Fiasco – Stanisław Lem | #language & literature

Fiasco – Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Lem devoted his last novel 'Fiasco' to the problem of establishing contact with a civilisation located on a distant planet. However, despite various forms of persuasion, including forceful confrontation, the 'brethren in intellect' do not take up the challenge. For the Earthlings, they remain impenetrable.

The history of this book is interesting. It was first published in German by S. Fischer Verlag in 1986. In Poland, it was published a year later by Wydawnictwo Literackie.

The novel refers in some parts to Stanisław Lem’s earlier works. In terms of its subject matter, it is connected with the Tales of Pirx the Pilot series. The author also used a significant fragment of his novella The Crystal Ball from the collection Sesame and Other Stories, as well as an unfinished story about Pirx entitled Birnam Forest, which became the first chapter of Fiasco.

The protagonist of the novel, Angus Parvis, lands on Titan, a moon of Saturn, where he has rushed to the rescue of mine builders – doing so also in the hope of finding his space mentor, Commander Pirx, recently lost on the same mission. In a perilous trek across unknown terrain, it only takes a small mistake for Parvis to succumb to a voluntary process of automatic hibernation. A century later, the body of one of the astronauts sleeping on Titan is unfrozen, but it is impossible to establish his identity (Pirx? Parvis?), so he is given a new name: Mark Tempe (a nod to Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: his work Farewell to Autumn featured a character named Sajetan, and The Shoemakers featured Sajetan Tempe and Józek Tempe).

Mark Tempe joins the crew of a spaceship heading for an unknown extra-terrestrial civilisation on the planet Quinta. And it was he who had the honour of direct contact with the planet’s inhabitants. However, the fundamental divergence in the biological and cultural nature of the Quintans and Earthlings doomed the noble mission of communication between the two cosmic intelligences, because 'we lack standards to measure and evaluate, particularly in the case of other beings on another world in another period of history different from our own'.

The plot of Lem’s final novel is, of course, set in the distant future – in times of radical scientific progress and the highest technological advancement. Cosmonauts travelled in ships powered by photon energy, as well as thermonuclear propulsion. Their onboard equipment was controlled by electron brains equipped with processors of so-called ultimate computing power, as no other computer could have more.

Even if the members of the crew used the help of the most powerful digital machines, it did not change the fact that these machines were made to serve a human who was far less efficient in his reactions. Therefore, in the novel we can feel a kind of tension between some of the participants of the expedition and the soulless automaton, which suggested options to solve the emerging problem without a shred of emotion, usually in several variants. The choice of the right way out from an oppressive situation rested, therefore, on the brain of a very fallible man – exploring the cosmos more and more boldly, as if the place where he comes from was not enough.

Each landscape on Earth is arranged with a purpose in mind because everything on the planet has a utilitarian sense. Certainly it was not always this way, but billions of years of organic work have left its mark: so there are colours of flowers which attract insects and clouds that pour rain on pastures and forests. Every form and thing is explained by someone’s benefit, and what is openly devoid of such benefit, like Antarctica’s glaciers or mountain ranges, is a desert enclave, an exception from the rule. A wild, though perhaps beautiful wasteland, but not for certain – because man, having taken upon himself to turn the course of rivers in order to make the waterless drought more fertile, or warming the poles, has paid for the improvement of some areas with the steppe-formation of others, and has thus upset the climatic balance of the biosphere, regulated by the evolutionary toil of life with only apparent crudeness.

The writer warns incorrigible Earthlings that ‘technology was a domain of fatal traps and whoever entered there could easily come to a bad end. Intelligent Beings were able to see this threat, but only when it was too late’. There are, in fact, many more threats to the functional stability of human beings in this novel. One of them is that the more and more precise technologies pose a danger of the Adamic people falling into mental laziness, because if machines calculate everything better and faster than a living being, then why should we, the little ones, calculate at all?

In this context, the skirmish between the human brain (of astronaut Mark Tempe) and the electronic brain (of the DEUS computer, the Digital Engrammic Universal System) was intriguing.

'Are you one of those phenomenal number wizards?' asked DEUS.

'No. I come from a time when calculations were also made without computers. Or sometimes one had to proceed 'not by π but by eye'. Anyone who couldn't do that in my profession died young. Why are you silent?'

'What am I supposed to say?'

'That you are not infallible.'

'I am not.'

'And that you have no business being called DEUS.'

'I did not name myself.'

The Man remains the final authority in the implementation and operation of all technological processes – until something gets out of his control, of course. Therefore, the methods of his conduct are modelled according to the standards and experiences of Earth. Thus, the manual of the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to a large extent resembled the template of promotional or presidential campaigns well-known to us, with directives that the message reach almost every inhabitant of the planet, 'so that no region, no continent, would be privileged or omitted'.

In anticipation of a possible attack from the surface of a planet chosen by the Earthlings (and visited without invitation, one should add), it was ordered to jam enemy radio waves at lightning speed, which, by the way, had its bright sides (Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920), but also dark sides (noise while listening to 'hostile' Western radio stations in the times of the People's Republic of Poland) in our history. In turn, the Latin motto of the royal Stuart dynasty in Scotland: Nemo me impune lacessit (No one harasses me with impunity) – otherwise familiar to cosmonauts from the short story The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe – justified the possibility of retaliatory steps. The problem is that the Quintans were not the provocateurs, which the participants of the supposedly peaceful mission did not take into account at all.

Despite the declaration that 'It's not blows we came here to exchange, but information' with another civilisation, the cosmic mission was irrevocably heading towards the colonial conquests known from the history of the Earth globe. 'We became mass murderers according to the maxim of a certain Italian heretic: 'Because of excess virtue the forces of hell prevail'. 'In this statement of one of the crew members an attentive reader of the books will notice another literary reference by Stanisław Lem, this time to the acclaimed historical novel The Name of the Rose, the last chapter of which the author, Umberto Eco, entitled as follows: 'Night. In which the ekpyrosis takes place, and because of excess virtue the forces of hell prevail.'.

Father Arago, the Vatican envoy and also a medic, takes part in the expedition, and although he is not a member of the crew, he does not spare his remarks, which are, generally, conciliatory and common-sense: 'Killing, we save no one, we save nothing'. However, it was not the clergyman but co-pilot Mark Tempe who came up with the idea of a kind of bible pauperum for Quintans, i.e. projecting onto the cloud layers surrounding the planet images or films showing – in a somewhat cartoonish form of a fairy tale – ‘where we are from and where we are going’. The reaction of the other astronauts was reserved at first: 'If the idea isn't imbecilic, it's brilliant.'

Unfortunately, the magical tale about the past and present actions of the Earthlings did not make the expected impression on the Quintans. Could it be because it was followed by forceful blackmail by the uninvited newcomers? Probably the hosts did not notice this subtlety, that in the long tradition of the planet Earth, any ideological offensive is usually followed by a military one.

In his last novel Fiasco Stanisław Lem left us, the inhabitants of the planet Earth, a clear message. Before we start boasting about our achievements in front of other intelligent beings – in the cosmos or in the county – let’s deal with our own problems in our own, strongly backward, xenophobic backyard. And instead of imposing our point of view on others, let’s at least try to listen to them, and maybe even understand them; we certainly won’t lose anything in the process.

Stanislaw Lem, Fiasco, Translation: Michael Kandel, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, number of pages: 322, ISBN: 978-0-15-130640-4

Originally written in Polish by Janusz Kowalczyk, translated into English by P. Grabowski, October 2021

stanisław lem

polish literature

polish sci-fi literature

futurology