When the pile of coins became large enough, the inevitable chain reaction occurred, the palace with its cruel occupant exploded, and the six hundred severed hands of the oppressor formed a spinning ring around the planet Aktynuria. It was ruled by the liberated Pyron, welcomed as a good and just ruler. Kosmogonik, in turn, returned to his proper work of brightening the stars.
In Uranium Ears, as in the rest of Fables for Robots and in many of Lem’s other stories and novels, the clash between the forces of good and evil is actually a duel between wisdom and stupidity. As in the folk tales, the evil rulers are humiliated and punished – sometimes even annihilated – and the highest office of the state or planet passes into the hands of the righteous hero, chosen from among the oppressed subjects.
An indispensable role is also played by someone who becomes a catalyst for change, a sort of ‘lone ranger’ – in Uranium Ears, it is the engineer Kosmogonik – in a word, a competent personality and a representative of technological progress. Basically nothing is impossible for him, which allows young readers (Fables for Robots, The Cyberiad and Tales of Pirx the Pilot made it to the compulsory reading list for Polish students) to identify not so much with a mythical character as with a completely real one. Working on scientific or constructive issues is presented here not as taboo, but, on the contrary, as a promising adventure, or even an invitation for teenage students to experiment wisely, under the supervision of an experienced master, of course.
Under the guise of a game, the writer encourages school children to think responsibly and civically; he appeals to their creativity. He ignites young imaginations not with fairy-tale charms, but with an encouragement to voluntarily expand their knowledge to produce real results. In a word, it mobilises the young generation to solve new challenges with the help of constant scientific progress.
There is also a place for the apotheosis of courage: Lem has shown the opportunities that come with civil disobedience or even – when the situation requires it – rebellion. For no one has the right to play with anyone’s fate, according to these or other, imaginary values, if he evidently causes harm to someone by doing so. The laws of logic are as merciless as those of physics – every action is accompanied by a reaction, i.e. ‘When force is used, with force respond and wrath; While young, upon our frailty wage a war’ – as our young bard Adam Mickiewicz appealed to his peers in situations of enslavement.
In Stanisław Lem’s writing one can already sense, from his early works, an overwhelming desire to convey – always in as comprehensible a form as possible – the manifold aspects of our reality, which both the author and his readers may not necessarily have liked. The transfer of the well-known attributes of governance – enslavement, tyranny, abuse of power, hatred or greed – beyond the geopolitical system of the Earth necessarily had to be associated by the readers (and still are) with practices quite close to their personal feelings. The lack of freedom of speech, characteristic of totalitarian regimes, forced (and still forces) the necessity of masking one's true intentions, which in the case of the writer meant using a clever enough meta-language to avoid any interference from the censor.
Stanisław Lem was a grandmaster of intelligent camouflage. However, if someone points to those fragments of his prose, in which he criticised the Western world for intolerance, or, for example, for the ruthless rule of the sharks of big capital, who dictate conditions to the rest of ordinary citizens, it is enough to ask such a critic to look at it with the eye of a reader who is at least somewhat familiar with the writer’s perverse game with the state. The contrast between the model of governing in the Western countries criticised by Lem and the so-called Eastern bloc democracies was so significant that no reasonable person could accuse Lem of an attack on that officially wrong-perceived reality, but de facto compared it to the methods of decision making of the ‘elites’ from his immediate environment.
Lem should not be read literally. The author of Uranium Ears, writing about imaginary worlds in a fairy-tale form, could hardly be accused of distorting reality – he was free to do so, and the censors never found a way around him. This is also the strength of his original, ever-present writing.