“Haven’t you ever noticed how much more interesting the unknown is...?"
May 13, 2017 11:15 AM   Subscribe

Two articles from the Paris Review about the work of Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, best known for the Andrei Tarkovsky adaptations of their work. Strugatsky Brothers: Yet the ambiguous ending of the novel, and its insistence on disrupting the conventional mystery narrative with fantastic elements, also speaks to the hopefulness of science fiction. The idea that there is something else out there implies that the situation here can potentially improve. Even the most grim dystopias are rarely without their redemptive escape hatch—a way out of the bind in which humanity has trapped itself.

And Lem: According to a new line of thought, space expeditions are actually futile, not only because of their danger but because relativity makes them “purveyors of dead information.” By the time the astronauts return to Earth the society that sent them is gone, and whatever world they discovered will have changed as well. Yet there are those who disagree: “And of what use was Amundsen’s expedition? Or Andree’s?” one characters asks. “The only clear benefit lay in the fact that they had proved a possibility.” Like George Mallory said of Everest, the reason to climb it is “because it’s there.”

See also.
posted by byanyothername (8 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite
 
One of the striking things about the MeFi favorite Cloud Atlas (the book, not the movie) was that it had no redemptive escape hatch. The world was well and truly fucked. But the structure of the book softened the blow, backing away slowly through time to a point where redemption seemed possible again, at least for a while. Adding an escape hatch to the film was necessary, I suppose, when they decided to change the structure, but I wouldn't go see the movie, that seemed like such a cop out (to say nothing of the yellowface problem).
posted by rikschell at 11:41 AM on May 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Kurt Vonnegut commencement speech Bennington college 1970;
"Everything is going to become unimaginably worse and never get better again."
posted by Alter Cocker at 11:58 AM on May 13, 2017 [6 favorites]


I think the redemptive escape hatch of Roadside Picnic is purely personal, as in, the only escape is the total annihilation of the self.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:35 PM on May 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I recently read an edition of "Roadside Picnic" with an afterword by Boris Strugatsky. He talked about how he was going to go into detail about how much trouble they had had publishing the novella and how they had to fight the Soviet literary system. He then talks about how when he was going over his notes he realized that none of these people matter anymore; that the entire system he had to fight is just gone and nobody remembers who any of these great and powerful figures who used to run it even were. Particularly after reading the novella, that struck me as quite beautiful.

I don't know if I can quite articulate my thoughts on the topic of dystopias and escape hatches. Certainly, I don't like either the redemptive escape hatch or the eternal, inescapable trap. Redemption is unsatisfying, it implies permanence, it's the end of the story. If we were ever redeemed we would soon have to be redeemed from redemption. And I think every post WW2 generation has thought themselves caught in one eternal trap or another. But time and tide just crumbling things until something new can be built out of the wreckage? That seems to happen pretty regularly. Certainly, things don't always get better, but they do always get different.

TheWhiteSkull: It's interesting you should say that, because I read it completely oppositely. I read it as the main character's redemption (and what makes him unique) is that he never has his self annihilated, no matter what he does or is responsible for, he still feels it, it still means something to him. I can't really talk about it more without spoilers though. I may also just be misreading your comment. I will agree that it's not made clear if its a good thing or a bad thing though,
posted by Grimgrin at 12:47 PM on May 13, 2017 [8 favorites]


the entire system he had to fight is just gone and nobody remembers who any of these great and powerful figures who used to run it even were.

Entropy is the ultimate escape hatch.
posted by hat_eater at 2:28 PM on May 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


These are really interesting thoughts, riskchell, Grimgrin. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle has to be another with no escape hatch; or the escape hatch is in Bokononism, which is to say deluding ourselves with beautiful fantasies. I have complex and ever-shifting thoughts on Bokononism, but I think it hits on something real and fundemental in that we need beautiful dreams in the face of the waking nightmares life throws at us. Lem's "Futurological Congress" and the film version seem to run with the Bokononist worldview to extremes even Vonnegut never followed.
posted by byanyothername at 2:42 PM on May 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


I worry the idea there's no escape hatch has itself become an ethical escape hatch for many.

I agree redemption as an absolute idea is specious, but redemption as the temporary resolution of a narrative until the next sequel or chapter doesn't seem problematic to me at all. I don't think the idea of redemption was ever previously understood to be a terminal state, just a stop on one leg of a larger journey that might take a different direction once the thread that led to a redemption of sorts ends.

Cynicism about the possibility of hope is nihilism. Nihilism is just Thanatos projected onto everyone and thing else, a form of defensive ego projection, I'd argue.

Calling the possibility of improvement hopeless is an awful lot like copping out because it's too hard to see what the answers might be, preemptively rationalizing failures as inevitable, the way conservatives do with the abstract idea of the possibility of good governance.
posted by saulgoodman at 2:59 PM on May 13, 2017 [11 favorites]


Thanks to the recent posts on Stalker/Roadside Picnic, I have read Roadside Picnic and am now reading The Dead Mountaineer's Inn. Really great stuff.

I have read most of what Lem wrote and there is another obvious parallel here. Lem wrote a detective novel too called The Investigation.

The book is really more of a meditation on knowledge and certainty. How do we know what we know? The mystery in the book is most easily explained if you are willing to agree that something supernatural is happening. It is the most obvious explanation - the evidence is before your eyes. The only alternative non-supernatural explanation involves an almost Rube Goldbergian series of unlikely but correlated events that it might be argued that a rational person would simply accept the supernatural explanation instead.
posted by vacapinta at 4:35 AM on May 15, 2017 [3 favorites]


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