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From the 1950s, science fiction writer Stanis\u0142aw Lem began firing out prescient explorations of our present and far beyond. His vision is proving unparalleled.
\nFor New Scientist, 16 November 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u201cPOSTED everywhere on street corners, the idiot irresponsibles twitter supersonic approval, repeating slogans, giggling, dancing\u2026\u201d So it goes in William Burroughs\u2019s novel\u00a0The<\/i>\u00a0Soft Machine<\/i>\u00a0(1961). Did he predict social media? If so, he joins a large and mostly deplorable crowd of lucky guessers. Did you know that in Robert Heinlein\u2019s 1948 story\u00a0Space Cadet<\/em>, he invented microwave food? Do you care?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more to futurology than guesswork, of course, and not all predictions are facile. Writing in the 1950s, Ray Bradbury predicted earbud headphones and elevator muzak, and foresaw the creeping eeriness of today\u2019s media-saturated shopping mall culture. But even Bradbury\u2019s guesses \u2013 almost everyone\u2019s guesses, in fact \u2013 tended to exaggerate the contemporary moment. More TV! More suburbia! Videophones and cars with no need of roads. The powerful, topical visions of writers like Frederik Pohl and Arthur C. Clarke are visions of what the world would be like if the 1950s (the 1960s, the 1970s\u2026) went on forever.<\/p>\n
And that is why Stanis\u0142aw Lem, the Polish satirist, essayist, science fiction writer and futurologist, had no time for them. \u201cMeaningful prediction,\u201d he wrote, \u201cdoes not lie in serving up the present larded with startling improvements or revelations in lieu of the future.\u201d He wanted more: to grasp the human adventure in all its promise, tragedy and grandeur. He devised whole new chapters to the human story, not happy endings.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\nAnd, as far as I can tell, Lem got everything \u2013\u00a0everything<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 right. Less than a year before Russia and the US played their game of nuclear chicken over Cuba, he nailed the rational madness of cold-war policy in his book\u00a0Memoirs Found in a Bathtub<\/em>\u00a0(1961). And while his contemporaries were churning out dystopias in the Orwellian mould, supposing that information would be tightly controlled in the future, Lem was conjuring with the internet (which did not then exist), and imagining futures in which important facts are carried away on a flood of falsehoods, and our civic freedoms along with them. Twenty years before the term \u201cvirtual reality\u201d appeared, Lem was already writing about its likely educational and cultural effects. He also coined a better name for it: \u201cphantomatics\u201d. The books on genetic engineering passing my desk for review this year have, at best, simply reframed ethical questions Lem set out in\u00a0Summa Technologiae<\/em>\u00a0back in 1964 (though, shockingly, the\u00a0book was not translated into English<\/a>\u00a0until 2013). He dreamed up all the usual nanotechnological fantasies, from spider silk space-elevator cables to\u00a0catastrophic \u201cgrey goo\u201d<\/a>, decades before they entered the public consciousness. He wrote about the technological singularity \u2013 the idea that artificial superintelligence would spark runaway technological growth \u2013 before Gordon Moore had even had the chance to cook up his \u201claw\u201d about the exponential growth of computing power. Not every prediction was serious. Lem coined the phrase \u201cTheory of Everything\u201d, but only so he could point at it and laugh.<\/p>\n
He was born on 12 September 1921 in Lw\u00f3w, Poland (now Lviv in Ukraine). His abiding concern was the way people use reason as a white stick as they steer blindly through a world dominated by chance and accident. This perspective was acquired early, while he was being pressed up against a wall by the muzzle of a Nazi machine gun \u2013 just one of several narrow escapes. \u201cThe difference between life<\/a>\u00a0and death depended upon\u2026 whether one went to visit a friend at 1 o\u2019clock or 20 minutes later,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n
Though a keen engineer and inventor \u2013 in school he dreamed up the differential gear and was disappointed to find it already existed \u2013 Lem\u2019s true gift lay in understanding systems. His finest childhood invention was a complete state bureaucracy, with internal passports and an impenetrable central office.<\/p>\n
He found the world he had been born into absurd enough to power his first novel (Hospital of the Transfiguration<\/em>, 1955), and might never have turned to science fiction had he not needed to leap heavily into metaphor to evade the attentions of Stalin\u2019s literary censors. He did not become really productive until 1956, when Poland enjoyed a post-Stalinist thaw, and in the 12 years following he wrote 17 books, among them\u00a0Solaris<\/em>\u00a0(1961), the work for which he is best known by English speakers.<\/p>\n
Solaris<\/i>\u00a0is the story of a team of distraught experts in orbit around an inscrutable and apparently sentient planet, trying to come to terms with its cruel gift-giving (it insists on \u201cresurrecting\u201d their dead).\u00a0Solaris<\/i>\u00a0reflects Lem\u2019s pessimistic attitude to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It\u2019s not that alien intelligences aren\u2019t out there, Lem says, because they almost certainly are. But they won\u2019t be\u00a0our<\/i>\u00a0sort of intelligences. In the struggle for control over their environment they may as easily have chosen to ignore communication as respond to it; they might have decided to live in a fantastical simulation rather than take their chances any longer in the physical realm; they may have solved the problems of their existence to the point at which they can dispense with intelligence entirely; they may be stoned out of their heads. And so on ad infinitum. Because the universe is so much bigger than all of us, no matter how rigorously we test our vaunted gift of reason against it, that reason is still something we made \u2013 an artefact, a crutch. As Lem made explicit in one of his last novels,\u00a0Fiasco<\/em>\u00a0(1986), extraterrestrial versions of reason and reasonableness may look very different to our own.<\/p>\n
Lem understood the importance of history as no other futurologist ever has. What has been learned cannot be unlearned; certain paths, once taken, cannot be retraced. Working in the chill of the cold war, Lem feared that our violent and genocidal impulses are historically constant, while our technical capacity for destruction will only grow.<\/p>\n
Should we find a way to survive our own urge to destruction, the challenge will be to handle our success. The more complex the social machine, the more prone it will be to malfunction. In his hard-boiled postmodern detective story\u00a0The Chain of Chance<\/em>\u00a0(1975), Lem imagines a very near future that is crossing the brink of complexity, beyond which forms of government begin to look increasingly impotent (and yes, if we\u2019re still counting, it\u2019s here that he makes yet another on-the-money prediction by describing the marriage of instantly accessible media and global terrorism).<\/p>\n
Say we make it. Say we become the masters of the universe, able to shape the material world at will: what then? Eventually, our technology will take over completely from slow-moving natural selection, allowing us to re-engineer our planet and our bodies. We will no longer need to borrow from nature, and will no longer feel any need to copy it.<\/p>\n
At the extreme limit of his futurological vision, Lem imagines us abandoning the attempt to understand our current reality in favour of building an entirely new one. Yet even then we will live in thrall to the contingencies of history and accident. In Lem\u2019s \u201creview\u201d of the fictitious Professor Dobb\u2019s book\u00a0Non Serviam<\/em>, Dobb, the creator, may be forced to destroy the artificial universe he has created \u2013 one full of life, beauty and intelligence \u2013 because his university can no longer afford the electricity bills.\u00a0Let\u2019s hope we\u2019re not living in such a simulation<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Most futurologists are secret utopians: they want history to end. They want time to come to a stop; to author a happy ending. Lem was better than that. He wanted to see what was next, and what would come after that, and after that, a thousand, ten thousand years into the future. Having felt its sharp end, he knew that history was real, that the cause of problems is solutions, and that there is no perfect world, neither in our past nor in our future, assuming that we have one.<\/p>\n
By the time he died in 2006, this acerbic, difficult, impatient writer who gave no quarter to anyone \u2013 least of all his readers \u2013 had sold close to 40 million books in more than 40 languages, and earned praise from futurologists such as Alvin Toffler of\u00a0Future Shock<\/i>\u00a0fame, scientists from Carl Sagan to Douglas Hofstadter, and philosophers from Daniel Dennett to Nicholas Rescher.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur situation, I would say,\u201d\u00a0Lem once wrote<\/a>, \u201cis analogous to that of a savage who, having discovered the catapult, thought that he was already close to space travel.\u201d Be realistic, is what this most fantastical of writers advises us. Be patient. Be as smart as you can possibly be. It\u2019s a big world out there, and you have barely begun.<\/p>\n
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From the 1950s, science fiction writer Stanis\u0142aw Lem began firing out prescient explorations of our present and far beyond. His vision is proving unparalleled. For New Scientist, 16 November 2016 \u201cPOSTED everywhere on street corners, the idiot irresponsibles twitter supersonic … Continue reading