Of Games with the Universe: Preconceptions of Science in Stanislaw Lem's "The Invincible"

Abstract

odological, or, more generally, literary and speculative, specifics of the genre with which his name is synonymous. The narrative self-awareness of Lem's fiction, prominent at all stages of his career, is often mediated through an examination of cultural and linguistic interpretive problems that reflect on the role and meaning of semantic models in epistemology and cognition. In Lem's first serialized novel, Czlowiek z Marsa (A Man from Mars, 1946), a failure in communication leads to the destruction of an alien from Mars; in his first literary breakthrough, Astronauci (The Astronauts, 1951), narrative self-reflexivity is apparent during the decoding of a Venusian magnetic document; and in the earliest of his novels to be translated into English, Eden (1959), the issue returns in the interplanetary communication problems that hinder both the humans and their translating computers. Toward the middle of Lem's career this profound awareness of, and attention to, the role of conventional communication codes (whether narrative or scientific) finds its quintessential expression in the verbal extravagance of futurolinguistics and morphological forecasting described