THE WRITER WIRT WILLIAMS HAD a theory that novelists–“like quarterbacks,” he would add–were most likely to flourish if they were reasonably intelligent but not off-the-scale brainy. (“Look at Terry Bradshaw!”) Too much intellection, Williams thought, tended to gum up the works in one way or another. Still, he allowed, there were exceptions.
A case in point is the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, who died on March 27 at the age of 84. Lem’s IQ, as he mentioned in passing in an autobiographical essay, was above 180, but no one who read many of his books needed that datum to conclude that here was an unusually powerful and wide-ranging intelligence. The son of a physician, Lem was trained in the sciences. Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a “kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature” in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world. Meanwhile, he was reading widely in literature and philosophy, and he embarked on a career as a writer of science fiction.
A lot of Lem is available in English, but more remains to be translated, both novels and works in other genres. (Let us hope that an enterprising publisher or two are willing to underwrite the Englishing of some of these missing items: That would be a fitting memorial.) His best-known novel is Solaris, thanks to the film version by Andrei Tarkovsky, and the recent remake. It’s not a bad book to start with, but I will move on to my personal favorites from Lemland.
The first, The Investigation (in Polish, 1959; in English, 1976), is neither a parody nor a pastiche, strictly speaking, but has elements of both. (The names of places and characters are clearly parodic.) The template is a mystery novel, featuring Scotland Yard detectives, crossbred with the conventions of the modern Gothic tale. The detectives are investigating a series of bizarre incidents at rural mortuaries in which corpses seem to have been reanimated. Also involved as a consultant is an eccentric academic who subjects these mysterious events to statistical analysis. In its unsettling shifts, its incongruous mix of tones and styles–suspense, metaphysical horror, humor, absurdity, intellectual puzzle–the novel both anticipates and surpasses later works that were trumpeted as the very model of postmodernism.
The Invincible (1964; 1976) has some affinities with The Investigation, though at first it appears to be very different, featuring as it does a classic sci-fi scenario: A spaceship is sent to a distant planet where another ship landed a year earlier, sent one intelligible message, and then apparently encountered some unknown disaster. Here, once again, Lem is working with a clear template and playing against it in various ways, particularly in his brilliant imagining of an encounter with an alien life form, radically different from the familiar aliens of yore. The physical setting is rendered with such virtuosity that it haunts my dreams for weeks afterward every time I read the book. If you like it, go straight to Fiasco (1986; 1987), Lem’s most ambitious treatment of the theme of alien contact.
The Chain of Chance (1976; 1984) also recalls The Investigation. Here the subject is a series of deaths at a resort in Italy, and there are elements of the thriller and the Golden Age mystery. But the tone is very different, not least because this is a first-person narrative. The intellectual puzzle is foregrounded, only to be turned inside out. A meditation on how we think about cause and effect–and about the role of chance in our lives–the novel sounds terribly pat, but in fact its “solution” is the opposite of the tidy summing-up as performed, for instance, by the redoubtable Hercule Poirot.
Other readers will have other favorites, and no one who plunges into Lem should miss his memoir of childhood, Highcastle, or his collection of essays, Microworlds, (which includes the much-quoted, much-abused essay, “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case–With Exceptions”). Some will be drawn to his reviews of imaginary books, others to the fables that recall the philosophical tales of Voltaire and his age. Lem is the driest of writers–not desiccated, not narrow, not at all–but his prevailing humor is dry, and his best books can be reread with pleasure every few years. Among the many mansions of the House of Fiction, there is room for the occasional polymath.
John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
