Return From the Stars by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cosmic PTSD

It was called Soldier’s Heart in the American Civil War. Shell shock was a condition of the First World War. Battle fatigue of the Second. But the condition we know as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, was unknown in previous conflicts and emerged from the American War in Vietnam. Each is a distinct syndrome befitting the circumstances of the time, including the prevailing technology. And I think there’s a good case to be made that the literature of each period created the ability to differentiate each development. Specifically I think Lem invented PTSD; and Return From the Stars is his diagnostic guide to the condition.*

PTSD is of course stress-related and occurs primarily through the experience of extended periods of life-threatening activities, particularly but not exclusively warfare. PTSD has several distinctive symptoms which differentiate the condition from other sorts of combat-induced stress. It need not involve physical injury or acute deprivation, for example. Individuals may be materially well cared for yet suffer intensely through the loss of comrades and the profound psychic dislocation or acting in an alien environment. It is also not typically a condition of the battlefield itself but one which manifests primarily after the time of peril has passed and upon reflection on experience.

But perhaps most significantly, PTSD depends crucially on the cultural context in which the survivor of danger finds him or herself. Having lived through an alien and alienating experience - the Americans in Vietnam, the British in Iraq, Russians in Afghanistan, Portuguese in Angola, the French in Algeria - individuals who return to an environment which is both different from their memories and hostile to their experience appear far more likely to show relevant symptoms. Because there are fewer individuals affected than in ‘world’ conflicts, and the personal risk of expressing the impact of their experiences in a culture which does not respect much less value those experiences, the psychic strain is of a unique variety.

Lem’s protagonist, Bregg, doesn’t return to Earth from war. Nevertheless he has spent 10 years under enormous physical and psychological pressure as a pilot on a mission to a distant star system. He has lost two of his four colleagues during the mission, and has returned to Earth a psychic burn-out, questioning both his youthful motivations and his continued career.

The Earth to which he has returned is unrecognizable as the one he left. His ten years away are equivalent to more than twelve times that for those who have not been traveling near light-speed. Nothing is how he had left it - technology, architecture, economics, food, the rituals and mores of everyday life, including sex, are entirely foreign. Moreover his mission, his sacrifice, has become déclassé in contemporary society. Even his musculature and stature represent a now repugnant historical epoch of high testosterone violence and machismo. He is, in short, a freak.

It is as if Lem has been able to anticipate (in 1961) the forthcoming mental effects of European and American military campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Bregg shows all the major symptoms of PTSD: depression, confusion, disorientation, alienation from both himself and his surroundings, an inability to express either the trauma of his experiences or the equal trauma of his return to ‘normal’ life. Yet the condition was not officially recognized by the medical establishment until the 1980’s.

It is possible and quite reasonable to read Return From the Stars as a prescient prediction of future technology - from Kindle to sophisticated robotics and driverless cars. But I think a solely technological emphasis shortchanges Lem’s literary as well as observational talent. His recognition of the kind of stress induced by technological development is extremely nuanced. Technology - of war, of travel, of perception - increases the ‘penetration’ of humanity into hostile and inhuman environments. Because these environments are increasingly ‘alien’, they are more acutely stressful and also more stressful to return from.

In using the device of ‘rational’ time-travel, Lem has created a narrative decades in advance of medical or sociological science for the sort of psychological effect of technology on human life. Much more than a techno-nerd therefore.

*Lem’s book was published in 1961. Arthur C. Clarke had published his Childhood’s End in 1952. Containing many of the same sci-fi tropes as the later book, particularly the return of a space-traveler to his now lost civilisation because of the effects of relativity, Lem’s emphasis is far more than Clarke’s on the psychic consequences of the technology.

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