Microworlds

by Stanisław Lem

  At this point we might embark on an excursus about the origin of Dick’s science-fictional concepts, but let just one example from Ubik suffice: to wit, the name that figures as the title of the book. It comes from the Latin ubique, “everywhere.” This is a blend (contamination) of two heterogeneous concepts: the concept of the Absolute as eternal and unchanging order which goes back to systematizing philosophy, and the concept of the “gadget” — the handy little device for use on appropriate everyday occasions, a product of the conveyer-belt technology of the consumer society, whose watchword is making things easy for people at whatever they do, from washing clothes to getting a permanent wave. This “canned Absolute,” then, is the result of the collision and interpenetration of two styles of thought of different ages, and at the same time of the incarnation of abstraction in the guise of a concrete object. Such a procedure is an exception to the rule in science fiction and is Dick’s own invention.

  It is hardly possible to create, in the way just noted, objects that are empirically plausible or that have a likelihood of ever coming into existence. Accordingly, in the case of Ubik it is a matter of a poetic — i.e., metaphorical — device and not of any “futurological” one. Ubik plays an important part in the story, emphasized still more by the “advertisements” for it that figure as epigraphs to each chapter. Is it a symbol, and, if so, of just what? This is not easy to answer. An Absolute conjured out of sight by technology, supposed to save man from the ruinous consequences of Chaos or Entropy much as a deodorant shields our sense of smell from the stench of industrial effluents, is not only a demonstration of a tactic typical nowadays (combating, for example, the side effects of one technology by means of another technology); it is an expression of nostalgia for a lost ideal kingdom of untroubled order, but also an expression of irony, since this “invention” of course cannot be taken seriously. Ubik moreover plays in the novel the part of its “internal micromodel,” since it contains in nuce the whole range of problems specific to the book, those of the struggle of man against Chaos, at the end of which, after temporary successes, defeat inexorably awaits him. The Absolute canned as an aerosol, which saves Joe Chip at the point of death — though only for the time being: will this, then, be a parable and the handwriting on the wall for a civilization that has degraded the Sacred by stuffing it into the Profane? Pursuing such a train of associations, Ubik could finally be seen as a take-off on Greek tragedy, with the role of the ancient heroes, who strive vainly against Moira, assigned to the staff telepathists under the command of a big-business executive. If Ubik was not actually undertaken with this in mind, it in any case points in such a direction.

  The writings of Philip Dick have deserved at least a better fate than that to which they were destined by their birthplace. If they are neither of uniform quality nor fully realized, still it is only by brute force that they can be jammed into that pulp of materials, destitute of intellectual value and original structure, that makes up science fiction. Its fans are attracted by the worst in Dick — the typical dash of American science fiction, reaching to the stars, and the headlong pace of action moving from one surprise to the next — but they hold it against him that, instead of unraveling puzzles, he leaves the reader at the end on the battlefield, enveloped in the aura of a mystery as grotesque as it is strange. Yet his bizarre blendings of hallucinogenic and palingenetic techniques have not won him many admirers outside the ghetto walls, since there readers are repelled by the shoddiness of the props he has adopted from the inventory of science fiction. Indeed, these writings sometimes fumble their attempts; but I remain after all under their spell, as often happens at the sight of a lone imagination’s efforts to cope with a shattering superabundance of opportunities — efforts in which even a partial defeat can resemble a victory.

  Translated from the Polish by Robert Abernathy

  THE TIME-TRAVEL STORY AND RELATED MATTERS OF SCIENCE-FICTION STRUCTURING

  Let’s look at a couple of simple sentences that logic, by virtue of a “disconnected middle” or by virtue of a tautology, asserts are always true, and let’s investigate whether there can be worlds in which their veracity ceases. The first will be the ever real disjuncture: “John is the father of Peter or John is not the father of Peter.” Any logician would acknowledge that this disjuncture satisfies at all times the requirement for truth, since tertium non datur, it is impossible to be forty percent father and sixty percent nonfather.

  Next, let’s work with a complex sentence: “If Peter has sexual relations with his mother, then Peter commits incest.” The implication is a tautological one, since, according to the semantic rules of language, to have sexual relations with one’s mother is tantamount to committing incest. (Our conjunction is not a complete tautology, since incest constitutes a concept broader than sexual relations with a mother, referring, rather, to relations with any person of such close kinship. We could bring the sentence to a perfect tautology, but this would necessitate complexities that would in no way alter the essence of the matter and merely make the argumentation more difficult.)

  To simplify matters we shall investigate first the impact of changes on the veracity or falsity of the statement “John is the father of Peter.” We should point out that what is involved here is a truly causative biological relation to the birth of a child, and not the ambiguous use of the designation “father” (since it is indeed possible to be a biological father and not be a baptismal father, or, conversely, to be a godfather, but not a parent).

  Suppose John is a person who died three hundred years ago, but whose reproductive cells were preserved by refrigeration. A woman fertilized by them will become Peter’s mother. Will John then be Peter’s father? Undoubtedly.

  But then suppose the following: John died and did not leave reproductive cells, but a woman asked a genetic technician to make up in the laboratory a spermatozoon of John from a single preserved cell of John’s epithelium (all the cells of the body having the same genetic composition). Will John, once fertilization is complete, now also be Peter’s father?

  Now suppose the following case: John not only died, but also did not leave a single bodily cell. Instead, John left a will in which he expressed the desire that a genetic technician perform the steps necessary to enable a woman to become the mother of a child of John — i.e., that such a woman give birth to a child and that the child be markedly similar to John. In addition, the genetic technician is not permitted to use any spermatozoa. Rather, he is supposed to cause a parthenogenetic development of the female ovum. Along with this he is supposed to control the genic substance and direct it by embryogenetic transformations in such a way that the Peter born is “the spit and image of John” (there are photographs of John available, a recording of his voice, etc.). The geneticist “sculptures” in the chromosomal substance of the woman all the features John craved for in a child. And thus, to the question “Is John the father or not the father of Peter?” it is now impossible to give an unequivocal answer of “yes” or “no.” In some senses John is indeed the father, but in others he is not. An appeal to empiricism alone will not in itself furnish a clear answer. The definition will be essentially determined by the cultural standards of the society in which John, Peter’s mother, Peter, as well as the genetic technician, all live.

  Let’s assume that these standards are fixed, and that the child realized in strict accordance with John’s testamental instructions is generally acknowledged to be his child. If, however, the genetic technician, either on his own or at the instigation of others, made up forty-five percent of the genotypical features of the child not in accordance with the stipulations of the will, but in accordance with an entirely different prescription, it would then be impossible to maintain that John, in agreement with the standards of a given culture, either is or is not the child’s father. The situation is the same as when some experts say about a picture reputed to be a work of Rembrandt: “This is a canvas by Rembrandt,” whereas others say: “This is not a canvas by Rembrandt.” Sin
ce it is quite possible that Rembrandt began the picture, but that some anonymous person finished the work, then forty-seven percent of the work could be said to originate from Rembrandt, and fifty-three percent from someone else. In such a situation of “partial authorship,” tertium datur. In other words, there are situations in which it is possible to be a father only in part. (It is also possible to achieve such situations in other ways, e.g., by removing a certain number of genes from a spermatozoon of John and substituting another person’s genes for them.)

  The possibilities of the transformations mentioned above, which entail a change in the logical value of the disjunction — “John is the father of Peter or John is not the father of Peter” — lie, one may judge, in the bosom of a not too distant future. Thus a work describing such a matter would be fantastic today, but thirty or fifty years hence it might indeed be realistic. However, the work by no means needs to relate the story of a definite, concrete John, Peter, and mother of Peter. It could describe fictitious persons in a manner typical of any form of literary composition. The relational invariables between father, mother, and child would not have at that time the fictitious nature they have in the present. The invariables that concern paternity are today different from those of a time when genetic engineering would be realized. In this sense a composition written today and depicting a given situation without a “disconnected middle” in the predication of paternity may be considered a futurological prognosis or a hypothesis that may prove to be true.

  For a real tautology to become a falsehood, the device of travel in time is necessary. Suppose Peter, having grown up, learns that his father was a very vile person — that he seduced Peter’s mother and abandoned her only to disappear without a trace. Burning with the desire to bring his father to account for so despicable an act and unable to locate him in the present, Peter boards a time vehicle, sets out for the past and seeks out the father in the vicinity of the place where his mother was supposed to have resided at that time. The search, although very thorough, turns out to be in vain. However, in the course of establishing various contacts related to his expedition, Peter meets a young girl who attracts him. The two fall in love and a baby is conceived. Peter cannot remain permanently in the past, though; he is obliged to return to his old mother, for whom he is the sole support. Having been convinced by the girl that she has not become pregnant, Peter returns to the present. He has not succeeded in finding traces of his father. One. day he finds in one of his mother’s drawers a thirty-year-old photograph and to his horror recognizes in it the girl whom he loved. Not wishing to impede him, she committed a white lie, and hid her pregnancy. Peter thus comes to understand that he did not find his father for the simple reason that he himself is the father. So, Peter journeyed into the past to search for a missing father, assuming the name John to facilitate his search by remaining incognito. The upshot of this journey is his own birth. Thus, we have before us a circular causal structure. Peter is his own father, but, as against a superficial judgment, he did not commit incest at all, since, when he had sexual intercourse with her, his mother was not (and could not be) his mother. (From a purely genetic point of view, if we forget that — as is today believed — the causal circle is impossible, Peter is genotypically identical with his mother. In other words, Peter’s mother for all practical purposes gave birth to him parthenogenetically, since, of course, no man inseminated her who was alien to her.)

  This structure constitutes the so-called time loop, a causal structure characteristic of an enormous number of science-fiction compositions. The composition I described is a “minimal” loop, yet there is one still “smaller,” created by Robert Heinlein in the story “All You Zombies” (1959).[9] Its plot is as follows: a certain young girl becomes pregnant by a man who then promptly disappears. She bears a child, or, more correctly, gives birth to it by Caesarean section. During the operation, the doctors ascertain that she is a hermaphrodite and it is essential (for reasons not explained by the author) to change her sex. She leaves the clinic as a young man who, because he was until quite recently a woman, has given birth to a child. She seeks her seducer for a long time, until it comes to light that she herself is he. We have the following circular situation: one and the same individual was in time T1 both a girl and her partner, since the girl, transformed into a man by surgical intervention, was transferred by the narrator to time T1 from a future time, T2. The narrator, a time traveler, “removed” the young man from time T2 and transferred him to time T1 so that the latter seduced “himself.”

  Nine months after time T1 the child was born. The narrator stole this child and took it back in time twenty years, to moment T0, so he could leave it under the trees of a foundling home. So the circle is completely closed: the same individual comprises “father,” “mother,” and “child.” In other words, a person impregnated himself and gave birth to himself. The baby born as a result of this is left behind in time, bringing about in twenty years the growth of a girl who has in time T1 sex with a young man from time T2. The young man is she herself, transformed into a man by a surgical operation. The fact that a sexual hermaphrodite should not be able to bear a child is a relatively small hindrance, since the puzzling situation of a person’s giving birth to himself is considerably “more impossible.” What we are dealing with here is an act of creatio ex nihilo. All structures of the time-loop variety are internally contradictory in a causal sense. The contradictoriness is not, however, always as apparent as in Heinlein’s story.

  Frederic Brown writes about a man who travels into the past in order to punish his grandfather for tormenting his grandmother. In the course of an altercation he kills his grandfather before his father has been engendered. Thus the time traveler cannot then come into the world. Who, therefore, in fact killed the grandfather, if the murderer has not come into the world at all? Herein lies the contradiction. Sometimes an absentminded scientist, having left something in the past, which he has visited, returns for the lost object and encounters his own self, since he has not returned exactly to the moment after his departure for the present, but to the time point at which he was before. When such returns are repeated, the individual is subject to multiple reproduction in the form of doubles. Since such possibilities appear to be pointless, in one of my stories about Ion Tichy (the “7th Journey”), I maximized “duplication” of the central character. Ion Tichy’s spaceship finds itself in gravitational whirlpools that bend time into a circle, so that the spaceship is filled with a great number of different Ions.

  The loop motif can be used, for instance, in the following ways. Someone proceeds into the past, deposits ducats in a Venetian bank at compound interest, and centuries later in New York demands from a consortium of banks payment of the entire capital, a gigantic sum. Why does he need so much money all of a sudden? So that he can hire the best physicists to construct for him a thus far nonexistent time vehicle, and by means of this vehicle go back in time to Venice, where he will deposit ducats at compound interest… (Mack Reynolds, “Compounded Interest” [1956]). Another example: in the future someone comes to an artist (in one story to a painter, in another to a writer) and gives him either a book dealing with painting in the future or a novel written in the future. The artist then begins to imitate this material as much as possible, and becomes famous, the paradox being that he is borrowing from his own self (since he himself was the author of that book or those pictures, “twenty years later”).

  We learn, further, from various works of this sort how the Mesozoic reptiles became extinct thanks to hunters who organized a “safari into the past” (Frederic Brown), or how, in order to move in time in one direction, an equal mass must be displaced in the opposite direction, or how expeditions in time can reshape historical events. The latter theme has been used time and again, as in one American tale in which the Confederate States are victorious over the North (Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee [1952, 1953]). The hero, a military historian, sets out for the past in order to investigate how the Southerners g
ained victory near Gettysburg. His arrival in a time machine throws General Lee’s troop formations into disarray, which results in victory for the North. The hero is no longer able to return to the future, because his arrival also disturbed the causal chain upon which the subsequent construction of his time machine depended. Thus, the person who was supposed to have financed the construction of the machine will not do this, the machine will not exist, and the historian will be stuck in the year 1863 without the means to travel back into the original time. Of course here also there is an inherent paradox — just how did he reach the past? As a rule, the fun consists in the way the paradox is shifted from one segment of the action to another. The time loop as the backbone of a work’s causal structure is thus different from the far looser motif of journeys in time per se; but, of course, it is merely a logical, although extreme, consequence of the general acceptance of the possibility of “chronomotion.” There are actually two possible authorial attitudes, which are mutually exclusive: either one deliberately demonstrates causal paradoxes resulting from “chronomotion” with the greatest possible consistency, or else one cleverly avoids them. In the first instance, the careful development of logical consequences leads to situations as absurd as the one cited (an individual that is his very own father, that procreates himself), and usually has a comic effect (though this does not follow automatically).