Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  Nevertheless, there can be circumstances that frustrate this process of natural selection. In biological evolution the result will be retrogression, degeneration, or at the very least developmental stagnation, typical of populations isolated from the outside world and vitiated by inbreeding, since these are most lacking in the fruitful diversity that is guaranteed only by openness to all the world’s influences. In culture an analogous situation leads to the emergence of enclaves shut up in ghettos, where intellectual production likewise stagnates because of inbreeding in the form of incessant repetition of the selfsame creative patterns and techniques. The internal dynamics of the ghetto may appear to be intense, but with the passage of years it becomes evident that this is only a semblance of motion, since it leads nowhere, since it neither feeds into nor is fed by the open domain of culture, since it does not generate new patterns or trends, and since, finally, it nurses the falsest of notions about itself, for lack of any honest evaluation of its activities from outside. The books of the ghetto assimilate themselves to one another, becoming an anonymous mass, while such surroundings thrust whatever is better downward toward the worse, so that works of differing quality meet one another halfway, as it were, in the leveling process forced upon them. In such a situation publishing success not only may, but must, become the sole standard of evaluation, since a vacuum of standards is impossible. Hence, where there are no ratings on the merits, these are replaced by ratings on a commercial basis.

  Just such a situation reigns in American science fiction, which is a domain of herd creativity. Its herd character manifests itself in the fact that books by different authors become as it were different sessions of playing at one and the same game or various figures of the selfsame dance. It should be emphasized that, in literary culture as in natural evolution, effects become causes by virtue of feedback loops: the artistic-intellectual passivity and mediocrity of works touted as brilliant repel the more exigent authors and readers, so that the loss of individuality in science fiction is at once a cause and an effect of ghetto seclusion. In science fiction there is little room left for creative work that would aspire to deal with problems of our time without mystification, oversimplification, or facile entertainment: e.g., for work that would reflect on the place that reason can occupy in the universe, on the outer limits of concepts formed on earth as instruments of cognition, or on such consequences of contacts with extraterrestrial life as find no place in the desperately primitive repertoire of science-fiction devices (bounded by the alternative “we win”/“they win”). These devices bear much the same relation to serious treatment of problems of the kind mentioned as does the detective story to the problems of evil inherent in mankind. Whoever brings up the heavy artillery of comparative ethnology, cultural anthropology, and sociology against such devices is told that he is using cannon to shoot sparrows, since it is merely a matter of entertainment; once he falls silent, the voices of the apologists for the culture-shaping, anticipative, predictive, and mythopoeic role of science fiction are raised anew. Science fiction behaves rather like a conjurer pulling rabbits from a hat, who, threatened with a search of his belongings, pretends to think we are crazy to suggest this and indulgently explains that he is just performing tricks — after which we promptly hear that he is passing himself off in public for an authentic thaumaturge.

  Is creative work without mystification possible in such an environment? An answer to this question is given by the stories of Philip K. Dick. While these stand out from the background against which they have originated, it is not easy to capture the ways in which they do, since Dick employs the same materials and theatrical props as other American writers. From the warehouse that has long since become their common property, he takes the whole threadbare lot of telepaths, cosmic wars, parallel worlds, and time travel. In his stories terrible catastrophes happen, but this, too, is no exception to the rule; lengthening the list of sophisticated ways in which the world can end is among the standard preoccupations of science fiction. But where other science-fiction writers explicitly name and delimit the source of the disaster, whether social (terrestrial or cosmic war) or natural (elemental forces of nature), the world of Dick’s stories suffers dire changes for reasons that remain unascertainable to the end. People perish not because a nova or a war has erupted, not because of flood, famine, plague, draught, or sterility, not because the Martians have landed on our doorstep; rather, there is some inscrutable factor at work that is visible in its manifestations but not at its source, and the world behaves as if it has fallen prey to a malignant cancer, which through metastases attacks one area of life after another. This is, be it said forthwith, apposite as a castigation of historiographic diagnostics, since in fact humanity does not as a rule succeed in exhaustively or conclusively diagnosing the causes of the afflictions that befall it. It is sufficient to recall how many diverse and in part mutually exclusive factors are nowadays adduced by experts as sources of the crisis of civilization. And this, be it added, is also appropriate as an artistic presupposition, since literature that furnishes the reader with godlike omniscience about all narrated events is today an anachronism that neither the theory of art nor the theory of knowledge will undertake to defend.

  The forces that bring about world debacle in Dick’s books are fantastic, but they are not merely invented ad hoc to shock the readers. We will show this with the example of Ubik, a work which, by the way, can also be regarded as a fantastic grotesque, a “macabresque” with obscure allegorical subtexts, decked out in the guise of ordinary science fiction.

  If, however, it is viewed as a work of science fiction proper, the contents of Ubik can be most simply summarized as follows:

  Telepathic phenomena, having been mastered in the context of capitalistic society, have undergone commercialization like every other technological innovation. So businessmen hire telepathists to steal trade secrets from their competitors, and the latter, for their part, defend themselves against this “extrasensory industrial espionage” with the aid of “inertials,” people whose psyches nullify the “psi field” that makes it possible to receive others’ thoughts. By way of specialization, firms have sprung up that rent out telepathists and inertials by the hour, and the “strong man” Glen Runciter is the proprietor of such a firm. The medical profession has learned how to arrest the agony of victims of mortal ailments, but still has no means of curing them. Such people are therefore kept in a state of “half-life” in special institutions, “moratoriums” (“places of postponement” — of death, obviously). If they merely rested there unconscious in their icy caskets, that would be small comfort for their surviving kin. So a technique has been developed for maintaining the mental life of such people in “cold-pac.” The world which they experience is not part of reality, but a fiction created by appropriate methods. Nonetheless, normal people can make contact with the frozen ones, for the cold-sleep apparatus has means to this end built into it, something on the order of a telephone.

  This idea is not altogether absurd in terms of scientific facts: the concept of freezing the incurably ill to await the time when remedies for their diseases will be found has already come in for serious discussion. It would also be possible in principle to maintain vital processes in a person’s brain when the body dies (to be sure, that brain would rapidly suffer psychological disintegration as a consequence of sensory deprivation). We know that stimulation of the brain by electrodes produces in the subject of such an operation experiences indistinguishable from ordinary perceptions. In Dick we find a perfected extension of such techniques, though he does not discuss this explicitly in the story. Numerous dilemmas arise here: should the “half-lifer” be informed of his condition? is it right to keep him under the illusion that he is leading a normal life?

  According to Ubik, people who, like Runciter’s wife, have spent years in cold sleep are well aware of the fact. It is another matter with those who, like Joe Chip, have come close to meeting with a violent end and have regained consciousness imagining
that they have escaped death, whereas in fact they are resting in a moratorium. In the book, it must be admitted, this is an unclear point, which is however masked by another dilemma: if the world of the frozen person’s experiences is a purely subjective one, then any intervention in that world from outside must be for him a phenomenon that upsets the normal course of things. So if someone communicates with the frozen one, as Runciter does with Chip, this contact is accompanied in Chip’s experiences by uncanny and startling phenomena — it is as if waking reality were breaking into the midst of a dream “only from one side,” without thereby causing extinction of the dream and wakening of the sleeper (who, after all, cannot wake up like a normal man because he is not a normal man). But, to go a step further, is not contact also possible between two frozen individuals? Might not one of these people dream that he is alive and well and that from his accustomed world he is communicating with the other one — that only the other person succumbed to the unfortunate mishap? This, too, is possible. And, finally, is it possible to imagine a wholly infallible technology? There can be no such thing. Hence certain perturbations may affect the subjective world of the frozen sleeper, to whom it will then seem that his environment is going mad — perhaps that in it even time is falling to pieces! Interpreting the events presented in this fashion, we come to the conclusion that all the principal characters of the story were killed by the bomb on the moon, and consequently all of them had to be placed in the moratorium, and from this point on the book recounts only their visions and illusions. In a realistic novel (but this is a contradictio in adiecto) this version would correspond to a narrative that, after coming to the demise of the hero, would go on to describe his life after death. The realistic novel cannot describe this life, since the principle of realism rules out such descriptions. If, however, we assume a technology that makes possible the half-life of the dead, nothing prevents the author from remaining faithful to his characters and following them with his narrative — into the depths of their icy dream, which is henceforward the only form of life open to them.

  Thus it is possible to rationalize the story in the above manner — on which, however, I would not insist too seriously, and that for two reasons at once. The first reason is that to make the plot fully consistent along the lines sketched above is impossible. If all Runciter’s people perished on the moon, then who transported them to the moratorium? Another thing that does not yield to any rationalization is the talent of the girl who by mental effort alone was able to alter the present by transposing causal nodes in a past already over and done with. (This takes place before the occurrence on the moon, when there are no grounds for regarding the represented world as the purely subjective one of any half-life character.) Similar misgivings are inspired by Ubik itself, “the Absolute in a spray can,” to which we will devote attention a little later on. If we approach the fictional world pedantically, no case can be made for it, since it is full of contradictions. But if we shelve such objections and inquire instead after the overall meaning of the work, we will discover that it is close to the meanings of other books by Dick, for all that they seem to differ from one another. Essentially it is always one and the same world that figures in them — a world of elementally unleashed entropy, of decay that not only, as in our reality, attacks the harmonious arrangement of matter, but also even consumes the order of elapsing time. Dick has thus amplified, rendered monumental and at the same time monstrous, certain fundamental properties of the actual world, giving them dramatic acceleration and impetus. All the technological innovations, the magnificent inventions, and the newly mastered human capabilities (such as telepathy, which our author has provided with an uncommonly rich articulation into “specialties”) ultimately come to nothing in the struggle against the inexorably rising floodwaters of Chaos. Dick’s province is thus a “world of preestablished disharmony,” which is hidden at first and does not manifest itself in the opening scenes of the novel; these are presented unhurriedly and with calm matter-of-factness, just so that the intrusion of the destructive factor should be all the more effective. Dick is a prolific author, but I speak only of those of his novels that constitute the “main sequence” of his works; each of these books (I would count among them: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Now Wait for Last Year, and perhaps also Galactic Pot-Healer) is a somewhat different embodiment of the same dramatic principle — the conversion of the order of the universe to rack and ruin before our eyes. In a world smitten with insanity, in which even the chronology of events is subject to convulsions, it is only the people who preserve their normality. So Dick subjects them to the pressure of a terrible testing, and in his fantastic experiment only the psychology of the characters remains nonfantastic. They struggle bitterly and stoically to the end, like Joe Chip in the current instance, against the chaos pressing on them from all sides, the sources of which remain, actually, unfathomable, so that in this regard the reader is thrown back on his own conjectures.

  The peculiarities of Dick’s worlds arise especially from the fact that in them it is waking reality that undergoes profound dissociation and duplication. Sometimes the dissociating agency consists of chemical substances (of the hallucinogenic type — thus in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch); sometimes in “cold-sleep technique” (as precisely in Ubik); sometimes (as in Now Wait for Last Year) in a combination of narcotics and “parallel worlds.” The end effect is always the same: distinguishing between waking reality and visions proves to be impossible. The technical aspect of this phenomenon is fairly inessential — it does not matter whether the splitting of reality is brought about by a new technology of chemical manipulation of the mind or, as in Ubik, by one of surgical operations. The essential point is that a world equipped with the means of splitting perceived reality into indistinguishable likenesses of itself creates practical dilemmas that are known only to the theoretical speculations of philosophy. This is a world in which, so to speak, this philosophy goes out into the street and becomes for every ordinary mortal no less of a burning question than is for us the threatened destruction of the biosphere.

  There is no question of using a meticulous factual bookkeeping to strike a rational balance for the novel, by virtue of which it would satisfy the demands of common sense. We are not only forced to but we ought to at a certain point stop defending its “sciencefictional nature” and for a second reason, so far unmentioned. The first reason was dictated to us simply by necessity: given that the elements of the work lack a focal point, it cannot be rendered consistent. The second reason is more essential: the impossibility of imposing consistency on the text compels us to seek its global meanings not in the realm of events themselves, but in that of their constructive principle, the very thing that is responsible for lack of focus. If no such meaningful principle were discoverable, Dick’s novels would have to be called mystifications, since any work must justify itself either on the level of what it presents literally or on the level of deeper semantic content, not so much overtly present in, as summoned up by, the text. Indeed, Dick’s works teem with non sequiturs, and any sufficiently sensitive reader can without difficulty make up lists of incidents that flout logic and experience alike. But — to repeat what was already said in other ways — what is inconsistency in literature? It is a symptom either of incompetence or else of repudiation of some values (such as credibility of incidents or their logical coherence) for the sake of other values.

  Here we come to a ticklish point in our discussion, since the values alluded to cannot be objectively compared. There is no universally valid answer to the question whether it is permissible to sacrifice order for the sake of vision in a creative work -everything depends on what kind of order and what kind of vision are involved. Dick’s novels have been variously interpreted. There are critics — Sam Lundwall is one — who say that Dick is cultivating an “offshoot of mysticism” in science fiction. It is not, though, a question of mysticism in the religious sense, but, rather, of occult phenomena. Ubik furnishes some ground
s for such a conclusion. Does not the person who ousts Ella Runciter’s soul from her body behave like a “possessing spirit”? Does not he metamorphose into various incarnations when fighting with Joe Chip? So such an approach is admissible.

  Another critic (George Turner) has denied all value in Ubik, declaring that the novel is a pack of conflicting absurdities — which can be demonstrated with pencil and paper. I think, however, that the critic should not be the prosecutor of a book, but its defender, though one not allowed to lie: he may only present the work in the most favorable light. And because a book full of meaningless contradictions is as worthless as one that holds forth about vampires and other monstrous revenants, and since neither of them touches on problems worthy of serious consideration, I prefer my account of Ubik to all the rest. The theme of catastrophe had been so much worked over in science fiction that it seemed to be played out until Dick’s books became a proof that this had been a matter of frivolous mystification. For science-fictional endings of the world were brought about either by man himself — e.g., by unrestrained warfare — or by some cataclysm as extrinsic as it was accidental, which thus might equally well not have happened at all.