Nobel Prize Laureate Olga TokarczukRussian fiction is known for its interest in the fragility of borders – between nations, between ethnic groups, between fiction and reality, consciousness and dreams. Because her novels and short stories depict the constant change of national boundaries, especially in Eastern Europe (Tokarczuk is Polish), they also delight in supernatural and science-fiction elements. IN “House of Day, House of Night“, visiting from Riverhead this week, she writes: “All over the world, wherever people sleep, small, tangled worlds flare up in their heads, growing over reality like scar tissue.” Recently, Tokarczuk sent us some notes about some of her favorite science fiction and speculative fiction writers, whose books masterfully combine the fantastic and the prose. Her notes were translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Star Diaries
Stanislav Lem
I started reading science fiction at an early age. I was absolutely sure that by the time I grew up, we would fly to Mars and the Moon without a second thought. I was going to work in space medicine or as a physicist. At first I read books for young people, but Stanislav Lem became my real introduction to this genre. My favorites of his books are “The Star Diaries,” about a lone space traveler and scientist named Iyon Tichi, and “Cyberiad“, a collection of short stories about robots and intelligent machines.
Lem was far ahead of his time, especially in the field of machine intelligence. He had an excellent sense of humor and a unique gift for discovering all sorts of paradoxes; his works challenge the imagination by asking questions that are the subject of philosophical inquiry. In the story “The Seventh Voyage”, Ijeon's spaceship gets caught in a time loop, resulting in a swarm of different Ijeong from different parts of the same day. Which one is “real”? Today I would tell myself that the real one is the one telling the story. The real one is the observer.
Since today we are mesmerized by artificial intelligence, we simply need to return to the stories of Lem, who anticipated the advent of all kinds of intelligent machines.
Ubik
Philip K. Dick
Most science fiction does not depend on literary sophistication. It's more about communicating a concept, a paradox, a vision. Sometimes the vision is so powerful, and the desire to express it so strong, that it reduces language to its most pragmatic role: pure communication. I think Philip K. Dick was a great visionary. He was the first writer to create a truly moving vision of a decaying world and the thin line between what is real and what our brains create. The multiplicity, variety, and innovation of his work changed not only science fiction, but literature as a whole. Incredibly modern and poignantly examines the questions that humanity has asked itself for centuries.
In Poland, Lem was Dick's great promoter, and they corresponded until Dick decided that Lem was not a person, but a spy network called LEM. I started with Ubik and will never forget its depiction of a reality falling apart: modern objects suddenly turn ancient, food instantly spoils, technology loses its power. Only the temporarily awakened dead and the polymorphic product known as Ubik can help. We can read this story as a metaphor for the decaying mind, but also as a “fallen cosmos” that must be constantly maintained by an unknown force.
