in every way ... saying that you are wondering, a worthless lousy clever man and an instrument of capitalism.
After that, you sometimes start to write, and even criticism. And, of course, after that you become rude and harmful.
It was really.
Except that it was not Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It was Wells and Olaf Stapledon. These were not Russian novels, but science fiction, and instead of the Writers' Union - SFWA. And Alabama was Poland. And you were Stanislav Lem.
Lem was carved from the heart of the American NF in 1976. Since then, many other writers have left the SFWA, but they have been expelled because they were Communists. Lem, of course, continued to gain widespread fame, mainly from high-profile critics who you will not find in a bookstore in the sky-fi department. Recently, Lemovsky's Macromir, a collection of critical essays, was published. For those of us who were not initiated into the dispute in the seventies, this is a book that sheds light on the actual state of things.
Lem compared himself to Robinson Crusoe, unmistakably claiming that he had to erect the entire whole structure of "science fiction" from scratch. He had the ancient wreckage of the shipwrecked vessel Wells and Stapledon, at hand, where he raided for tools years later. (We have collected notes thanks to digging his Friday in the trash, Australian critic Franz Rottensteiner)
These essays are the work of a lonely person. We can appreciate the zeal of Lemov’s attempts, such as “Structural Analysis of Science Fiction”: a Pole who writes in German, Austrians about French semantic theory. The whirlpool of the mind. After these superhuman efforts of interaction, you thought that people should reduce the abyss and get closer - out of pity, if not for the sake of something else.
But Lem’s ideology, both political and literary, is simply menacingly terrible. What Lem called science fiction books are not at all like the American NF, just like a dolphin is not like a reptile. Certain competitive skirmishes and thrashings were inevitable.
Lem was not very interested in "fiction" in itself.
He became interested in science - the structure of the universe. A brief autobiographical work, “Reflections on My Life,” made it clear that Lem was so from the very beginning. The fuse of his literary activity was not literature, but the medical texts of his father - a magical world of skeletons and brains, and multi-colored salted entrails. The earliest works of Lem during his studies in high school were not “stories”, but a thorough series of imaginary documents: “certificates, passports, diplomas ... encrypted notes and cryptograms ...”
For Lem, science fiction is a documented form of thought experiment - a point of knowledge.
Everything else is secondary, this is that determination that gives its work its frantic energy. This is a real “literature of ideas”, liberating the heart as insignificant, unscientific, but piercing the skull like an icicle.
Surrendering to his addictions, Lem probably never wrote “human stories”. But its main reason for avoiding this is astounding. The massacres during the Nazi occupation of Poland, as Lem said, led him to such a literary description of humanity as a species. “In those days, all written laws that had previously been used in literature were crushed and refuted. The immense futility of human life, which was influenced by mass killings, cannot be expressed by artistic methods in which the person or small groups of people make up the essence of the story. ”
A shocking statement, and one of those people in other, happier, countries, will reflect. The meaning of this belief is, of course, incredibly extreme. Lem's work is marked by decisive extremism. He frantically fought for the idea with the energy of a drowned man clutching at a straw.
Content, plot, human values, character description, internal conflict were wholly ruthlessly discarded.
In criticism, however, Lem continued to live and studied the wreckage carried ashore with a cynical look.
American science fiction, he said, is hopelessly compromised because its narrative structure is garbage: detective stories, crime thrillers, fairy tales, illegitimate myths. Such banal and vulgar methods are completely unsuitable for the grandiose scale of sci-fi themes, reducing it to cheap tricks of a pop magician.
Lem despised them, believing that a person should not seek entertainment in secondary magic. Stanislav Lem is not a merry fellow. Strange, but for the science fiction writer he was little interested in obscure. He showed no need for secrets, wonders, oddities ... He is blind to the fruits of the imagination. This, for example, led him to deny most of Borg's work. Lem stated that "Borg's best works are created as mathematical proofs." “This is a tautology, for Lem, mathematical evidence is what the best works should strive for. In the notes on the Borg essay, Lem left a strange assertion that when no one agrees with this, philosophy will automatically become fiction. ” Lem's literature is a philosophy, and a change of course for the sake of sensations alone is a scam.
American science fiction, therefore, has a network of crooks, and their figures fool around almost like sellers of snake fat. Lem adheres to pedantry, but throwing it in the water when it comes to the work of Philip Dick: "A Seer Among Quacks." Lem's mind was completely amazed at Dick's reading, and he tried to find some ideas lying in his ideology that would reduce the ontological nonsense in an understandable drawing.
This is a futile attempt, full of condescension and confusion, like the choreographer who analyzes James Brown.
The works are written to captivate, entertain, enlighten, convey cultural values, explore the life, behavior, morals and nature of the human heart. What Stanislav Lem writes, however, is created to burn mental flaws by a ruthless coherent light. How can someone do this and continue to produce similar “literature”? Lem tried to write novels. Novels, alas, looked strange, without unplayed characters in them.
Then he discovered this: the smile of fortune.
The collections “Perfect Vacuum” and “Imaginary Magnitudes” are Lemov’s masterpieces. The first contains reviews of books, the second - preface to various scientific books. The considered “books” never existed in reality, and were humorously entitled, such as, for example, “Necrobes” written by “Caesar Strzybs”. But here Lem found literary constructions, not “stories”, but a combination of prose, familiar and pleasant to the reader.
Of course, it’s a little dry to read a whole book of “preface”, which are usually wonderful snacks in front of the main course. But this is due to the author’s sense of freedom, his apparent enjoyment of the thorns that have become between him and his Grail. These charming works, witty, original, extremely provocative, highly lacking interest in people. People will only read them in decades. And not because they are written as works of art, but because their composition serves its purpose with the ominous grace of an automaton.
Here Lem shied away from an irrevocable choice. This is the choice that every sci-fi writer faces. Will the writer write Real Books that accidentally turned out to be science fiction, or will he create rough and non-improving NF artifacts that are not “works of art”, but just fantastic texts? The argument in favor of the first path will be the same Real Readers, that is, the majority who refuse to notice the undisguised NF.
How Lem should have been jubilant when he received abundant publishing advertisements from Time and Newsweek (not to mention earnings after currency exchange in Poland). Thanks to his work as a literary critic, he bewitched American sorcerers by receiving a piece of the pie and eating it publicly on the holy pages of the NY Review of Books.
This is a good trick that is difficult to perform, requiring ideas that burn so brightly that their radiance would be irresistible. This capable loner deserves some envy from the local Writers Union. But this is just a trick, and the main question is still unresolved: “What is NF?”
And what is it for?
