In this very respect – in irony and sarcasm – Lem came closest to Chandler. ‘You know, if you proceeded gradually, you could lead anyone – even the College of Cardinals – into the practice of cannibalism.’ Sciss’s words, uttered in a conversation with Gregory, best sum up the eternal, inexplicable drive of mankind towards self-destruction.
Once the race begins, it can't stop. It has to go on. If one side invents a big gun, the other retaliates with a bigger one. The sequence concludes only when there is a confrontation; that is, war. In this situation, however, confrontation would mean the end of the world; therefore, the race must be kept going. Once they begin to escalate their efforts, both sides are trapped in an arms race. There must be more and more improvements in weaponry, but after a certain point weapons reach their limit. What can be improved next? Brains. The brains that issue the commands. It isn't possible to make the human brain perfect, so the only alternative is a transition to mechanization.
More and more perfected electronic brains of two hostile systems will eventually demand an increase of their competencies. And then the Earth will become a chessboard and its inhabitants ‘pawns manipulated in an eternal game by two mechanical players’. An anti-utopia? If so, it is becoming more and more real. Dystopia.
In The Investigation, the author hid a parable about chaos, chance, statistics and the human need to search for order under the mask of a detective story. He explored an attempt to create order from seemingly random, trivial and imperfect events, because they are what make up the image of the world, history, cosmos.
A detective story is, by its very nature, a page-turner – solving a crime provides the reader with the kind of knowledge that constitutes informational ballast and usually discourages from re-reading the book. Fortunately, this is not the case with The Investigation and all other books by Stanisław Lem. They contain that edge, that valuable extra, which keeps them relevant.
Originally written in Polish by Janusz R. Kowalczyk, translated into English by Patryk Grabowski, Sep 2021
Stanisław Lem,
The Investigation,
HARCOURT BRACE & CO, 1986,
English translation: Adele Milch,
number of pages: 224,
ISBN 0156451581