Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us
CATSCAN 2  "The Spearhead of Cognition"

	You're a kid from some podunk burg in Alabama.
	From childhood you've been gnawed by vague 
numinous sensations and a moody sense of your own 
potential, but you've never pinned it down.
	Then one joyful day you discover the work of a 
couple of writers. They're pretty well-known (for 
foreigners), so their books are available even in your 
little town. Their names are "Tolstoy" and 
"Dostoevsky." Reading them, you realize: This is it! 
It's the sign you've been waiting for! This is your 
destiny-- to become a *Russian Novelist*!
	Fired with inspiration, you study the pair of 
'em up and down, till you figure you've got a solid 
grasp of what they're up to. You hear they're pretty 
well-known back in Russia, but to your confident eye 
they don't seem like so much. (Luckily, thanks to some 
stunt of genetics, you happen to be a genius.) For 
you, following their outline seems simple enough--in a 
more sophisticated vein, of course, and for a modern 
audience. So you write a few such books, you publish 
'em, and people adore them. The folks in 'Bama are fit 
to bust with pride, and say you've got Tolstoy beat 
all hollow.
	Then, after years of steadily growing success, 
strange mail arrives. It's from Russia! They've been 
reading your stuff in translation, and you've been 
chosen to join the Soviet Writers' Union! Swell! you 
think. Of course, living in backwoods Alabama, it's 
been a little tough finding editions of contemporary 
Russian novelists. But heck, Tolstoy did his writing 
years ago! By now those Russians must be writing like 
nobody's business!
	Then a shipment of modern Russian novels 
arrives, a scattering of various stuff that has 
managed to elude the redtape. You open 'em up and--
ohmiGod! It's . . . it's COMMUNISM! All this stupid 
stereotyped garbage! About Red heroes ten feet tall, 
and sturdy peasants cheering about their tractors, and 
mothers giving sons to the Fatherland, and fathers 
giving sons to the Motherland . . . Swallowing bile, 
you pore through a few more at random--oh God, it's 
awful.
	Then the _Literary Gazette_ calls from Moscow, 
and asks if you'd like to make a few comments about 
the work of your new comrades. "Why sure!" you drawl 
helpfully. "It's clear as beer-piss that y'all have 
gotten onto the wrong track entirely! This isn't 
literature--this is just a lot of repetitive agitprop 
crap, dictated by your stupid oppressive publishers! 
If Tolstoy was alive today, he'd kick your numb 
Marxist butts! All this lame bullshit about commie 
heroes storming Berlin and workers breaking production 
records--those are stupid power-fantasies that 
wouldn't fool a ten-year-old! You wanna know the true 
modern potential of Russian novels? Read some of my 
stuff, if you can do it without your lips moving! Then 
call me back."
	And sure enough, they do call you back. But 
gosh--some of the hardliners in the Writers' Union 
have gone and drummed you out of the regiment. Called 
you all kinds of names . . . said you're stuck-up, a 
tool of capitalism, a no-talent running-dog egghead. 
After that, you go right on writing, even criticism, 
sometimes. Of course, after that you start to get 
MEAN.
	This really happened.
	Except that it wasn't Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It 
was H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. It wasn't Russian 
novels, it was science fiction, and the Writers' Union 
was really the SFWA. And Alabama was Poland.
	And you were Stanislaw Lem.
	Lem was surgically excised from the bosom of 
American SF back in 1976. Since then plenty of other 
writers have quit SFWA, but those flung out for the 
crime of being a commie rat-bastard have remained 
remarkably few. Lem, of course, has continued to 
garner widespread acclaim, much of it from hifalutin' 
mainstream critics who would not be caught dead in a 
bookstore's skiffy section. Recently a collection of 
Lem's critical essays, _Macroworlds_, has appeared in 
paperback. For those of us not privy to the squabble 
these essays caused in the '70s, it makes some eye-
opening reading.
	Lem compares himself to Crusoe, stating 
(accurately) that he had to erect his entire structure 
of "science fiction" essentially from scratch. He did 
have the ancient shipwrecked hulls of Wells and 
Stapledon at hand, but he raided them for tools years 
ago. (We owe the collected essays to the beachcombing 
of his Man Friday, Austrian critic Franz 
Rottensteiner.)
	These essays are the work of a lonely man. We 
can judge the fervor of Lem's attempt to reach out by 
a piece like "On the Structural Analysis of Science 
Fiction:" a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian, 
about French semantic theory. The mind reels. After 
this superhuman effort to communicate, you'd think the 
folks would cut Lem some slack--from pure human pity, 
if nothing else.
	But Lem's ideology--both political and literary-
-is simply too threatening. The stuff Lem calls 
science fiction looks a bit like American SF--about 
the way a dolphin looks like a mosasaur. A certain 
amount of competitive gnawing and thrashing was 
inevitable. The water roiled ten years ago, and the 
judgement of evolution is still out. The smart money 
might be on Lem. The smarter money yet, on some 
judicious hybridization. In any case we would do well 
to try to understand him.
	Lem shows little interest in "fiction" per se. 
He's interested in science: the structure of the 
world. A brief autobiographical piece, "Reflections on 
My Life," makes it clear that Lem has been this way 
from the beginning. The sparkplug of his literary 
career was not fiction, but his father's medical 
texts: to little Stanislaw, a magic world of skeletons 
and severed brains and colorful pickled guts. Lem's 
earliest "writings," in high school, were not 
"stories," but an elaborate series of imaginary forged 
documents: "certificates, passports, diplomas . . . 
coded proofs and cryptograms . . ."
	For Lem, science fiction is a documented form of 
thought-experiment: a spearhead of cognition.
	All else is secondary, and it is this singleness 
of aim that gives his work its driving power. This is 
truly "a literature of ideas," dismissing the heart as 
trivial, but piercing the skull like an ice-pick.
	Given his predilections, Lem would probably 
never have written "people stories." But his rationale 
for avoiding this is astounding. The mass slaughters 
during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Lem says, drove 
him to the literary depiction of humanity as a 
species. "Those days have pulverized and exploded all 
narrative conventions that had previously been used in 
literature. The unfathomable futility of human life 
under the sway of mass murder cannot be conveyed by 
literary techniques in which individuals or small 
groups of persons form the core of the narrative."
	A horrifying statement, and one that people in 
happier countries would do well to ponder. The 
implications of this literary conviction are, of 
course, extreme. Lem's work is marked by unflinching 
extremities. He fights through ideas with all the 
convulsive drive of a drowning man fighting for air. 
Story structure, plot, human values, characterization, 
dramatic tension, all are ruthlessly trudgeon-kicked 
aside.
	In criticism, however, Lem has his breath, and 
can examine the trampled flotsam with a cynical eye. 
American SF, he says, is hopelessly compromised, 
because its narrative structure is trash: detective 
stories, pulp thrillers, fairy-tales, bastardized 
myths. Such outworn and kitschy devices are totally 
unsuited to the majestic scale of science fiction's 
natural thematics, and reduce it to the cheap tricks 
of a vaudeville conjurer.
	Lem holds this in contempt, for he is not a man 
to find entertainment in sideshow magic. Stanislaw Lem 
is not a good-time guy. Oddly, for a science fiction 
writer, he seems to have very little interest in the 
intrinsically weird. He shows no natural appetite for 
the arcane, the offbeat, the outre.. He is colorblind 
to fantasy. This leads him to dismiss much of the work 
of Borges, for example. Lem claims that "Borges' best 
stories are constructed as tightly as mathematical 
proofs." This is a tautology of taste, for, to Lem, 
mathematical proofs are the conditions to which the 
"best" stories must necessarily aspire.
	In a footnote to the Borges essay Lem makes the 
odd claim that "As soon as nobody assents to it, a 
philosophy becomes automatically fantastic 
literature." Lem's literature *is* philosophy; to veer 
from the path of reason for the sake of mere sensation 
is fraudulent.
	American SF, therefore, is a tissue of frauds, 
and its practicioners fools at best, but mostly snake-
oil salesmen. Lem's stern puritanism, however, leaves 
him at sea when it comes to the work of Philip K. 
Dick: "A Visionary Among the Charlatans." Lem's mind 
was clearly blown by reading Dick, and he struggles to 
find some underlying weltanschauung that would reduce 
Dick's ontological raving to a coherent floor-plan. 
It's a doomed effort, full of condescension and 
confusion, like a ballet-master analyzing James Brown.
	Fiction is written to charm, to entertain, to 
enlighten, to convey cultural values, to analyze life 
and manners and morals and the nature of the human 
heart. The stuff Stanislaw Lem writes, however, is 
created to burn mental holes with pitiless coherent 
light. How can one do this and still produce a product 
resembling "literature?" Lem tried novels. Novels, 
alas, look odd without genuine characters in them. 
Then he hit on it: a stroke of genius.
	The collections _A Perfect Vacuum_ and 
_Imaginary Magnitudes_ are Lem's masterworks. The 
first contains book reviews, the second, introductions 
to various learned tomes. The "books" discussed or 
reviewed do not actually exist, and have archly 
humorous titles, like "Necrobes" by "Cezary 
Strzybisz." But here Lem has found literary 
structures--not "stories"--but assemblages of prose, 
familiar and comfortable to the reader.
	Of course, it takes a certain aridity of taste 
to read a book composed of "introductions," 
traditionally a kind of flaky appetizer before the 
main course. But it's worth it for the author's sense 
of freedom, his manifest delight in finally ridding 
himself of that thorny fictive thicket that stands 
between him and his Grail. These are charming pieces, 
witty, ingenious, highly thought-provoking, utterly 
devoid of human interest. People will be reading these 
for decades to come. Not because they work as fiction, 
but because their form follows function with the 
sinister elegance of an automatic rifle.
	Here Lem has finessed an irrevocable choice. It 
is a choice every science fiction writer faces. Is 
the writer to write Real Novels which "only happen to 
be" science fiction--or create knobby and irreducible 
SF artifacts which are not true "stories," but 
visionary texts? The argument in favor of the first 
course is that Real Readers, i.e. mainstream ones, 
refuse to notice the nakedly science-fictional. How 
Lem must chuckle as he collects his lavish blurbs from 
_Time_ and _Newsweek_ (not to mention an income 
ranking as one of poor wretched Poland's best sources 
of foreign exchange) . By disguising his work as the 
haute-lit exudations of a critic, he has out-conjured 
the Yankee conjurers, had his cake and eaten it 
publicly, in the hallowed pages of the _NY Review of 
Books_.
	It's a good trick, hard to pull off, requiring 
ideas that burn so brilliantly that their glare is 
overwhelming. That ability alone is worthy of a 
certain writhing envy from the local Writers' Union. 
But it's still a trick, and the central question is 
still unresolved. What is "science fiction," anyway? 
And what's it there for?