Stan

One of my literary heroes, Stanislaw Lem, just passed away. At an impressionable age I read a fraction of his prolific oevre, half a dozen of his books over a period of several years, but I enjoyed them all and had my mind fairly blown by two.

Lem wrote under Poland's repressive Iron Curtain regime, forbidden to even write about certain topics, but his mind seems so fecund that you don't feel the limitations straining against the writer as with straight social tracts. (Credit for preserving Lem's engaging and nimble style in English goes to usual translator, Michael Kandel.) You feel his imagination, you feel this is a guy who really knows what's really going on, and although Lem and some of his admirers disdain the science fiction genre category slapped on his body of work (including Solaris), it's among the most mind-expanding science fiction.

It's been a long time since I've read them, but I'll try to do justice to the two.

The Futurological Congress (1971) is a tripfest, where Lem's favorite hero, Ijon Tichy, goes to a futurists convention in Costa Rica, winds up drugged in the middle of a coup, and awakens in the overmedicated utopia of 2039. In this vision of tomorrow, there is so much drug use that various capitalists and spies use any kind of delivery to create moods or warp everyone's reality. At points the air is so thick with competing, counteracting, mutating aerosol hallucinogens that our narrator can't trust anything he experiences, and much of it is pretty wild.

It's an acidy Philip K. Dick set-up but Lem, the more brilliant stylist, adds in helium. The story just never stops rising, with colliding characters mutating through unreliable layers of reality as one drug influence segues into another, Ijon searching endlessly for the real world, long before the end of the book clearly an absurd search.

The other one of his novel's that completely rocked my world was Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961). Jerry Stratton describes it well here:

After an accidental holocaust in which all paper, and thus all civilization, is destroyed, the Pentagon still lives in a building deep beneath the mountains, safe from harm and still carrying out its war of words against “the enemy”, the “anti-Pentagon”. Even though “the enemy” probably doesn’t even exist. It doesn’t matter, because you can manufacture the enemy more easily if you start from scratch. Everything up to and including the stars is fair game...

...Lem constructs a place where paranoia is the ruling mindset, where everything is code, even code is in code, and the most precious item you can have is a straight razor.

A civilian wanders into the Building, but the bureaucracy has no idea what to do with him, so they turn him into an agent, giving him a “Special Mission”--but it quickly becomes clear that his real mission is penetrating the multiple layers of secrecy in order to find out what his Special Mission actually is. No one has clearance to give it to him. And those who do have clearance keep moving him off the track of his search. Slowly, his own vision of the world gets sucked into the paranoid world-vision of The Building.

We’re never quite sure what the protagonist and story-teller is in the building for...He has a pass, but the room number on his pass doesn’t exist--or at least, no one’s able or willing to tell him where it is.

The climax is simultaneously enigmatic and shattering; the vision sticks. Lem's allegory of a nightmarishly self-perpetuating bureaucracy could easily be life inside a Soviet-style fascist society, or just as easily some endlessly self-justifying war-loop government where secrecy and paranoia have already won.