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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 eyeopening 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."