Discursiveness
The discursive and non-fictional character of Lem's writting is first seen in the relatively early novel, The Astronauts, that considers the Tunguska catastrophe and rocket technology, and is characterised by a relatively small measure of fiction. The aforementioned tendency to present scientific deliberations in an almost unprocessed manner was stronger because Lem chose, as his protagonists, people for whom science and technology constituted an inseparable element of their lives: engineers, doctors, scientists, explorers, pilots. In effect, his novels do not attempt to exploit an alternative compositional scheme in which the main protagonist is a child or a lay-person who could ask questions, naturally and naively, on the subject of the world surrounding them.
The above-mentioned choice is symptomatic because Lem's protagonists, specialising in the cognition of reality, sooner or later find themselves in situations that in fact make lay-persons of them. The author is interested in topics on the borderline of human cognition. The plots of his novels are generally scaffolding for thoughts. It is not strange, therefore, that after a certain time Lem switched to a form expressing those thoughts without fictional additives.
The book crowning the series of canonical works from the 1960s, His Master's Voice, can be somewhat paradoxically called "a novel in the form of an essay". The main protagonist, Peter Hogarth, is an outstanding mathematician who is prone to anthropological deliberations and attempts to read "a letter from the stars" that, despite the commitment of the finest minds, becomes contaminated by typically human militarism. The project, uniting scientists selected to decipher the mysterious message, begins to resemble the Manhattan Project, on account of the location of the research complex in the desert, interference from the authorities, and the hopes nurtured by the state founders of discovering new technologies that could be used as weapons of mass destruction. The last point, however, does not materialise, not even because of the "conspiracy" of Professor Hogarth but because of the random nature of the TREX effect (Transport Explosion). Hogarth sees in this fact the effect of extraordinary carefulness on the part of the Aliens, who had foreseen and prevented all possible destructive readings of the "letter".
Against the background of other novels about contact, The Word of God is different because it expresses complete cognitive failure. Everything that the novel's protagonists can do, despite their undoubted scientific genius, is the creation of another mythology about Contact, making it almost The Word of God and, in addition, protecting it from interpretations that could have fatal consequences for humanity.
An often overlooked aspect of Lem's work is the biting satire of the universalistic claims of humanism in the 1960s. It is not without reason that the key words repeated many times by the protagonists include: communiqué, context, code, transmitter and receiver, terms originating in Jacobson's structuralist teachings about language. The humanists taking part in the Project are, therefore, presented as quite unnecessary, because even if some of their ideas can be regarded as interesting, they do not refer at all to the presupposed aims of the research.
Another text straddling the border between fiction and essay is Golem XIV. Among the fictional elements is an artificial intelligence that far exceeds human intelligence. The rest is a series of lectures presented as the fruit of the thoughts of the eponymous super-computer. It is interesting that Golem suggests a description of evolution consistent with that found in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976).
Finally, The Philosophy of Chance is also a specific text, arising from a revolt against structuralism (confirming the reading of His Master's Voice suggested above). Admittedly, Lem begins his deliberations about chance from a literary point of view but he moves away from them by formulating a concept of culture as the domain of random processes and then teaches us how to recognise random factors when we instinctively expect to see a cohesive construction set towards a defined aim.
The Philosophy of Chance may not be a particularly expressive continuation of Lem's philosophical writings but two anti-crime stories may serve as such, The Investigation and The Cold (regarded by the author as an improved version of The Investigation ). The two works differ from classical crime stories in that they lack the most important element, a perpetrator. In both cases, he is replaced by a sequence of strange coincidences and, in The Cold, even the solving of the mystery is brought about by chance.
