Fair warning, this story is about 9,000 words. But it's so rich and weird and dazzling. It's among my favorite Lem stories — although i admit i hadn't read anything of his until we (MIT Press, where i work) started reissuing his books last year, so i'm by no means an expert on him. Anyway, there was a lot of interest in an excerpt from Lem's memoir I submitted here a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25533405), so thought i'd share this as well.
Really glad to hear there is an effort forward to bring out more of Lem's work. One of the most interesting SF authors, with what would seem to be a deeper understanding of actual science than most of the others I've read. I especially love His Master's Voice, and am happy to see that on the list of MIT reissues!
Lem's criticism of much mainstream US SF at the time likewise takes the view that there's too little Science behind any of this Science Fiction. I'm not sure how much of his literary criticism is in print, "Microworlds" is the volume I read.
I like my SF very hard ("Incandescence" by Greg Egan is roughly where I'd say I'm comfortable, a plausible mechanism by which a pre-industrial civilisation might discover general relativity, that novel made me cry at the end) but even when he's being totally whimsical I really enjoyed Lem.
Lately on Amazon the term "hard" has been misused or
redefined for "military scifi" / "violent scifi".
That aside,
I just have a regular understanding of most fields in science. I know a bit here and there.
More astronomy.
My field is computer science, so I have
some knowledge there.
What I wonder about is if the average scifi reader expects or even could tell if something is "science" and not fantasy. Huge absurd things of course.
I have read so many different descriptions on how FTL works.
I dont think (ignorance on my part) that we have a solid theory for how it can be done.
- Warping of space/time (or higher dimension),
- "portals" left by "an ancient civilization"(that sort of evades the issue)
- wormholes
- "Taming a god"
- through special cracks in space/time that only a special navigator (species) can feel.
- improbability drive (I do love Douglas Adams).
and many more.
When you read can you take the existence of FTL on just being there, do you reject the ideas fully, or do you judge it on its merits if the description extrapolates current knowledge into a future where we can FTL? (if ever)
> What I wonder about is if the average scifi reader expects or even could tell if something is "science" and not fantasy
I think hard sci-fi requires that the book universe has consistent rules and the book focuses on their consequences, while soft sci-fi focuses on stories and the rules are unspecified or don't drive the plot.
The rules don't need to be what we currently think about our universe for the book to be hard sci-fi.
So, what makes SF, even hard SF, is not so much what can or can't be possible but the storytelling approach which falls out of it.
This is genre fiction, and genres have rules. For example, Romance is a genre of happily ever after endings. If you write what is ostensibly a Romance novel, but the heroine realises six pages from the end that her new lover is cheating on her and so she walks away unhappily and that's it, that's not a Romance novel, a Romance imprint would reject it, if you're a big name author they'd tell you to take it to a literary fiction house - otherwise go away and rewrite with a happy ending.
In SF the rule is "What if ...?", so you absolutely can have anything, unicorns, magic spells, faster than light travel, God can be real, but the story is about what else if that was so? That's where science comes into it. OK, so there are unicorns, what's special about them, just horses with a weird horn or anything more? Do people... ride unicorns? Eat them? Or maybe the unicorns eat people.
A fantasy kingdom with a rich gold mine can be dirt poor and yet money is somehow measured in gold, the thing they have plenty of, in fantasy you needn't explain, but in SF that's either a massive error or the core thesis of a novel.
On FTL specifically. I'm not a fan for reasons Charlie Stross explained when he gave up on writing a sequel I'd kinda wanted to read some day in a setting where he'd tried to tame FTL. FTL is time travel. So, you need to either embrace that, and have arbitrary time travel in your story (good luck producing a narrative you can write down) or come up with a water tight reason nobody ever does this. That's just a high cost it usually isn't worth it.
That said, the Clockwork Rocket series by Egan does just do time travel, but it also has different spatial dimensional layout, it's set somewhere way stranger than the setting for Incandescence, which is our universe albeit not somewhere humans could ever go. Still, I wasn't enormously happy with the outcome, time travel still ends up being sort of cheating even in the framework Egan creates. They do, as hoped, solve their impending disaster by going very, very fast though. Also they fix the patriarchy, which is way harder in a world where women inherently die during the equivalent of childbirth...
You are absolutely correct there is no "solid theory" for FTL. Rather, there is "solid theory" FTL truly is impossible in the universe as we know it, because it would allow effects to happen before the events that caused them. It would allow messages to be sent back in time. The speed of light is much more than the speed of light: it is the speed of causality itself. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, the earth would continue to orbit the disappeared sun for the roughly 8 minutes that lightspeed (or causality-speed) requires for covering the earth-sun distance. Anytime any event happens anywhere in the universe, you can imagine an invisible sphere exploding outward from that event in all directions at lightspeed (causality-speed). The event cannot cause an effect anywhere in the universe until this expanding sphere hits that part of the universe. So picture one of these spheres expanding outward from you at the moment you were born. At age 80 your birth-sphere now has a radius of 80 light-years. There is a 160 light-year diameter ball in the Milky Way all the effects of your birth are limited to. It will be millions of years before anything you ever could have done could have any effect whatsoever in the Andromeda galaxy. There is a "glass half full" optimistic view of this limitation: intergalactic Thanos/Hitler types cannot exist in the universe as we know it. We are well quarantined from the evil in other galaxies (if any exists), and other galaxies are well-quarantined from our evil here (where it definitely exists).
I can't help but read this story as a predecessor of "Solaris", where a contact with a planet-size living entity is actually attempted.
I also see here some characteristic traits of Lem's plots: something we are close to but can't hope really attaining (like personally traveling inside a star), the lack of understanding from well-intentioned lay people, and the idea that there are things we try hard to understand but really can't yet by far, like an ancient Greek, even well-educated, won't understand a quantum-mechanical problem.
This, and great storytelling, as usual. I find this translation quite well made. (I wonder though how would the translators wrestle with Lem's word games, like in "Observations on the spot" or "Futurological congress".)
I was thinking the same thing, but it was at least published after Solaris which came out in '61. Of course, he could have done The Truth before or during the writing of Solaris. It could still be a proto-Solaris. And anyone who's written fiction knows that you produce a lot of material that doesn't make it into the final draft. Maybe The Truth is a bit of Solaris that didn't make the final but Lem liked enough to return to later.
Also, if you feel like more Lem after reading this, I heartily recommend the '72 Solaris film if you haven't seen it. Probably one of the greatest directors (Tarkovsky) of all time filming off of one of the greatest sci-fi authors of all time. Tarkovsky likes long, slow shots the style of which is all but absent from Hollywood today, where they cut like a microtome, so it might seem dull and strange at first, but give yourself a chance to get used to his pacing.
The first novel I read of him was "The Invincible", recommended here. It was great, but it didn't prepare me at all for the second book someone recommended me, "The Futurological Congress". It's like two different styles.
Two Lems for the price of one! What could be better? One serious and the other basically telling SF folk stories, mocking other SF and inventing possible worlds, like Vonnegut did with his Kilgore Trout. Also ‘The Cyberiad’ with Trurl and Klapaucius is somewhat similar to the Ijon Tichy cycle.
For me too, but it was actually two novels in one book, "The Invincible" and "Solaris", and I was young back then (maybe 8yo), and didn't understand that one novel can ends in the middle of the book. Was quite puzzled about the change of topic mid-flight.
My favorite book is "Wizja Lokalna", the title has been translated to English as 'Observation on the Spot' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observation_on_the_Spot). It's a wonderful allegory of problems related to the concept of the 'world of abundance' vs 'communism/authoritarianism'. The presented problems (ethico-sphere, abundance of material thing) are serious and well researched and described, even if in a humorous fashion.
I really like the cover art on these books, by Przemek Dębowski. They have a very suitable and appealing retro-future look, I'd encourage people to them out. I actually ordered one from Dębowski as a poster recently.
I used (and attributed) some of the wonderful cover art and illustrations by Lem and Mroz and others from his web site, to illustrate this article about "GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine":
