Peace on Earth – Stanisław Lem | #language & literature

Peace on Earth – Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Lem's penultimate novel 'Peace on Earth' (1984) is part of his anti-utopian deliberations on universal disarmament. Although the military arsenals of several world powers were shipped to the moon, this did not end the intelligence operations on our planet.

Peace on Earth is also the last volume of the adventures of Ijon Tichy, a character known from a series of Lem’s earlier short stories and novels: The Star Diaries, Tales of Pirx the Pilot, The Futurological Congress and The Scene of the Crime. This time, Commander Tichy undertook an expedition to the Moon to better understand the relations in various military sectors. And despite the top-secret nature of his dangerous mission, enough information was leaked that he only miraculously survived two assassination attempts, both before the rocket launch and after his return to Earth.

The mission was fully accomplished, although his employers encountered serious difficulties in extracting valuable information from the Commander. He had inadvertently crossed the safety zone on the moon for a moment, causing him to be irradiated in a peculiar way. The information he had gathered during his mission became stratified and difficult to access. The paralysis of one of the vital organs of the brain caused irreparable damage – the records of the left and right cerebral hemispheres were disconnected and because of that he was only able to provide a flawed mission report that did not yield the expected value.

‘Our brains all have two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum or great commissure. Two hundred million white nerve fibres connect the brain so it can put its thoughts together but not in my case,’ confessed Tichy, who – as in each of the previous stories starring himself – is also the narrator of Peace on Earth. The most difficult thing about his condition was that his body created serious problems for him in everyday life, as the left side of his body sabotaged the efforts of the right side. For example, his left hand immediately snatched a typewritten page meticulously written out with his right hand from the typewriter roller and passionately destroyed it, whilst an unruly leg, also located on the same side of the body, could kick his immediate supervisor or, for example, a scientist who was occupied with studying the astronaut’s condition.

In this aspect of the novel’s narrative one can see Stanisław Lem’s references to his medical education, but this is not the only reflection of the deep and multidirectional knowledge the writer presented both in Peace on Earth and in his other works. The author’s genius encompassed a wide spectrum of meticulous, almost university-level knowledge of scientific disciplines, beginning with astronomy, through mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, anthropology, history, to philosophy, religious studies, etc., etc. This knowledge permeates the text, for example, in the case of a casual conversation between the pilot’s ground controllers and himself, when it turned out that the armchair on which he was sitting 'was riddled with sensors that analysed […] reactions, through microscopic changes in muscle tension, to […] key stimulus words'.

No nation or coalition of nations could be allowed to learn the results of the lunar reconnaissance, assuming it succeeded, because whoever knew the state of the weapons there first would gain, by that strategic information, immediate supremacy on Earth. The peace, in other words, was far from idyllic.

Thus, before the benevolent scientists released Ijon into space, they dissected his brain. This, of course, happened before his mission, but after the pilot's return they adopted a different tactic: since Commander Tichy's brain still retained defence-related-relevant information, although he himself could not articulate it, the knowledge had to be guarded with their life, so that he himself – or just the contents of his skull – did not fall into the wrong hands of an army of ubiquitous enemy intelligence agents.

Stanislaw Lem would not be himself if, aside from the praise of the latest technological achievements, he did not notice this or that defect of the introduced improvements. Ever since computers’ abilities exceeded the capacity and capabilities of human minds, what usually failed were the operators, that is humans. Sometimes it was just ordinary carelessness, which resulted in very unpleasant consequences.

All it took was for a technician's pipe cleaner to accidentally find its way into the cocoon of cables and equipment in which Ijon was wrapped. Pressed into a spacesuit, the small object made it impossible for the pilot to move forward without feeling an increasing tingling sensation in his leg, which, of course, could have been detrimental to the plan's success. Fortunately, the Commander handled the episode with his innate perverse sense of humour: 'It was I who discovered Tichy’s Law, which says that the first itch occurs in a place on the body you can’t possibly reach'.

A much more serious problem was caused by human anatomy, not entirely adapted to cosmic conditions: 'The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn’t mention it'. The trivial problem was solved only by computer-controlled devices, cleverly called defecators.

As always with Lem, Peace on Earth announces future technologies that may soon (hopefully not!) become reality. The writer, however, is sceptical about the methods of their application since, for various more or less explainable reasons, they are used most actively by the military industry. However, the progress of science cannot be stopped, so it is hard not to reckon with the far-reaching consequences of the miniaturisation of weaponry.

It is no longer the atom, nor hydrogen, nor the power of increasingly powerful cannons and missiles that plays a significant role in the fights of opposing states or military alliances. Following the example of quickly recovering insect populations, which come out almost unscathed from various climate or natural disasters, military engineering has turned to the production of hard-to-track and stop clouds of billions of micro-props, as Stanisław Lem called the moving micro-automata. These insect-like inventions are capable of squeezing through the tiniest gaps to merge into whatever they were designed to be, such as a centaur, as in the novel, or a more complex machine bringing death and havoc. This state of affairs, by the way, ceases to be novelistic fiction and slowly, almost before our eyes, becomes reality.

In Peace on Earth, the author refers to his earlier novels. For example, in The Invincible a cloud of micro-automata destroyed the contents of the brains of all living beings. In turn, in Memoirs Found in a Bathtub a virulent bacterium decomposed paper, and therefore everything that was written on it. Yet another invention is the so-called remote control mentioned in Peace on Earth, i.e. an automaton filled with electronics that perfectly performs in the place of a human being, and from a safe distance, the activities that he himself would prefer to avoid (we already have, for example, a remote device for disarming explosive devices).

Leaving aside, however, the purely technical solutions to the issues connected with space missions, one cannot forget that Lem’s novel provides not only a large dose of emotions as the adventurous thriller it is but also important reflections of a strictly ethical nature. Commander Ijon Tichy’s disability, acquired during the journey to the lunar training ground, caused him to be seen as little more than a hard drive containing valuable information, but with no one able to crack its code. Presumably this is the only reason why the protagonist of the novel has not been eliminated by hostile forces, including, unfortunately, his own employers.

If he had completed his mission with a full report, as a man still in possession of equally priceless knowledge, he would not have been able to move freely on our planet. Fortunately for him, his superiors failed to fully exploit him, saving him from inevitable annihilation. There is probably no greater injustice on this best of worlds, when the reward for a job well done is death at the hands of the former patrons.

Fleeing from his enemies as well as from his employers, Ijon Tichy systematically pursued the essence of things, as much as his callosotomy allowed him to. The multi-layered masquerade of appearances or games in which he was entangled surpassed all his previous adventures. The thing is, however, that a much greater threat to him was not the conquest of outer space, but an attempt at a relatively peaceful life on Earth, which – for the time being – should give us something to think about.

Stanislaw Lem, Peace on Earth, Harvest/HBJ Book, 2002, English translation: Elinor Ford with Michael Kandel, format: 123 x 197 mm, binding: soft with wings, number of pages: 240, ISBN: 9780156028141

stanisław lem

Peace on Earth

polish sci-fi literature

sci-fi

futurology