Fiasco by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Respecting the Eternally Dead

This is science fiction at its best. It is scientific because it employs technology that is not yet available but is nevertheless plausible in theory. It is fictional not because it proposes some strange physics in an alien galaxy-far-away but because it presents an alternative cosmology to the one that exists, unchallenged, in our own heads. This is a counter-fiction that is shocking and intriguing in equal measure; and it makes Fiasco a masterpiece.

Lem reveals and overturns an unrecognized presumption, a prejudice really, we make about the universe: the anthropomorphic conceit that life emerges from mere matter, when it does, as a sort of developmental triumph. Life represents progress; the more complex the life which evolves, the more advanced the world in which it occurs. Living things, we think, are special: they have purpose; they adapt to the world in order to achieve their purposes; in the case of humankind, they are even capable of choosing among purposes. In short, life is teleological. Even if we reject religious belief, we tend to accept that this apparent trajectory reflects the purposefulness of the cosmos which produced it.

But just suppose that we’ve got this narrative of cosmic progress wrong. Suppose that purposeless matter - not just lifeless matter but matter that has no potential at all to produce life, as on a moon of Saturn - is not only the dominant mass in the universe, but it is also a superior substance. It is superior because it is not subject to the laws of genetic evolution. It exists without having to conform to environmental vagaries. In fact, extreme environmental conditions allow this matter to express incredibly original, even creative, forms. Dead matter need not struggle for a place in the universe, nor need it prevail over other dead matter. To describe the situation succinctly: dead matter is free, liberated eternally from the “guillotine of evolution.”

The possibility of travel to other places in and beyond the solar system has perennially provoked speculation about the existence of dead matter. But we duck the issue of infinite cosmic ‘waste’. And we temporise about it until the scientific analysis is ‘complete’. We try desperately to give dead matter purpose. We search for life on Mars and Venus, even if it might now be extinct, because the thought of the dominance of dead matter is disturbing. We fantasize about mineral deposits on the Moon or travel to other planets, or even galaxies, to find places of refuge or needed resources for a depleted Earth. We look for intelligent signals from deep space in the hope of forging some kind of cosmic companionship. We may no longer consider ourselves the centre of the universe; nevertheless it is all for us - to use, to explore, to communicate with. If there is intelligent life elsewhere, it too is instrumental for our well-being. Either they can teach us or we them. The camaraderie of the living!

We thus give purpose to these places - but only in our imagination. They have no inherent purpose or at least none we could accept as such - for us, for any other form of life, but most importantly for themselves. If they consist of dead matter, they will never develop. They will never be used to become more than they are. They may be reduced to their constituent components of particles and energies in a super nova or black hole or in the nuclear engines of space craft, but by escaping genetic evolution they will forever evade the constraints of teleology. They exist immutably and only for themselves. In Christianity this is a definition of God.

If another intelligent civilization does exist, it too has been subject to the inscrutable, and debilitating, process of evolution. And evolution implies competition, conflict, and very un-Godlike action to overwhelm one’s living opponents. Recent anthropological findings confirm that the rise of primitive Homo Sapiens was at the expense of not only others in the genus Homo but most of the existing fauna in the areas Sapiens invaded. From Australia, to the islands of the Pacific, and into North and South America, humankind was a persistent serial killer of mammals, and marsupials, as well as the insects and flora which relied upon them. Why should any other intelligent species be ignorant of the reality of evolution. [See the recent Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind For a fascinating account of the natural destructiveness of our species: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...]

Such a conception is obviously problematic for Christian, as well as other monotheistic, beliefs for a variety of reasons. But Lem hones in on the central doctrine of Christian thought: resurrection from the dead. Resurrection is thrown into reverse; it is not a sign of divine mercy but an obscene curse. The resuscitation of a corpse, that is the reconstituting of life from dead matter, isn’t a divinely inspired miracle but a cosmically sinful tragedy. The corpse is forced from its liberated state of union with the divine back into the slavery of the genetically dependent world and straight back into the miserable competition among living things. The medical technology that Lem invents to allow such resuscitation is therefore clearly infernal, profoundly evil in its intent.

Lem’s cosmology isn’t Gnostic or nihilist. His heaven or nirvana or place of ultimate refuge is not somewhere else outside the universe that we see and experience; it is located within this very universe in its most perfect state, one of absolute internal stasis and contentment. What we call dead is really divine. What is not dead produces chaos. ‘Disordered’ is the theological term which the Dominican theologian aboard the space craft Eurydice might use. ‘Fiasco’ is the theatrical equivalent.

Lem uses his technology to get us as far away from ourselves as possible in order for his fiction to take effect. At such a distance, the fiction may not be fictional at all. "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars... "

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