2023-05-20
Review: "The Astronauts" by Stanislaw Lem
★ recommended ★
I read this book in March 2023. The first half during boring lectures I skipped, the second half during a five hour train-ride to Berlin. A short two day trip with a friend to quench our thirst for dark-wave at a Selofan concert. We had fun, the gothic scene in Berlin is great.
Anyway, the book. Written in 1951, I read the reprint from the seventies and as such the pages have sympathetically yellowed. It has a preface by Lem, in which he is rather critical of his own work. He laments how the story and more so the setting are outdated and how its original ideas fell behind real technological and scientific development. He writes that should anyone read this book twenty years later, surely only to smile and laugh at it like they'd do at works of Jules Verne. This was my first book of Lem. I have since read more of his work and he now sits comfortably among my favourite authors. His skill in writing enjoyable and interesting science fiction is unparalleled. However at least when he wrote this preface, I believe he failed to understand what his readers search for in his books (or in the works of Jules Verne, for that matter). Being that assumed someone who read this book (over) twenty years later, I did not do so to belittle it.
Science fiction stories do not loose their value once reality surpassed fiction, once it is clear their vision of the future will not materialize. That would be ridiculous. Is an outdated vision of the future really all that different from an unrealistic vision of the future? I argue it's not. Yet there is no question that science fiction with questionable ideas about the days to come enjoys a strong following.
Casual science fiction fans commonly exclaim how they like "realistic" science fiction. They are in fact wrong. What they have come to misidentify as realism really is just internal consistency. In simpler terms, whether a setting and the stories within it feel good and believable depend less on how close to reality it really is, but mostly on how they treat and navigate the readers (or viewers) suspension of disbelieve. A setting with clear and hard rules, that are never - or only on special occasion - broken, which build a foundation that seems logical and not arbitrary, will always bestow a sense of authentic believability in the reader, regardless of how close or removed this may be from current scientific understanding. It is this believability that the reader wants, not shallow realism. This is why high fantasy works, why fantastical science fiction works and why this book indeed still works.
As an aside, it amuses me how the outspoken fans of realism usually tend to cite works that are at most only superficially realistic and loose even that once you take a closer look, but that would a bit much now. Instead, I will dedicate the rest of this book review to actually reviewing the book.
The threat in this book is imposed by the inhabitants of Venus upon humanity. A war loving species, the Venusians want to kill all humans remotely using radiation and then take over earth. Humanity learns of this by examining a crashed automated probe the Venusians send. Admittedly I do find it a bit weird, that this probe contains the entire Venusian invasion plan, however it is lightly implied that the onboard computer may have been an artificial intelligence making it somewhat believable. I'd like to point out a small, seemingly irrelevant story detail here, which I think can be source for an interesting discussion. The computer memory of the probe is a magnetic wire on a ceramic spool. When the book was written, magnetized wire would have been a very obvious storage medium for computers and when I read the relevant sections, I got the feeling that the human engineers and scientist were familiar with this technology. This is phenomenal, because this implies that humans and Venusians use similar technology, at least in some areas. Modern science fiction has fallen into the trap of portraying technology and science employed by aliens to be alien as well, more akin to magic in high fantasy. This however, in my not particularly humble opinion, assumes that there is no natural ladder of progression to scientific advancement. While there probably is a lot of "wiggle-room" with regards to what technologies can be developed before which others, I think there might be some merit to the idea that some ideas are universal, that some technologies are inherent discoveries on any scientifically inclined species path of evolution. This is further supported by the fact that physics, the underlying set of laws of the universe, is the same for everyone. In the world of this book, storing computer data on magnetized wire perhaps is one of these universal technologies.
Following the discovery of the magnetic memory, the book spends a fair time on humanity decoding its contents and later debating the few recovered snippets. This part is truly delightful, because it is full of scientists discussing and hypothesising in a large plenum over many pages with is surprisingly light to read and just fun. The different scientists and engineers feel like distinct characters, which is refreshing coming from modern science-fiction where scientist characters are often cliche and way too similar to tell apart. On two occasions in this book, Lem apparently decided to make a character … stupid. In this section, it is a biologist who, during the plenum discussions, proposes wild hypothesis on the biology of the Venusians that are void of logic. He is always quickly corrected by the de-facto (but not de-jure) main character of the book, the astrophysicist Arsenjew.
The second such character is the actual main character, the pilot. Not the pilot of the space-craft, in Lems books spaceships are controlled by engineers and not pilots, but of the onboard plane and helicopter. But we'll get to that later. The pilot is not meant to be incompetent, but it is made very clear that he often acts impulsive without thinking about his actions beforehand. The pilot is american, incidentally, which I think Lem found amusing. And again it is Arsenjew who regularly puts him in his place. But I got a bit ahead of myself here.
After uncovering the Venusian plan, earth decides to send a spaceship to venus to investigate. There are several things here I'd like to mention at once: That decision is made by the very same council of scientist that decoded the data wire. In the entire book, no government or military entity is mentioned. Important administrative decisions on earth are made by scientists, not politicians. No diplomacy, just cooperation. The crew of the vessel send to venus, again, consists of scientists and engineers, their leader being the aforementioned Arsenjew. Despite being absolutely convinced that the Venusians are determined to annihilate all life on earth and despite earth having the ability for a guaranteed lethal preemptive first strike, they still send a spaceship to investigate. And yes, the crews expressive mission is investigating Venus. They are strongly discouraged from using violence in any situation. I love this optimism. Of all the things the book envisions for the future, this is both the most important and the least realistic.
Starting with the launch of the spaceship, the book is now from the point of view of the pilot. Lem spends substantial amount of time writing about the ships voyage to venus. This however is not filler content. It allows the crew to get to know each other, which in term allows us, the readers to get to know them as well. This is done in a very interesting way: Each night, they gather and one of them tells a story from his life. There are three such stories in the book. Well, actually more like two and a half, because unfortunately Arsenjews story comes a bit short. I would have really liked a few more stories here, especially from characters like Chandrasekar, the mathematician.
I won't spend any time on the landing on Venus. It is an interesting procedure that, at least to me, made a certain amount of sense, however you would not get much out of me describing it. Once on venus, arguably the best part of the book starts. I will not spoil the details or actual story here, instead I will talk about why I love this part so much. Keeping it short, it's the exploration. I love exploration stories, especially when the subjects of the exploration are the creations and remains of strange civilisations. Writing a good exploration story is not easy. An author needs to be careful to neither give too little nor too much. If there is not enough bits of information, not enough connection between them, too few discoveries, then the little you do have feels arbitrary, disconnected, unsubstantial, inconsequential. Give too much and you deprive the reader of what makes exploration stories so enjoyable: The speculation. A good exploration story gives just enough, to make the reader file like there is <i>something</i> there. Just a few slightly connected fantastical discoveries will make the readers mind work. Will make them speculate. What possibly could be the purpose of the thing just discovered? How does it connect to everything else? Who made it? And why? A good exploration story will make readers pause, put the book aside for a few seconds and just <i>think</i>. This part of the book is a decent exploration story. The crew makes fantastical discoveries that intrigued me. This was fun.
Unfortunately, the ending of the book feels a bit abrupt. With that I do not mean the revelation that the Venusians have destroyed themselves long before they could finalize their invasion plans. That has been hinted at for most of the book and once it was finally "officially" revealed, I just nodded along (which is a good thing, by the way; only bad, unskilled writers need to rely on crutches like "subverting expectations" to make their stories engaging). I mean the decision to let the pilot fall into unconsciousness, only to awaken once the spaceship is already on its way back home to earth. At least it comes after a nice moment between the pilot and Arsenjew, which feels good after Arsenjew constantly (but rightfully) berating the pilot over the course of the story.
Now, one last thing I'd feel like mentioning that this book is absolutely a product of its time. Not just the dated science fiction. There isn't a single woman in the entire book. While I usually do not explicitly look for such things, this felt hard not to notice. The movie based on the book remedies this, although it certainly has it's own issues. By the way, should you want to watch the movie, I recommend getting a hold of the original German / Polish version (usually called "Der schweigende Stern" and rarely "Raumschiff Venus antwortet nicht"). The American version made substantial changes, including making the pilot soviet and Arsenjew an american as well as just removing a lot of material.
And that's it. That's all I have to say about this book right now. It short, interesting and fun. Definitely recommended.