From archive (archive) From: ecl@mtgzy.UUCP (Evelyn C. Leeper) Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ Subject: A PERFECT VACUUM/ONE HUMAN MINUTE by S. Lem Date: 23 Jan 88 01:14:37 GMT A PERFECT VACUUM by Stanislaw Lem Translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971 (1978, 1979), 0-15-671686-0, $3.95. ONE HUMAN MINUTE by Stanislaw Lem Translated from the Polish by Catherine S. leach Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985 (1986), 0-15-668795-X, $4.95. Two book reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1988 Evelyn C. Leeper This is a review of two real books of reviews of 18 imaginary books and one real one. The real book reviewed is A PERFECT VACUUM, which is the first book reviewed in A PERFECT VACUUM itself. Though these are called reviews, they are more summaries of the works than the sort of "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" writing that people think of when they hear the word 'review'. So what we have here is really Lem writing about various philosophical concepts that would normally take a full book in a condensed format. In many ways, these "reviews" are more like "Cliff's Notes" for non-existent books. Some of the books described are take-offs on recognized literature. GIGAMESH (yes, that is how it is spelled) is to the Gilgamesh legend what Joyce's ULYSSES is to the ODYSSEY and Lem spends his review doing the same sort of dissection on it, word by word, phoneme by phoneme, that critics have been doing to Joyce for years. GRUPPENFUHRER LOUIS XVI is a novel about how an ex-Nazi in Argentina recreates the pre-Revolutionary French Court in the jungle; Lem's description of it makes it sound as though it descended from the literary surrealism of that country. BEING INC. shows us the world as the result of elaborate computer planning of individual lives, a huge choreography of humanity; it reminded me immediately of Borges' story "The Babylon Lottery." Many of the philosophical points are intriguing enough that one wishes for more elucidation on them. In DIE KULTUR ALS FEHLER (CIVILIZATION AS MISTAKE) Lem postulates that humanity has tried to give meaning to its frailties and weaknesses by claiming they are part of a larger plan of things, the way to a higher state of being. When "kultur"--technological civilization--comes along and shows us a way to overcome these handicaps, to accept them we must admit the meaningless, the futility of all that has gone before. People had for millennia explained that pain in childbirth was necessary as part of some plan; when anesthetic came along, people at first rejected it. An acceptance of it would, after all, negate all their rationalized and mean that the pain women had gone through for so many centuries was unnecessary. So it is now that various means of "correcting" nature have been developed, many people cling to the old ways rather than admit the "unnecessity" of all the suffering that has gone before. THE NEW COSMOGONY presents a startling, yet consistent, answer to the Fermi Paradox ("If life is as common in the universe as calculations would indicate, why haven't we been contacted yet?"). Whether Carl Sagan would buy into it is another story entirely. DE IMPOSSIBILITATE VITAE and DE IMPOSSIBILITATE PROGNOSCENDI are "must reading" for alternate history fans. The former consists almost entirely of tracking all the things that must have happened for the supposed author to have been born: his father must have married his mother, which in turn depended on them meeting during the War, which in turn depended on dozens, nay, hundreds of other events. For those alternate history authors who think that they can change one thing without changing others, this chapter should come as a revelation. Many of the books described are larks. RIEN DU TOUT, OU LA CONSEQUENCE is a book written entirely in negations ("The train did not arrive. He did not come."). U-WRITE-IT gives the reader blank pages and strips containing fragments of some great novel and lets her re-arrange them at will (has Gary Gygax patented this yet?). Lem gets his shot at reviewers (of real books, presumably) in his review of PERICALYPSIS when he says, "Joachim Fersen, a German, wrote his PERICALYPSE in Dutch (he hardly knows the language, which he himself admits in the Introduction) and published it in France, a country notorious for its dreadful proofreading. The writer of these words [i.e., Lem] also does not, strictly speaking, know Dutch, but going by the title of the book, the English Introduction, and a few understandable expressions here and there in the text, he has concluded that he can muster as a reviewer after all." Given that the premise of PERICALYPSIS is that so much bad art is produced that the good art is hopelessly swamped, and hence all of it should be destroyed to simplify things, the need for reviewers would be diminished were it taken seriously at all. In ONE HUMAN MINUTE, Lem restricts himself to only three books, and hence can devote more time to each one. ONE HUMAN MINUTE is an encyclopedic description of what everyone in the world is doing in a single minute, sort of like those photographic books of a day in America and a day in the Soviet Union, but much much thorough and restricted. Lem describes it as deriving from the GUINNESS BOOK and books such as THE FIRST THREE MINUTES. For example, he claims that 53.4 billion liters of human blood are pumped per minute. (I assume those are American billions, rather than British billions. If you assume 5 billion people, that's 10.7 liters per minute per person. Sounds about right. Of course, this is set in the 21st Century, so 5 billion may be off.) THE UPSIDE-DOWN EVOLUTION says that since insects are much less susceptible to radiation than huge computers, future weaponry will consist of swarms of specially engineered synthetic insects. (Has anyone thought of Lem as one of the original cyberpunk authors? He has certainly dealt with robots and computers for longer than all these new upstarts.) And THE WORLD AS CATACLYSM is just another way of looking at catastrophe theory. Both books are interesting exercises in fantasy, or perhaps meta- fantasy. Another of Lem's works, IMAGINARY MAGNITUDE, is a collection of introductions to imaginary works, and I hope to get to that soon. Of these two, however, I would recommend A PERFECT VACUUM first. If you enjoy that, you might try ONE HUMAN MINUTE, but the former does offer a more varied menu than the latter. And I think the former has some far more interesting ideas to provide food for thought for the reader. Evelyn C. Leeper (201) 957-2070 UUCP: ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl ARPA: mtgzy!ecl@rutgers.rutgers.edu Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!newsfeed.sunet.se!news00.sunet.se!sunic!nntp.coast.net!howland.erols.net!news.sgi.com!uhog.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!usenet From: danny@cs.su.oz.au (Danny) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Review - The Futurological Congress (Lem) Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 02 Oct 1996 11:12:30 -0400 Organization: Basser Dept of Computer Science, Uni of Sydney, Australia Lines: 64 Sender: wex@tinbergen.media.mit.edu (Graystreak) Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu Keywords: author= Danny Yee X-Newsreader: (ding) Gnus v0.94 The Futurological Congress, by Stanislaw Lem Review Copyright (c) 1996 Danny Yee Ijon Tichy, having returned to Earth from space, finds himself attending the Eighth World Futurological Congress, being held in a 106-storey hotel in Costa Rica alongside the Plenary Council of Student Protest Veterans, the Convention of Publishers of Liberated Literature, and a Philumenist Society meeting (collectors of matchbooks). This is a setting made for comedy. Here is Tichy observing the futurologists' debate: Each speaker was given four minutes to present his paper, as there were so many scheduled -- 198 from 64 different countries. To help expedite the proceedings, all reports had to be distributed and studied beforehand, while the lecturer would speak only in numerals, calling attention in this fashion to the salient paragraphs of his work. ... Stan Hazelton of the U.S. delegation immediately threw the hall into a flurry by emphatically repeating: 4, 6, 11, and therefore 22; 5, 9, hence 22; 3, 7, 2, 11, from which it followed that 22 and only 22!! Someone jumped up, saying yes but 5, and what about 6, 18, or 4 for that matter; Hazelton countered this objection with the crushing retort that, either way, 22. I turned to the number key in his paper and discovered that 22 meant the end of the world. Meanwhile, political trouble is brewing outside the hotel. In an attempt to forestall a revolution, the government pumps benignimizers into the water supply and the hotel is accidentally bombed with hallucinogens. Tichy is transported to an even bizarrer future, where chemicals are used to simulate everything. This is the opening for Lem to launch into a barrage of neologistic puns and satirical invention: And therefore we have the malingerants, fudgerators and drudge-dodgers, not to mention the special phenomenon of simulimbecility or mimicretinism. A mimicretin is a computer that plays stupid in order, once and for all, to be left in peace. And I found out what dissimulators are: they simply pretend that they're _not_ pretending to be defective. Or perhaps it's the other way around. The whole thing is very complicated. A probot is a robot on probation, while a servo is one still serving time. A robotch may or may not be a sabot. One vial, and my head is splitting with information and nomenclature. A confuter, for instance, is not a confounding machine -- that's a confutator -- but a machine which quotes Confucius. A grammus is an antiquated frammus, a gidget -- a cross between a gadget and a widget, usually flighty. A bananalog is an analog banana plug. ... It's hard to place Lem as a humourist -- a kind of cross between Jorge Luis Borges and Douglas Adams, perhaps. _The Futurological Congress_ is possibly the most frivolous of all his humourous works, but it displays his usual dry, intellectual humour: it is, after _The Cyberiad_, my favourite among them. %T The Futurological Congress %A Stanislaw Lem %F Michael Kandel %M Polish %I Futura %C London %D 1977 [1971] %O paperback %G ISBN 0-8600-7928-7 %P 149pp %K science fiction, humour