Time Warps

By Paul Gray

MEMOIRS OF A SPACE TRAVELER by Stanislaw Lem

Translated by Joel Stern and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 153 pages; $9.95

These nine stories were left out of The Star Diaries (1976), an English translation of a 1971 Polish collection by Author Stanislaw Lem. The fact that this new book has thus tumbled out of a time warp seems entirely appropriate to its contents. More so, in fact, than the rather misleading title. Lem is not concerned here with rockets or star treks; only two stories take Ijon Tichy, the peripatetic hero and chronicler of The Star Diaries, away from planet Earth. The space that is traveled is chiefly cranial; vast internal distances are covered by leaps of imagination.

In The Eighteenth Voyage, for example, Tichy ponders a problem no smaller than the creation of the universe. A scientist friend has proved to his own and Tichy's satisfaction that the cosmos is "a fluke on the largest possible scale." It exploded from a protoatom that could not have existed; it pulses on borrowed energy as aberrantly as the subatomic particle that violates, for a nanosecond, physical laws. After 18 billion years or so, the universe's "monstrous debt" may come due at any time. Tichy figures out a way to repay it and make everything much nicer in the process, but his plan is altered by a satanic trio of laboratory workers before it is put into effect. The awful result is what now exists, everywhere. Tichy shoulders the responsibility: "Since October 20 of last year, I am to blame for all--and I mean all--the constructional defects in the Universe."

Not all of Tichy's adventures are so apocalyptic. He attracts mad scientists, members of "the gray brotherhood of obsession," who confide their wild schemes to him. One visitor unveils a working time machine; unfortunately, he commits involuntary suicide when he projects himself forward to see how his invention has prospered. Tichy explains: "If a time traveler goes 20 years ahead, he must necessarily become as many years older. How could it be otherwise?" Tichy also bumps into a man who has cloned himself and another who has created an eternal soul, its complex circuitry imprinted in sturdy crystal. Still another acquaintance thinks the cybernetic revolution has failed its promise by simply trying to mimic applied human intelligence. He labors to create disobedient devices: "If I present you with a machine that extracts square roots from even numbers but doesn't want to from odd numbers, that's no defect, damn it, that's an achievement!"

Tichy finds that attempts to improve things, no matter how elegant in design, invariably make them worse. Two giant corporations compete to make a better washing machine; as veteran readers of science fiction might suspect, the devices become complex enough to experience mental illness, hire their own laundresses and attempt a takeover of the world. Even outer space is being ruined by man's ability to visit it. Graffiti flourish in the asteroid belt: IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT ON THIS HERE METEORITE.

Yet Lem is not just another humanist crying out against the inroads of technology. He knows science well enough to be playful about it. He understands that the weakest link in any theory may be the theoretician. His message is not glum but comic: if a perfect machine ever arose, miraculously, from its imperfect builder, no one would trust it.

-- By Paul Gray

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