A Man in a High Castle

March 16, 2022 3:46 AM

A Holocaust Survivor's Hardboiled Science Fiction [ungated] - "Though he rarely discussed them, Stanisław Lem's experiences in wartime Poland weighed on him and affected his stories." (previously)

Lem turned eighteen in September, 1939, the month that Germany invaded Poland, setting off the Second World War. He had a brand-new driver’s license and was planning to attend engineering school, but, within days, Lwów was beset by both German and Soviet troops. Because Hitler and Stalin had just signed a non-aggression pact, with secret provisions divvying up Eastern Europe, a German bombardment of the city was followed by a Soviet occupation. The Soviets deported and later secretly executed many of Lwów’s defenders, and, in the following months, the N.K.V.D., the Soviet secret police, arrested thousands of the city’s élite, mostly ethnic Poles. Historians estimate that while the Soviets were occupying eastern Poland they deported a million and a half residents. An N.K.V.D. officer was boarded in the Lem family home, and whenever the Lems noticed him hard at work they warned friends to hide.

1921 - "Stanislaw Lem was born in Lwow, Poland (presently Lviv, Ukraine) to a family of a wealthy laryngologist."[1]

Lem about Himself (Highcastle) - "A fragment of Highcastle."[2]

Norbert Wiener begins his autobiography with the words "I was a child prodigy." What I would have to say is "I was a monster." Possibly that's a slight exaggeration, but as a young boy I certainly terrorized those around me. I would agree only if my father stood on the table and opened and closed an umbrella, or I might allow myself to be fed only under the table.

I don't actually remember these things; they are beginnings that lie beyond the boundary of memory. If I was a child prodigy, it could only have been in the eyes of doting aunts. (...) In my fourth year I learned to write, but had nothing of great importance to communicate by that means. The first letter I wrote to my father, from Skole, having gone there with my mother, was a terse account of how all by myself I defecated in a country outhouse that had a board with a hole. What I left out of my report was that in addition I threw into that hole all the keys of our host, who also was a physician...

The Art of Conjecturing - "The young Lem never tried to produce the blank form granting full authorization hidden in the files of the High Castle, but its inscrutable and ultimately inaccessible power would find many analogs in his mature fiction, from the mysterious, living sea in Solaris to the uninterpretable message from space in His Master's Voice. But these vacant symbols, which at first seem capable of authorizing anything, invariably end up as the screens upon which characters project the content of their own minds. So it is with the void to which Lem returned again and again, the emptiest and most promising of all — the future."[3]

Imagining the future is always a political act. Though the future Lem considers is only tangentially concerned with politics, there are polemical undertones to his sense of its radical contingency and its tendency to escape the control of would-be architects. “In trying to contain self-induced oscillations of a system by force,” he remarks, “one is abandoning the principle of homeostasis, since the system’s self-organization is replaced with violence. This is how historical forms of power, such as tyranny, absolutism, fascism, and so on, came about”. Lem, born to parents with Jewish ancestry in Poland in 1921, had firsthand experience of the ways in which historical actors might attempt to shape a system by means of violence. He survived the Nazi occupation of Poland with the help of forged identity papers, documents that surely haunt his later memories of his childhood experiments in bureaucratic invention. His relation to the Communist state that followed was troubled, in part because of the very ideas that form the core of Summa Technologiae: the scientific newsletter for which he wrote in the late forties was penalized for his critique of Lysenkoism, the officially-sanctioned account of evolution that briefly replaced Darwinian theory, while his interest in cybernetics preceded political acceptance of the field. At the same time, his sense of the transformative implications of technology for social structure is indebted to Marxist theory, “But what causes the transformation of social systems?” he asks, in order to reply, “We know that a change to the means of production, that is, to technologies, is its driving force”.

• Two by Stanisław Lem: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow - "Stanisław Lem's works of short fiction were laboratories in which various futures were put to the test."
• Humanity Is Stupid, Helpless and Possibly Worth Saving - "Two new editions of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem's work showcase his singular imagination."
• Paul Di Filippo Reviews Stanisław Lem's The Truth and Other Stories - "This is a treasure-rich discovery akin to finding an unpublished novel by Sturgeon, some heretofore-unseen Hainish stories by Le Guin, or maybe a lost mainstream manuscript by Philip K. Dick. (I ring in PKD here ironically, given the weird imbroglio between him and Lem, which you can read about here.)"[4]

Chance and Order - "IN 1946, we—my father, my mother, and I—moved from Lvov to Krakow, having lost all our possessions in the course of the war. My father, who was seventy-one years old, was forced, because of these reverses, to work in a hospital; there was no possibility that he could set up his own practice. We all lived in a single room in Krakow, and my father didn't have the means to buy his own equipment. Purely by chance, I learned how I could financially help our family: I wrote several long stories for a weekly dime-novel series that featured a complete story in each issue..."

That chance played a role in my life is undeniable. In the First World War, when the fortress of Przemysl fell, in 1915, my father, Samuel Lem, a physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was taken prisoner by the Russians, and was able to return to Lemberg (now Lvov), his native city, only after nearly five years, in the wake of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. I know from the stories he told us that on at least one occasion he was to be shot by the Reds on the spot for being an officer (and therefore a class enemy). He owed his life to the fact that when he was being led to his execution in a small Ukrainian city he was noticed and recognized from the sidewalk by a Jewish barber from Lemberg who used to shave the military commander in that city and for this reason had free access to him. The barber interceded for my father (who was then not yet my father), and he was allowed to go free, and was able to return to Lemberg and to his fiancee. (This story, made more complex for aesthetic reasons, is to be found in one of the fictitious reviews—of “De Impossibilitate Vitae”, by Cezar Kouska—in my book “A Perfect Vacuum”.)

Feci, quod potui, faciant meliora potentes - "I did what I could, whoever can, let him do better."

posted by kliuless (13 comments total)

I just finished Solaris yesterday, I highly recommend Audible’s recording, narrated expertly by Allessandro Juliani (who played Lt. Gaeta in Battlestar Galactica). There’s certainly a critique to be made through a feminist lens about it, but the story was gripping.

I’ve already got Cyberiad queued up next.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:07 AM on March 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

narrated expertly by Allessandro Juliani
whoa that's so cool
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 7:19 AM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh it looks like the audible Solaris is the new translation; that's awesome! Previously the English Solaris was a translation of the French translation.

I highly recommend 'The Futurological Congress,' after the Cyberiad. It's by far the zaniest Lem I've read. (It was also kinda adapted into a deeply weird movie with Robin Wright playing herself.)
posted by kaibutsu at 7:37 AM on March 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yes, the Johnston translation is a good 'un (as far as I can tell, I can barely read Polish).

The chapter on the history of Solaristics Kelvin flips through when he's bored is one of my favorite bits of world-building ever.
posted by Earthtopus at 7:40 AM on March 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Another centenary tribute: Jonathan Lethem, My Year of Reading Lemmishly (LRB 10 Feb 2022).
posted by verstegan at 8:58 AM on March 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

A Perfect Vacuum is a collection of reviews of non-existent books. His review of Being, Inc. uses the word elephantiasis in a way that I'd never seen before nor since, but it is a beautiful metaphor for a specific feeling I have. I've never forgotten it and never will.
posted by hypnogogue at 10:21 AM on March 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Philip K. Dick was a dick. This wasn’t even his only FBI snitch letter — he also wrote one about science fiction writer Thomas Disch about his novel Camp Concentration, which is a bit of a Thomas Mann pastiche.
posted by larrybob at 10:29 AM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I believe PKD accused Fredric Jameson (the Marxist literary/cultural theorist) of being both a Commie infiltrator and one of the Lem-committee.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:23 AM on March 16, 2022

While many folks rightly hail Arthur C. Clarke for his prescience -- geosynchronous satellites, for example -- relatively few give Lem his due for things he foresaw accurately. For example, Stanislaw Lem is probably the first science-fiction author to mention tablets:

"Stanisław Lem was probably the first sci-fi writer to accurately predict the end of paper books and the arrival of electronic formats and e-book readers. He did so in his 1961 novel Return from the Stars, some 40 years ahead of any first attempts with e-paper. Lem imagined e-books as little memory crystals which could be loaded onto a device, eerily reminiscent of contemporary tablets. He called it an ‘opton’, but most of us today call it a Kindle."

That's something often incorrectly attributed to Star Trek. I often wonder how much of an inspiration he had on Star Trek's writers and designers, because it seems like a lot of the devices he described were used as props on the show.

Smartphones, 3D printing, even the Internet -- all things that Lem mentioned long before they came into being. He was a fantastic writer with a fantastic vision.
posted by wolpfack at 1:28 PM on March 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Since I read it a few years ago, I've been trying to get everyone to read The Invincible: it's a frighteningly plausible portrait of a world over-run/ populated by nano-bots.I currently have a copy of The Futurological Congress on my night stand. It is a hoot.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:55 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

The New Yorker piece was cool. For one thing, you don't usually see New Yorker pieces in this style or format. It's sort of just a list of Lem books, interspersed with solitary anecdotes. This list and anecdotes add up to contextualizing Lem within his Jewishness and within the holocaust and the communist regimes that followed. I like that Caleb Crain. I also found the suppressed Judaism of Lem quite resonant for my experience of my family members both Jewish and non of a certain age, and the stew of repression, assimilation, internalized anti-semitism and trauma that created vast oceans of emanating silence very familiar.
posted by latkes at 10:36 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Memoirs Found In A Bathtub is a slightly obscure Lem book I've always loved that may particularly pertinent to this post.
posted by kyrademon at 7:17 PM on March 17, 2022

Just finished reading The Invincible. I'm not sure if call it 'plausible' exactly but it is completely terrifying. About halfway through the book I was thinking they needed to place a probe orbiting the planet sending a continuous message along the lines of 'this is not a place of honor...'
posted by kaibutsu at 8:08 PM on March 19, 2022 [1 favorite]