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Love, Death, and Higher Mathematics: Poland's Science Fiction Master, Stanisław Lem

Mar 3, 2022·10 min read

Today I want to recommend a science fiction writer.

His name is Stanisław Lem.

figure 1 Stanisław Lem, 1921-2006

Lem and science fiction

Stanisław Lem is widely regarded as a genius of science fiction. Solaris, A Perfect Vacuum, His Master's Voice, The Cyberiad, The Futurological Congress, the list of his great works goes on longer than I can keep track of.

He was a national treasure of Poland, a Jewish writer, born in Lviv in 1921.

Of all the writers I know, Lem is the most broadly learned. He touched cybernetics, science, mathematics, philosophy, and more. He founded the Polish Astronautical Society and belonged to the Polish Cybernetics Society. You could fairly call him a real scientist. Like the other famous masters of the genre, Lem successfully predicted the arrival of much of our modern technology in his fiction, which is not so surprising, because back when cybernetics and computer science were only just getting started, Lem was one of the people actually in the room. That is why he is also recognized as a futurist.

There is no need to say much about his standing in science fiction. Solaris points straight at the deepest parts of human nature and the universe. A Perfect Vacuum sits at the very front edge of experimental and avant-garde literature. The Cyberiad is children's fiction that readers of any age can enjoy. And Summa Technologiae is a long reverie and prophecy about the technology to come.

Every time I read one more of his works, my admiration and respect grow another notch. He really is something.

Lviv and war

I suddenly feel like talking about the place Lem was born, Lviv.

Lem is a famously Polish writer, but if you go and search for his birthplace, Lviv, you find that Lviv is a major city in western Ukraine, the educational and industrial center of the country's west.

That fact puzzled me deeply. Why was Lem born in Ukraine and yet a Polish writer? I kept reading the encyclopedia (forgive my thin grasp of history), and the twisted, turbulent past of Lviv turned out to be far beyond what I had imagined.

1918

When the First World War ended and the government of Austria-Hungary collapsed, Lviv became a place of conflict between Ukrainians and Poles. On November 1, the local Ukrainians declared the West Ukrainian People's Republic, with its capital in Lviv. The Polish residents, unhappy under Ukrainian rule, rose up in resistance and won the support of the Polish forces behind them.

1920

Poland and Ukraine signed an agreement, and Ukraine recognized Polish rule over the Lviv region.

1921

Stanisław Lem was born in Lviv.

1939

Nazi Germany invaded Poland and entered Lviv, where it carried out massacres of the Jewish population. After the war, Lviv was given to the Soviet Union (more precisely, to Ukraine within the Soviet Union). After the Soviet collapse, Lviv went to Ukraine.

2014

Amid the unrest in Ukraine, Lviv, as one of the country's more pro-European regions, saw its own political upheaval.

2022

Russia launched its war against Ukraine.

Lem was born in 1921 and died in 2006. He lived to see the birth of the internet and the search engine he had once written about, yet the strife and fire over his homeland have never stopped, from before he was born right up to today.

I used to wonder why a literary genius like Lem settled so contentedly into writing science fiction. Why didn't he set out to write some timeless work of serious literature? With his prose and his gifts, it would not have been hard. But once I learned about the storms he weathered across his life, once I read about the years of turmoil and chaos in Lviv, once I grasped how harsh literary censorship was in country after country during the Second World War, and once I noticed the cold mockery of authoritarian governments buried in his fiction, the biting satire of rank and fortune, and the yearning call for science and peace, I finally understood what Lem was up against.

This king was a military fanatic to the bone, and on top of that exceptionally stingy, you might call him the founding father of cheapskates across the whole universe. To trim the treasury's expenses, he abolished every punishment except the death penalty. His favorite thing to do was shut down any government office he deemed useless. Once he disbanded the ministry of justice, every condemned prisoner had to cut off his own head, unless it happened during a state amnesty, in which case a family member could do it for them. In the arts he supported only the cheap projects, such as recitation choirs, chess, and army calisthenics. But he paid special attention to the art of war, because a single victory could bring in a tidy sum. And yet, to win, one had to plan and prepare carefully in peacetime, so in a certain sense he was a lover of peace.

Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad: The First Sally

The Cyberiad

All right, enough of the serious subjects, because what I actually want to recommend today is a work of children's science fiction, The Cyberiad. The book follows two "master constructors" through their adventures and misadventures across the universe.

I am a little at a loss for how to sum up Lem's sense of humor in this book. It is full of the kind of dark comedy you get in Rick and Morty, and reading it feels like watching two Ricks of different temperaments run wild together on a whim. I am convinced the crews behind Rick and Morty and Love, Death and Robots were influenced by Lem.

The Cyberiad is not some doorstop of a novel. It is a collection of short and medium-length stories that share one consistent world. As children's literature, it brims with childlike flights of fancy, and the writing and logic are clear enough that a kid can follow along without any strain. But underneath these delightful adventures, you can also see Lem's concern and contemplation for the ultimate questions. From the ethics of artificial intelligence to the final meaning of existence, from debates about personal identity to meditations on the universe and life, from his ridicule of power to his care for human nature, every time I finished one of the little stories I had the urge to find someone and talk about it for hours. I am only about two thirds of the way through, and I am already braced to start over the moment I finish. The last time a book got me like this was Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Lem was a writer with a real streak of pride. He was fluent in several languages yet insisted on writing only in Polish. The Chinese editions seem to be mostly translated from English rather than the original, so the translation quality is a touch uneven (take the poem below, for instance; in Polish, Lem surely worked the meter and rhyme to perfection). None of that dims the brilliance coming through between the lines.

If you love science fiction, love science, and love to think, do not let yourself miss this genius named Lem.

figure 2 The Cyberiad

Love, death, and higher mathematics

Here is the setup for this scene. One master constructor (Trurl) creates a genius electronic poet by simulating the origin of the universe, and his friend, another master constructor (Klapaucius), wants to make Trurl look foolish, so he sets bizarre challenges to trip the electronic poet up.

Klapaucius knit his brow, thought and thought, and finally said, "Fine, then give me a poem about love and death, but every expression must use the language of higher mathematics, tensor algebra above all, and of course it can also include topology and a bit of analysis and calculus. The poem has to be full of love and desire, it has to break with convention, and naturally the whole thing has to be composed within the field of cybernetics."**

"Have you lost your mind?! Mathematics about love? I think something has gone wrong in your head!" Trurl began cursing Klapaucius in a fury, but before he could even finish, he and Klapaucius were both struck speechless by what the electronic poet recited:

The timid robot constructor can find an extremum in an unconventional matrix,

can work out the integral equations a machine requires in the misty haze of afternoon,

yet cannot know whether love has truly arrived.

Stay away from me, stay away from me, from dawn to dusk all I see is the Laplacian,

from night until daybreak the unit vectors wrap me round in layer after layer,

O preimage, come closer to me, come closer to me,

for only by shrinking you down can I wait for the moment I hold my beloved in my arms!

All the units of measure bind gasp and moan tightly together,

becoming a leaping rotation group, so the positive and negative numbers are no longer alone,

whether by the waterfall model or the spiral model,

a tender gaze is like heaven's thunder meeting earth's fire!

You are a transfinite number, boundless in power, beyond all compare,

you are a connection of vast magic, an immaculate coordinate,

if I could love you as no one ever has before and no one ever will again,

I would gladly forget the Christoffel symbols and Stokes' theorem forever!

Let me reach the depths of your scalar-thicketed heart,

let me, lost in the closed range theorem, come near to you,

in this madly growing gradient,

breathing the scent of the pines, listening to the white doves sing!

How could anyone walk out of love unscathed?

Neither Weyl space theory nor the Brouwer fixed point theorem

can bring him a single sliver of joy anymore,

he steels himself and opens the theory of topology,

studying a curvature that not even Möbius could compute.

O tensor algebra, you are all the true feeling between my shells,

did you know that only the one who feels your parameters in every imprint

will truly cherish you,

while he himself turns to ash within a nanosecond.

A point mass under holonomic constraints,

yet it cannot find an asymptote in the coordinate system,

in this final equation, keeping watch over the last tenderness,

the master constructor bids love its eternal farewell, and dies without regret.

I am Ning Ning Ningjing Hai. Thank you for reading my article.

References:

What a strange and wondrous book this is! A reader's guide to The Cyberiad

EssayScience FictionLiteratureStanisław Lem
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