The Man From Mars – Stanisław Lem | #language & literature

The Man From Mars – Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Lem’s literary debut, ‘The Man from Mars’ (1946) is a harbinger of extraordinary talent in the field of science fiction. In the book, the author considers the problem of establishing contact with a visitor from another planet. He also shows a fascination with the prose of H. G. Wells.

The main theme of The Man From Mars is a ‘war of the worlds’ waged by humans against an extra-terrestrial visitor. Stanisław Lem’s first literary work was published in the Nowy Świat Przygód (New World of Adventures) magazine in 1946. Long forgotten, it was not published in book form until 1994 by NOWA, an independent publishing house. Earlier, it had been available only in unofficial fanzine form.

In the novel, one can see period-typical anxieties about the future of the world, coming right after the carnage of World War II. These included fears about the dangers caused by access to nuclear weapons, whose tragic effects were revealed by the atomic hell of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this context, it was hard not to wonder about the participation and responsibility of the scientists involved in these projects, when their scientific efforts were placed in destructive hands.

Indeed, The Man From Mars does not lack an ideological layer, although the narrative is not too visibly lined with it. The first pages of the book do not announce a work of science fiction at all. The reader has the impression of being confronted with a thriller in which the main character – McMoore, an investigative reporter from Chicago lost in New York – by a strange twist of fate finds himself at the centre of events that surpass his previous experience and even his imagination.

The protagonist unwittingly becomes a hostage of a kind of secret brotherhood, de facto people of science, residing in a modern complex of hidden laboratories, where in hermetic isolation from everyday matters they deal with the challenge posed to them by an unexpected visit from an alien. On Earth – specifically in the United States – a capsule containing the newcomer landed, who became known as Areanthropos (‘area’ in Latin in combination with the Greek anthropos), but no one from the select group of world-class scientists knew his intentions, nor could guess what mission he arrived with. The first task of the insiders became an attempt to establish contact with the extra-terrestrial visitor.

McMoore, caught up in an unexpected situation – as an astute journalist he was well aware of its gravity – understood that he would not be leaving this place anytime soon. Swiftly sworn in – thus losing all hope of a sensational story on the front page of The New York Times – he was treated by the university and polytechnic geniuses as an additional participant in the experiments, with the possibility of taking the floor as an independent advisor. For the team of experts, the figure of the cyborg from outer space was initially just a mysterious entity to be deciphered in terms of the intentions on a planet alien to him: Earth.

Relatively quickly, with the help of the alien himself, it was established that he came to the New York area directly from Mars. He looked like a human-shaped robot, resembled a self-propelled machine with three snake-like limbs and – as it turned out – contained a hidden plasma centre, which resembled a human brain. Smelling the robot’s mouth, from which a whiff of the plasma centre emanated, gave an unusual impression, as described by the reporter:

I don’t know what happened to me. I first saw impossibly beautiful, hazy, slowly gliding circles. Then large and small tones went by, creating a beautiful harmony. It all merged into one stream of colour, light and scent, a scent neither fragrant nor pleasant – rather unpleasant, I would say now as I write to recall it – but the unpleasantness was sweet to the point of pain. It was a feeling of a strong and terribly violent life, offering pleasure from every beat of the heart, from the movement of the muscles, from the breath, all surrounded as if by a silken veil. But at the same time, I could see perfectly well what was going on around me, I felt that I was thinking as clearly as ever, that I was seeing as sharply and colourfully as if through a strange optical instrument – someone, it seems, an engineer, wanted to take the flask away from me. I squeezed it tightly as if to keep it, but then I felt slight inertia – I let it go...

What does this description remind us of? What else but the sessions conducted by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, experimenting on himself with peyote? Stanisław Lem, who modelled the character of the poet Sekułowski on Witkacy in his Hospital of the Transfiguration, was undoubtedly familiar with a collection of his essays entitled Narkotyki (Drugs), first published in 1932.

Further interference in the Martian’s body machinery demonstrated his unusual abilities. For example his flexible pipes – neither hands nor legs – could be used as suction cups or weapons, with blowers emitting a powerful wave of energy outside, annihilating the nearest targets.

Not all of the experimenters who treated the Martian came out of this confrontation unscathed. In the category of scientific miracles (if such things exist), one should include a successful attempt to extract a radioactive nucleus from the body of the humanoid machine, which mitigated the effects of the alien’s powers, but not entirely. It was still feared, and rightly so.

When read through the prism of Stanisław Lem’s later works, The Man From Mars shows some shortcomings, which the author himself has sometimes mentioned, not holding his debut novel in high esteem. However, it contains an extraordinary amount of ideas or motifs used by the writer many times in his subsequent books, which makes it important to every lover of science fiction literature – and Lem in particular– as a ‘mother-novel’ or a ‘key-work’. The main motif, to which the writer repeatedly returned, is the already mentioned attempt to build an appropriate language of communication with a being from outer space, and a certain framing device can be observed here. From the first novel The Man From Mars, through, for example, His Master’s Voice, to the last one significantly titled Fiasco, the author showed far-reaching scepticism about the success of this type of contact.

Moral dilemmas of scientists, for whom the progress of science and technology means participation in the creation of more and more perfect means of destruction, is another theme often present on the pages of subsequent books written by Lem. However, only in this isolated case of debut prose does the main brain behind the scientific team, Professor Widdleton, decide to irrevocably annihilate a dangerous extra-terrestrial. Maybe that’s why, from the very beginning, the author describes the head of the research team as an impertinent, devilishly stubborn, somewhat crazy old man, from whom it would be difficult to expect a different decision.

That being said, old Widdletton also had moments of human ‘weakness’ when explaining why the cyborg didn’t break him:

In my worst, hardest moment, I remembered who I am and who I love. Maybe that saved me? Because it takes some faith...if not in yourself, then outside of yourself... though it’s better to believe both in yourself and in others, to be able to accomplish something.

Some purely technical solutions in The Man From Mars are no longer used today, such as asbestos (due to its carcinogenic nature) which, however, saved the novel’s protagonists from burns. Other discoveries, on the contrary, foreshadowed the technology of the future: ‘An Areanthrope enters a kind of receiving camera made of some transparent substance and is sprayed into atoms in it... and the same Areanthrope is produced in the same (or the next?) moment, materialised at any distance. The condition is that there is a suitable apparatus nearby’. This resembles – not literally, of course – holograms.

Every lover of Lem’s works will find many more such tropes in The Man From Mars. This is why we reach for Stanisław Lem’s books so eagerly. We find in them not only the exoticism of cosmic adventures but, much more often, our own earthly threats, anxieties or fears.

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

stanisław lem

polish sci-fi literature

the man from mars

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