Fan Yipeng Chen Feifan
The Lyme Anthology, published by Yilin Publishing House in August 2021: Solaris Star, translated by Jing Zhenzhong, 254 pages, 49.00 yuan; Fiasco, translated by Chen Zhuo, 392 pages, 58.00 yuan; Futurology Conference, translated by Xu Donghua, 143 pages, 42.00 yuan; Invincible Number, translated by Luo Yanli, 202 pages, 45.00 yuan; Eden, continued translation, 275 pages, 48.00 yuan; "The Voice of its Lord", translated by the United States, 234 pages, 46.00 yuan
2021 marks the centenary of the birth of the great Polish science fiction maestro Stanisław Lem (1921-2006). For a long time, the only works that could be read in the Chinese world were Solaris Star, Perfect Vacuum, and the later introduction of Master Robot. This year, Lyme's work has a more complete and complete translation. Here, I would like to start from my personal reading experience and make some simple introductions and interpretations of Lyme's science fiction universe. Compared with the well-known names of Asimov, Clark and Heinlein, perhaps because the types of works were relatively small before, Lem was relatively niche in the Chinese world, or at least, the polish master's name has not yet become popular to the point of "out of the circle" except for a group of loyal fans within the science fiction circle.
Compared to its contemporaries, Lemmes are the most fascinatingly different or even different. Lem didn't mix with American science fiction circles—in fact, he looked down on them—but he was unique not only by the political distinctions of connections, genres, and countries, but also by his writing style and intellectual ambitions, which were very different from his contemporaries.
Polish science fiction novelist and futurist Stanisław Lem (Credit: The New York Times)
Compared with the grand, operatic narrative and spectacle of technological imagination in twentieth-century American science fiction that we know, Lem's science fiction works are sometimes more like mental, philosophical, and speculative sketches. Although he was from Eastern Europe, Lem was not exactly like the science fiction masters of the former Soviet Union, coming from a purely "hard science and engineering" technical background, in fact, he had a deep understanding of poetry and literature, which also became the soil for his science fiction creation. Perhaps there are specific places in Lem's work that evoke memories of science fiction/literature/fantasy masters such as Kafka, Calvino, Borges, or the contemporary science fiction writer Ted Ginger. It can be said that the Polish master is witty, funny, dark and deep, and some of his almost de-genre works are philosophical discussions or literary experiments borrowed from the shell of science fiction.
The imagination of science fiction works is ultimately anchored in the ultimate motif of "man".
One of the reasons is that people cannot transcend the limitations of their own vision. Science fiction creators make a projection of the "unknown", which can be technically unattained, timeless, or spatial, of course, this unknown can also be an imagination of some civilization that has not yet been contacted. Through this "unknown", the creator constructs a different kind of belief system, philosophical system and even physical rules. But even with the transcendent imagination, this projection of the so-called "unknown" and "unknowable" still cannot transcend the finite framework of human beings themselves—in a difficult-sounding and superfluous phrase, "man cannot imagine what is truly unimaginable."
Translucent ghosts, three-headed, six-armed monsters, alien creatures that look like a lump of slime... These imaginations are also just a recombination, or exaggeration, of elements that humans have already seen. Nietzsche's words in The Science of Happiness: "Man has to start from his own position and perspective when thinking and analyzing, and cannot go beyond his own position and perspective." ”
The second reason lies in the starting point and intention of creation. Many science fiction creators' imaginations of the "unknown" and "the other" are still used to reflect on themselves and seek themselves, no matter how far away the time is and how the setting is at the other end of the universe, the essence of the story is still a satire of human civilization itself, and the narration of interstellar events is a deduction of the human political world that has been deformed. For the "first contact", a timeless basic motif in the science fiction genre, Lyme's world-renowned masterpiece Solaris Star shows a negative, real and fascinating attitude. If the creation of the science fiction masters of the same generation lies in the development of "unknowable", then Lem is starting from "unknowable". Connecting and communicating with someone first requires us to see and understand each other, but Lem reminds us that the first step in this engagement may never be completed. Earth and alien civilizations are often unimaginably different and have unexpected barriers to understanding. There are also no commonalities between life and life.
The protagonist arrives at the detection station of Solaris Star and sees the illusion of his deceased wife, but it seems that the mysterious sea of Solaris Star is exploring the inner world of the human beings who have come here (Image Artist: Victo Ngai)
There is only one inhabitant on solaris, and that inhabitant is the planet itself, the planet's ocean of seventeen trillion tons. In the book, human beings' initial understanding of this creature is vague and crude: "It has not experienced all the evolutionary stages that earth's organisms have experienced, that is, it has not undergone the emergence of single-celled and multicellular organisms, nor has it undergone the evolution of animals and plants, nor has it evolved the nervous system and brain, but has cut a short path and jumped directly to the stage of 'steady-state ocean'." ”
This extraterrestrial life has a biological basis that is different from all species on Earth. The complex activities and ecological responses it exhibits bear no resemblance to everything in human cognition. Although human beings have exhausted all technical means and analytical methods, spanned light years, spent decades of time, and recorded hundreds of millions of written and video materials, in the end they have found nothing but pale and silent data. The scientists who studied solaris were helpless, and in the end, the word "contact" was kept silent in everyone's research reports, and even subconsciously deified the word. Borges also imagined an "unimaginable thing" in his short story "The Matter Is Still Over", and he wrote this sentence:
When you see something, you must first understand it. For example, armchairs are pre-made for the human body and its joints and parts, and scissors are prerequisites for cutting. The same is true of lights and vehicles. Barbarians could not see the Bible in the hands of missionaries, and the rigging seen by the traveler was not the same thing as the rigging seen by the seafarer.
If we did see the universe, we might understand it.
We can see a thing because it has a place in the civilizations and languages we already have, but if something does not constitute any readable meaning in the so-called human world and human language, it remains in a state of absolute chaos and unknowability.
Left: Poster for Tarkovsky's 1972 film Flying into Space; Medium: 2002 Hollywood edition of Solaris; Right: Cover of The Star of Solaris, a new edition of The Star of Solaris
Of course, the "unknown" that science fiction is concerned about, there is also one: what is the ultimate truth of the universe and the answer to everything? It transcends technology, time and space, and points to the supreme apex of the metaphysical heavenly kingdom. Romantic and optimistic creators of this will present a picture of a high civilization that has been solved will hand us the answer like a feed. And humble science fiction writers seem to subconsciously believe that the answer is hidden in the distance; that humanity, after countless trials and turns, can always finally get it, or get closer to it. Lem was not as fearless as they were. In his novel Fiasco, the "double-slit interference experiment" is described as follows: "The world, when asked about its 'ultimate essence,' refuses to give a 'final' answer. ”
Left: Ted Ginger's Babylon Tower; Center: Tarkovsky's Stalker; Right: Kafka's Castle
In Ted Ginger's debut novel, The Tower of Babylon, the Babylonians built a towering tower of babel, connecting the earth with the heavens, and wanted to step directly into the realm of the gods, but found that after breaking through the highest ceiling, they drilled out of the ground, and everything became vain and futile—man was forever confined to the cycle of the human world, unable to reach the higher place. In the famous work "Stalker" by the Soviet film master Tarkovsky (adapted from the science fiction novel "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky brothers), with the poetic slow-motion shot, we see the stalker with a scientist and a writer into the "zone" that has been interfered with by extraterrestrial civilization, constantly wandering, but in the end not entering the "room" that can satisfy the deepest desires of the human heart in the legend - the last, the most unknowable, the most mysterious place, science can not enter, literature can not enter, religion can not enter. In Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle, land surveyor K looks out at the absurd and mysterious castle high above, exhausting all means, but can only wander at its feet forever, not to enter its doors. Similarly, in the face of such futile, infinite, infinite efforts to the "unknown", Lem wrote the following sentence: "We pursue humanism and have lofty ideals. We have no intention of conquering other races, but simply to teach them our values and to draw on their civilized traditions in return. We see ourselves as 'knights of divine contact'. And that's another lie. We're looking for people, not something else. We don't need other worlds. What we need is a mirror. ”
The polish game team's new project, Invincible, which developed Cyberpunk 2077, is based on Lem's novel of the same name
Science fiction is not an academic textbook or a theoretical work, and we cannot grasp academic theory directly through these readings. But good science fiction can be speculative and provide another way to see the world. The world Lem depicts is likewise a mirror that requires us to reflect on our existence in unknowable circumstances. It deprives the words "as they should be" from their original weight. Let humanity re-bury its head and contemplate the logical basis of its own civilizational context.
Lem's work illustrates the limitations of human cognition, and even the limitations of the word "cognition" itself. He vaguely outlines the edges of his thinking, making people vaguely aware of the existence outside the edges, but never being able to glimpse the truth. Lem did not hesitate to construct the fictional ecology of this life (world) in describing the "Planet solaris", and the details of the details presented a complex and rich world under his accumulated pen and ink - and under the impact of such an unknowable and unintelligible world, human beings are no longer the yardstick for measuring everything, and "anti-anthropocentrism" seems to be a perfect confirmation here. To some extent, however, after removing the unit of "humanity", we still cannot substantively touch any norms, and we only feel the precariousness of the artificial order under the impact of Solaris. The human subject experience has gradually blurred into an inconspicuous constant in the universe.
The sea on the planet Solaris in the movie
Even if humans accepted a life form like Solaris and gave it the name of civilization, even if humans successfully embraced Solaris and got its feedback. The gap between the two still seems to be difficult to clear. As the book says:
Besides, even if there is a real "exchange of information" with the thinking ocean, what do people really want to get out of it? What can they expect from this? Could it be a running account of the long experience of survival in this ocean? Maybe it's so old that it can't even remember its origins.
Or is it a description of its desires, passions, hopes, and pains? And it expresses these emotions in the moment of the birth of a living mountain, in the process of transforming mathematics into material existence, into loneliness and helplessness into fulfillment? Yet all this is ineffable knowledge, and if someone tries to translate it into any language on earth, all those values and meanings that people dream of will be lost, and they will remain out of reach.
At this point, we can't seem to bypass Wittgenstein. The philosopher wrote this in The Philosophy of Logic: "What can be said must be made clear; what cannot be said must be silenced." And the boundaries are drawn: "The conceivable, eloquent, meaningful includes the world, language, logic, and science; the inconceivable, ineffable (but visible), meaningless includes logical forms, metaphysical subjects, ethics, and aesthetics." If we accept Wittgenstein's point of view, can we classify the "Solaris star", a fictional foreign object written by Lem? Solaris is first and foremost a worldly, existential entity, following the same physical laws as everything in the universe, which should have been understandable, but which humans have not yet been able to do. Similarly, Lem did not prove in the end whether humanity is forever insoluble on this problem. In essence, the collision between humans and Solaris is still a collision of subjects. The cognitive limitations that exist here are human limitations, not logical limitations. To quote a passage from mr. Chen Changshen of the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in "The Mystery of Relativism in "On Certainty"":
What would happen if different people or groups of people had different pictures of the world—if the basis of the propositional system that forms our inquiry and assertion differs from the basis of the propositional system that forms the inquiry and assertion of others?
If a reasonable evaluation of a claim is possible only within a system, then there seems to be no basis for a reasonable evaluation of competing systems or of the world picture itself.
As a work of science fiction, Lem has not given us any definite numbers after all, and Lem's human beings cannot understand Solaris star now, nor do we know whether one day we will be able to understand it- and we have no way of determining whether there is a different world picture between humans and Solaris. And it is precisely in this way that the suspense of the work brings us speculation that can go endlessly towards the depths.
The 2013 film Futurology Congress is based on Lem's novel of the same name, intertwining live-action and animation.
Compared with the history of civilization, the history of science fiction is not very long, but masters and masterpieces are still stacked. Excellent science fiction works can bring people indescribable feelings, Liu Cixin said of Arthur Clark: "Late that night after reading "2001: A Space Odyssey", I went out of my house to look up at the starry sky, when the Chinese sky was not too polluted, I could see the Milky Way, in my eyes, the starry sky was completely different from the past, and I had a sense of awe for the grandeur and mystery of the universe for the first time, which was a religious feeling. It is true that countless science fiction writers have hot fantasies about the starry sky and the future, and the demands and perspectives of writing are bound to be different, but the shock of Lem's works will not be lighter than any other Huang Zhong Da Lu in the history of science fiction. Among the star-studded masters of science fiction, Lemme is unique. From another perspective, the slightly pessimistic "unknowable" worldview in Lem's work is also, to some extent, an admiration for the vastness and mystery of the universe. As he mentions in Fiasco:
The so-called commonality comes from the fallacy of anthropocentrism, which emphasizes that human beings are the descendants of some ancient beliefs and myths. There are actually many different intelligent beings in the universe, and it is precisely because it is so colorful that the sky is so silent.
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Yan Zhang