This tradition is important because it represents the largest pool of alternative views of what role science could play in society and in the life of the spirit - alternative to the ascendant western capitalist view which needs to be rethought (although, due to the insidious, everpresent viewpoints of fundamentalist neocon cryptofascists, I always feel the need to insert that caveat that rethinking doesn't mean tearing up and throwing away). Not that this book explores this idea directly, but the FEELING of these imaginative hypotheticals of future/technology/alien as projected from 1988 Poland are very different from the American hypotheticals I grew up with.
Fiasco starts out pretty slow. Real slow. It really begins with Lem's fantastic descriptions of Titan landscapes, which explore the nature of... nature. Like Solaris, it explores an anthropomorphized alien world as a pretext for exploring possibilities of the alien spirit, mixing the fear of the unknown with the fascination of the new. (Vivomorphism? - 0 hits)
The Roembden Crater had cracked, once, at the northeast on its large circle. Then a glacier of frozen gas crept through the gap. In the following millennia, the glacier retreated, leaving on that furrowed terrain mineral deposits—the delight and vexation of the crystallographers and other, no less dumbfounded scientists. It was indeed a sight to see. The pilot (now operator of a strider) faced a sloping plain ringed by distant mountains and strewn with... with what, exactly? It was as if the gates of unearthly museums had been flung open and the remains of decrepit monsters had been dumped in a cascade of bones. Or were these the aborted, insane blueprints for monsters, each one more fantastic than the last? The shattered fragments of creatures that only some accident had kept from participating in the cycles of life? He saw enormous ribs, or they could have been the skeletons of spiders whose tibiae eagerly gripped blood-speckled, bulbous eggs; mandibles that clung to each other with crystal fangs; the platelike vertebrae of spinal columns, as if spilled out in coin rolls from the bodies of prehistoric reptiles after their decay.
This eerie scene was best viewed, in all its wealth, from the height of the Digla. The area near Roembden was called, by the people there, the Cemetery—and in fact the landscape seemed a battlefield of ancient struggles, a burial ground that was an exuberant tangle of rotting skeletons. Parvis saw the smooth surfaces of joints that could have emerged from the carcass of some mountainous monstrosity. One could even make out on them the reddish, bloodclotted places where the tendons had been attached. Nearby were draped skin coverings, with bits of hair that the wind gently combed and lay in changing waves. Through the mist loomed more many-storied arthropods, gnawing through one another even in death. From faceted, mirrorlike blocks thrusted antlers, also gleaming, among a spill of femurs and skulls of a dirty-white color. He saw this, realizing that the images that arose in his brain, the macabre associations, were only an illusion, a trick of the eyes shocked by the strangeness. If he dug methodically in his memory, he would probably remember which compounds yielded—in a billion-year chemistry—precisely these forms that, stained with hematites, impersonated bloody bones, or that went beyond the modest accomplishments of terrestrial asbestos to create an iridescent fluff as of the most delicate fleece. But such sober analysis would have no effect on what the eyes saw.
For the very reason that here nothing served a purpose—not ever, not to anyone—and that here no guillotine of evolution was in play, amputating from every genotype whatever did not contribute to survival, nature, constrained neither by the life she bore nor by the death she inflicted, could achieve liberation, displaying a prodigality characteristic of herself, a limitless wastefulness, a brute magnificence that was useless, an eternal power of creation without a goal, without a need, without a meaning. This truth, gradually penetrating the observer, was more unsettling than the impression that he was witness to a cosmic mimicry of death, or that these were in fact the mortal remains of unknown beings that lay beneath the stormy horizon. So one had to turn upside down one's natural way of thinking, which was capable of going only in one direction: these shapes were similar to bones, ribs, skulls, and fangs not because they had once served life—they never had—but only because the skeletons of terrestrial vertebrates, and their fur, and the chitinous armor of the insects, and the shells of the mollusks all possessed the same architectonics, the same symmetry and grace, since Nature could produce this just as well where neither life nor life's purposefulness had ever existed, or ever would.
I had to sign up for this book themed social site called scribd to read this book. I don't understand the site yet, but a bunch of people are "following" me on it. Whoever came up with THAT terminology has never had to deal with acute paranoia, that's for sure.
I'm not DONE reading this book yet - so wait for part 2. In the meantime, since you've already seen Tarkovsky's "Solaris," I'm pleased to point out that "Сталкер", my personal favorite, is on youtube in its entirety;
What is it that is exciting about this school of thought? Can you put your finger on it?
This is too much to read.
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