Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

I see some familiar names popping up here!

The Twitter exodus is making me realize that for many of these people, this is their first time fleeing a collapsing social media platform. I've done it a lot of times! This, for instance, is the reincarnation of a LiveJournal, which technically is still there though I haven't posted anything to it in years.

I have a new presence on Mastodon, at mathstodon.xyz/@mattmcirvin . I'm certainly not going away from here, but that place has the feel, for me, of the vanished Google+ science/mathematics community, which was a nice place in some ways.

The Mathstodon instance has the very special property that it supports LaTeX mathematics markup in posts, but unfortunately you can only see it rendered if you view the posts through that instance (or another that supports it, but there are not many). Still, this is fantastic for certain very geeky purposes, and so far I've mostly posted about mathematics there.

Since Mastodon has a broadly Twitter-like structure with a 500-character limit on posts, this Dreamwidth account will still be useful for longer-form writing, which is mostly what I use it for already.

I still haven't been back to Canobie since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, but last year we managed to get over to Six Flags New England, and yesterday we hit Lake Compounce in Bristol, Connecticut, on tickets I got as a birthday present. This is a park I'd been to and enjoyed a couple of times before--our last visit was on the way home from a longer trip, and was cut short by an immense traffic jam that delayed our arrival for hours. That time, the most memorable moments of the visit were the Compounce Mountain sky ride, and riding the raft ride, Thunder Rapids, three times straight through resulting in extreme drenching. This time, the sky ride is sadly no longer around and Thunder Rapids is not operating for some reason. But we had a great time anyway.

I had several reasons to think it would be kind of a messed-up visit, but this did not happen. The weather predictions in the previous week seemed to be calling for either showers and thunderstorms, or punishing heat, but it was actually just partly cloudy and hot enough to make it fun to get wet. Pretty much ideal amusement-park weather, as long as you used some sunscreen and stayed hydrated, and I think the ominous predictions kept the crowds down.

Then when we arrived, it seemed like most of the major rides in the park were closed, including Boulder Dash, the colossal mountainside wooden coaster that is many visitors' main reason to visit Compounce. Actually, nearly all of those rides opened up a little later in the day. I'm wondering if some of the "everything was closed!" Yelp reviews I've seen were people fooled by a similar phenomenon.

My main must-rides were the new one (well, it's 6 years old, but my last visit was before that), Phobia Phear Coaster, and Boulder Dash. I also wanted to get rides on a couple that I'd never gotten around to riding: their classic Arrow flume Saw Mill Plunge, and their cheeseball shooting dark ride, Ghost Hunt. We all started off riding some gentle family rides together (the antique carousel, the bumper cars and the little "Zoomer's Gas and Go" cars), then the others went off to the waterpark and I went to tackle Phobia.

Here's CoasterForce's POV video of the ridiculously named Phobia Phear Coaster. It's a short but good ride, a popular off-the-shelf coaster model from Premier called a Sky Rocket II. Both of the Busch Gardens parks have similar rides--at this little park, it really stands out, a loop within a loop about 150 feet tall. The track is twisted so that the loops don't invert you--but there's also a roll inversion at the very top, the one place where you do go upside down.

It's a launch coaster with three magnetic LSM launches. You launch forward with enough energy to just go up a little way and fall back, then backward with almost but not quite enough energy to make the smaller non-inverting loop (I love the drama of this), then forward to go all the way over the top and around the track. The heartline roll slowly dangles you upside down over 150 feet of air (held in by nothing but a lap restraint), then you plunge and twist forcefully down into the non-inverting loop. You shoot through the station, make one last partial climb up the first rise, then settle back down into the station.

The twists in the track have some real whip to them, and if this coaster had hard over-the-shoulder restraints, it would be a painful headbanging machine. Fortunately it does not. Most installations in the US do have a soft "comfort collar" hated by coaster fans, which is presumably there to provide some psychological reassurance to guests, but this one doesn't, I suppose because psychological reassurance is the opposite of this ride's theme. I personally found it not unusually terrifying (from prior experience, I have faith in the ability of a secure lap bar to hold me in, which I guess is the main fear element here) but it was solid and forceful, a ride that did not mess around.

After getting off Phobia, I noticed that Boulder Dash was running. I took a break to compose myself and find a water-bottle-filling station (at the Johnny Rockets by the carousel), then headed for the park's signature ride.

This is East Coasters' fairly recent POV of Boulder Dash. I have to say, even with recent re-profiling work this ride was running rougher than I remembered it being, jackhammering actually pretty hard. That may have been a function of the seat I was sitting in, or maybe my tastes just became more delicate with age. But it is an absolutely overwhelming assault on the senses, still one of the wildest coasters I've ever ridden. There is not a lot of strong airtime--it's more powerful positive G-forces kicking you in the butt in the valleys, laterals on the screaming turnaround at the far end, combined with all that shaking and a scary sense of out-of-control speed as you hurtle through the woods and along the lake. I'm just not sure how many times I could take it. Maybe if I was still 25.

After getting my fill of the monster rides, I joined up with my folks again and we rode the lazy river at the waterpark and got a late lunch. My spouse wanted to do the park's big family raft waterslide, Mammoth Falls, which we'd never done before. That was a fun one; much of it is twists and turns in a dark tube and I was facing backwards through this, so it kind of reminded me of the backwards helix on Disney's Expedition Everest. Then we joined up with our daughter again and did the shooting dark ride, Ghost Hunt, immortalized by Airtime Cinema here:

All I can say is, the kid was the most skillful ghost-hunter of the family by a huge margin.

The classic Arrow flume, Saw Mill Plunge, was one of the rides that was initially closed. We only noticed that it was running right at the end of the day when we were about to leave, and the others didn't care to ride it, so I declined a solo ride. Maybe next time.

 

Lately I re-read a couple of influential novels for me: Arthur C. Clarke's novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stanisław Lem's His Master's Voice. They are both meditations on the theme of contact with an unseen, offscreen extraterrestrial intelligence of nearly godlike capability, and what this means for humanity and its flawed institutions. I thought it might be interesting to review and compare them. First, the Clarke. Inevitably, I'm going to be comparing this one to its film version too.

I first read 2001 when I was a kid, actually years before I saw Stanley Kubrick's epochal movie. Oceans of ink have been spilled on the mysteries of that movie and what it might mean--it's a little odd in that Clarke's novel, while it tells the same story in broad outline, is not enigmatic at all. Clarke, like his friend Isaac Asimov, tended to aim for clarity of exposition and here he seems almost to be deliberately writing on a young reading level, as if it's a YA novel. He tells you a lot about what's supposed to be going on and the motives of the major players (including the unseen aliens), and doesn't leave any major unanswered questions about what the plot is supposed to be. There are still a lot of unexplained mysteries, since we're dealing with Clarkean technology-indistinguishable-from-magic that mere humans likely can't understand, but they're more in background. If you like, you can take this novel as an easy cheat code to understanding the movie. But since the novel (which is neither a novelization, nor the basis for the film, but was written in parallel during its chaotic production) differs from the movie on many points of detail, you can equally well take it as an independent story and reinterpret Kubrick's movie any way you like. It's not one of Clarke's best novels, but it has its moments and in any event, it's a very quick read.

The basic outline is familiar by now (but I'm going to spoil much of the plot of both book and movie, and mostly assume you know the movie, so turn away if you don't want that).

The Dawn of People

Millions of years ago, a tribe of ape-people, depicted through a protagonist Clarke calls Moon-Watcher, encounter an alien artifact like a rectangular slab (in the book, it's transparent and is a kind of video display) that manipulates their minds, teaches them both simple technology and organized aggression. This puts humanity on a path to conquering space and creating artificial intelligence, but also makes us enthusiastic killers. This is described as a necessity for the world the proto-humans live in, if the aliens' general program of uplifting Mind is going to succeed here, but not necessarily the healthiest mix for the long term.

We proceed (not as abruptly as in the film) to the near future of Clarke's time, in which Dr. Heywood Floyd travels on specially chartered spaceliners to a rotating wheel station, then to the US moonbase in crater Clavius. Much as in the film, this part is all just futuristic scene-setting and exposition. In the absence of bravura miniature effects, Strauss and Ligeti, the book doesn't dwell on it for all that long. US moonbase workers, on the trail of a magnetic anomaly, have dug up another monolithic slab at crater Tycho, this one completely black and unresponsive. During a lighthearted photo op at the monolith site, the Sun comes up and the monolith suddenly emits an eldritch radio screech, a signal aimed at the planet Saturn. Apparently it's a kind of burglar alarm, designed to start some process in motion when a civilization appears that is capable of going to the Moon and digging it up. But what process, who knows? Presumably we need to go to Saturn to find out.

(This section of the book did evolve directly from "The Sentinel", the short story that was the seed of the whole book and movie project. In that story, the "alarm" is a featureless black pyramid.)

Saturn Mission, Some Time Later

The longest and most conventionally exciting part of the book is what follows, the story of the Discovery mission to Saturn (in the film, it's Jupiter, but we can spend longer on the travelogue detail here--they pass Jupiter along the way and drop a probe into its atmosphere, much like the uncrewed Galileo spacecraft in real life). As in the film, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole make up the crew along with three hibernating crew members and an artificial intelligence named HAL 9000 with full control of the ship's systems. Hal reports a bogus failure in the antenna-pointing unit, goes berserk and manages to kill everybody but Dave, who survives his attack, shuts him down, and has to proceed solo with a hobbled spaceship and no clear way home.

The differences from the movie are particularly interesting here--not only does Clarke tell us exactly what's wrong with Hal, the characters in the book figure it out too! Mission Control even manages quite rapidly to induce the same psychosis in a duplicate Earthbound HAL 9000. As with real-life programming bugs, it's much easier to diagnose after the fact than to prevent. It turns out to be a very Asimovian-robot sort of dilemma: Hal has badly dealt with conflicting directives to share and to conceal information (since Dave and Frank have, for purposes of secrecy, not been told anything about the Tycho monolith or Discovery's true mission, but Hal knows everything). Clarke explains that only the hibernating crewmembers had been briefed on all this. (This is a subtle difference from the film: I read the film's dialogue as implying that not even they knew, just Hal.)

In a way, Clarke was prescient here. Our stabs at artificial intelligence don't go around the bend in quite this way, but the difficult tension between security and free access to information in computer systems is after all a huge problem in our society today, and in fact is the basis of my current job. I suppose Murray Leinster's even more prescient "A Logic Named Joe" already dealt with some of the same conflicts in 1946.

Clarke used this same explanation for Hal's major malfunction in his 1980s sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, but since that is more a sequel to the movie than to the novel, he has it as a mystery that only gets figured out in the course of that story. (The film of 2010 did basically the same thing.)

Dave is considerably smarter here than he is in the movie, but it makes the conflict less cinematic. After Hal murders Frank on an EVA, Dave sees immediately that Frank is dead and doesn't go chasing off after his body; instead, the big argument with Hal is over regaining manual control of the hibernation system to wake up the three hibernating crew. Hal gives in suspiciously easily, but when Dave goes to do it, Hal opens all the pod-bay doors and blows all the air out of the ship. Dave manages to get to an emergency shelter with an oxygen bottle and a spacesuit, and from there, there's nothing for it but to bust into Hal's brain and hear him sing "Daisy, Daisy". I've always liked the book version of this scene, with ripped-out circuit boards bouncing around in zero gravity and Hal getting so addled that his floating-point routines start to deteriorate. But the film version is superb for what was possible with the effects of the time.

Saturn, and Beyond the Negative Zone

There's a lot more detail about what Dave gets up to afterward. It's made very clear that Dave is completely boned at this point: he was never intended to get home on this ship in the first place, and without Hal fully functioning he can't even go into hibernation and await rescue by the next mission, as originally planned. There's nothing to do but press on with the mission as best he can. The real target seems to be Saturn's weird two-toned moon Iapetus (which Clarke spells "Japetus"). Clarke describes the bright hemisphere of Iapetus as a completely smooth oval like an eye, its long axis oriented north-south, with what turns out to be a gigantic monster Monolith standing like a black tower at the exact center.

(Voyager 2's first semi-close-up photos of Iapetus were reminiscent enough of Clarke's description to inspire Carl Sagan to dash off a note to him, but the resemblance is somewhat exaggerated in popular accounts--what Iapetus really has, as Cassini made clearer, is an irregular dark oval splayed out east-west along its equator, with the poles bright; also a bizarre tall ridge along its equator. Some of the first images of all this from Cassini were grabbed by me off of the JPL website and given some quick amateur image processing to make them more legible, whereupon astro-conspiracist Richard Hoagland grabbed my versions and, as is his wont, used the images' blocky, JPEG-artifact-filled nature as evidence that Iapetus is an artificial space station. I'm guessing this level of crank attention would not have been paid were it not for the prominence of Iapetus in Clarke's novel, even though it doesn't figure in the more famous film at all.)

Dave attempts to land one of Discovery's space pods on top of the monolith and instead finds himself dropping into some sort of incomprehensible ancient interstellar transit system, leaving a final message that ends "...oh my God, it's full of stars!" A version of this actually became a famous quote because Peter Hyams' movie of 2010 makes heavy use of it, but it actually doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the line never appears and also wouldn't really jibe with the appearance of Doug Trumbull's Star Gate effects. It does make sense in the book, because the Iapetus monolith, when it opens up to Dave Bowman and inverts like a Necker cube, actually does look like it's full of stars.

From here on has always been easily my favorite part of the novel. Clarke was a visual writer (to an under-appreciated degree, I think) and his version of the climactic psychedelic sequences of 2001 is a gem, with, finally, some of the transcendent weirdness of Childhood's End and The City and the Stars--quite different from what Kubrick and Trumbull filmed, but full of evocative imagery in its own right. It would have been difficult or impossible to film as it stood in 1968, but somebody could have a go at it with modern CGI, and it'd be interesting to see. Some of the details, like the Star Gate's resolute defiance of the laws of perspective, would be hard to visualize. Dave passes through an ancient cosmic switching station seemingly located in a bizarre photo-negative space with a white sky and black stars, witnesses all manner of things like jumbled ancient space ruins and living blobs on the surface of a red giant star, then finally ends up in the freaky alien hotel room. Clarke initially describes this in a much more coherently science-fictional manner than Kubrick's depiction, as a room constructed by aliens who imperfectly understand us, on the basis of finite-resolution television images of Earth society. But Dave's subsequent transformation is as odd and mystical as Kubrick's vision, albeit different in detail.

As with Hal, Clarke gives the unseen Monolith Builders clearly explained motives. Their highest value is Mind, their goal uplift of intelligent species, ultimately to some incorporeal form. An interesting detail only in the book, that I only caught on this read, is that the Builders themselves evolve over the course of the story--when they were messing with proto-humanity they were merely cybernetic machine beings who had bodies and spaceships of some sort (though the ape-folk aren't sophisticated enough to register this), but now they're something much more, evolved beyond the machinery they left behind in our solar system. There's no hint of that evolution in the film.

And, at least for now, in this book, we seem to be passing their minimum standards for further processing. The warlike nature of humans, and its capacity to destroy us, is a theme that comes up at the beginning and end of the book, especially in what Dave the transformed Starchild does at the very end. But it's seemingly not a deal-breaker for the uplifters, nor is it a fully-developed through-line to the degree that it is in the Lem novel. More on that later.

Prof. Pierre Aronnax, naturalist of the Paris Museum, arrives in New York City from the wilds of Nebraska to find the world abuzz with news of an unidentified object menacing shipping on the high seas. Aronnax is in high demand for interviews, since he's the author of a popular book on the mysteries of the ocean. His best guess, based on fragmentary descriptions and the process of elimination, is that the thing is a monstrous narwhal.

Invited to join an expedition to find and extirpate the beast, Aronnax takes his imperturbable, Jeeves-like valet Conseil and jumps at the chance. Swept overboard in a confrontation with the mysterious object, he finds himself marooned on its very surface with Conseil and irascible Québécois harpooner Ned Land. It is no narwhal, but a submarine of extraordinary size and power. Taken prisoner by the vessel's uncommunicative crew, they soon find themselves face to face with its enigmatic designer and captain, a mercurial genius who goes only by Nemo.

SPOILERS ahoy...

There's a reason 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is Verne's best-known and most-adapted novel. This is clearly the best and most complex of the Verne novels I've read, though it has a history of being somewhat damaged in translation and treated as a children's book in the English-speaking world; I must have read it dozens of times as a kid, in a "Children's Classics" edition that was probably heavily abridged.

I read and enjoyed a better English translation with extensive notes some years ago, which I think was William Butcher's; reading it in the original French also reveals it to be a surprisingly complex and nuanced story. To the usual Verne travelogue with unusual technology (extrapolated in what Verne intends to be a hard-science-fiction style), he adds his greatest character study, more involved drama and emotion than he usually puts into one of these adventure tales, and some interestingly ambivalent politics, revolving around the question of violent radicalism.

The Captain

The question of what, precisely, Captain Nemo's deal might be is the animating mystery of the novel. It's established early on that he's decided to divorce himself entirely from the mass of human society, and the land--the Nautilus was built piece by piece through anonymous, secretive deals with human industry, but everything Nemo uses to sustain it and its crew, he now gets from the sea, with his only other base being a hollow, extinct volcanic island with a secret underwater passage to its interior.

Captain Nemo has what seem to be a combination of anti-imperialist and libertarian ideas. He rails against despots and colonial oppressors, takes the side of the oppressed of the earth against them, proposes at one point establishing a sort of undersea colony free of land-based tyranny. The sea, to Nemo, is a place of unlimited freedom, the only place where he can be fully himself. It's somewhat in conflict with the state of genteel imprisonment in which he keeps his guests--a point that Aronnax tries, unsuccessfully, to use against him late in the story.

There's also the question of Nemo's men. It's implied that they are all seekers of refuge from tyranny who have similarly abjured all contact with land. Nemo probably has more of them than he needs to run the ship. But in the text, they're treated more as faceless minions, like the minor henchmen of a Bond villain. Captain Nemo, I think, is pretty clearly an antecedent for at least the cinematic version of the Bond villain: a man with a strangely huge and powerful secret organization, super-technology, a hollowed-out volcano base and a large supply of minions, driven to the point of insanity by some obscure revenge. But Verne likes him more than most Bond movies like their bad guys. He identifies with revolutionary and liberating figures such as (among others) Washington, Lincoln and John Brown. He venerates the wreck of the French republican ship Vengeur, sunk in a battle with the British during the French revolutionary wars.

Near the book's conclusion, though, Nemo's motivation becomes clearer: it's personal. He's driven by revenge against some Earthly power that evidently destroyed his life and killed his family. The identity of this state remains unknown; the warship that he destroys at the climax is flying a pennant whose colors are unclear to Aronnax, Conseil and Land.

Verne spares nothing in describing the brutality of this attack, the drowning men swarming like ants over the hull of the wrecked ship as trapped air explodes from beneath its decks: he makes it clear that Captain Nemo is an unapologetic mass murderer. But there's still a lot of sympathy there.

The anonymity of Nemo's enemy is due to meddling by Verne's publisher. Originally, Nemo was supposed to be a Pole, and the ship was Russian, but there was worry about the commercial implications of offending the Russians. In the story's open ending, much about Nemo remains unrevealed.

In the sequel, The Mysterious Island, which I have not read, Verne apparently does give Nemo a different backstory: he's an Indian named Prince Dakkar who participated in the Rebellion of 1857, and his quarrel is with the British Empire (which makes some sense given the location of 20,000 Leagues' final battle, near the English Channel). I think Nemo as Indian works--it jibes with his touching encounter with a pearl diver near Sri Lanka earlier in the book. Nemo as a prince, I'm not so sure. The Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues seems to have anti-monarchical, republican sentiments. But it would explain where all of his start-up resources came from. Maybe experience changed him. There are apparently other continuity issues with that book. In any event, that detail has inspired some contemporary depictions.

Another connection occurred to me, though: Nemo's prominent use of an N monogram as his standard would, I think, have obvious associations for a 19th-century Frenchman. Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues not during a republican period, but during the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Whether he was trying to flatter the Emperor's famous uncle by association or critique him, I'm not sure. Maybe both.

The Guests

As in many of these stories, we have a set of contrasting companions as protagonists. Unusually, it's a first-person narrative. Prof. Aronnax, the narrator, is the consummate scientist who's actually happy to be a prisoner of Nemo as long as he can observe an unlimited pageant of wonders of the sea... and can get away in some vague futurity so he can publish. His passion for cataloguing sea life means that Verne can use him as the vehicle for Verne's trademark long infodumps, in this case about species of things he saw swim past the window.

It's also possible to see a kind of slowly gathering bromance between Aronnax and Nemo--he clearly admires the captain as a scientist, as an inventor/engineer and as a political idealist, as much as he is alarmed by Nemo's brooding, sulking periods, and the question of what precisely Nemo is doing during the periods when he locks them up and demands they not investigate. When he finds out, it clearly rocks Aronnax to the core. But until then, Nemo also seems to enjoy Aronnax's company as an educated audience for his collected scientific wonders. Most of the expeditions outside in diving suits involve all of the guests and several of Nemo's crew, but when he goes out to reveal the secret wonders of Atlantis, he's alone with Aronnax.

Conseil isn't an audience-identification character like Passepartout in Around the World in Eighty Days; instead he's more of an odd comic-relief character, an unflappably loyal servant who Aronnax has trained into a hobby of reciting the Linnean classification of any living thing he sees. I called him Jeeves-like and at times he displays a similarly startling level of intelligence, as when he proposes estimating the Nautilus's crew size by calculating from their rate of oxygen consumption.

The role of audience identification passes more to Ned Land, the brusque man of action who finds Nemo highly suspect and doesn't like being cooped up on a submarine at all. Ned is the one who's constantly pointing out the injustice of the situation and formulating plans to escape, which Aronnax joins only reluctantly, but which are thwarted by circumstance until the very end of the book. The Disney movie, of course, cast him as Kirk Douglas and gave him more of a protagonist role, which makes some sense.

The Nautilus

Aside from Nemo, the other central focus of the book is his vessel, the Nautilus. It's been somewhat altered in the popular imagination by the 1950s Disney live-action movie, which depicted it as having ornate "Victorian" exterior styling and implied, somewhat cleverly, that Captain Nemo had prematurely discovered a form of nuclear power. None of this is from the text. In the book, the ship is a battery-powered electric vehicle with a more utilitarian external shape, a simple spindle with a protruding pilothouse and lantern, inclined planes for vertical maneuvering at its sides, screws and rudder in the rear, and a sharp ram at the prow which is its primary weapon. There are railings around the top to define a low external deck, riding just above the waves when the Nautilus is at the surface.

In this, Verne was influenced by an early French submarine of his time called the Plongeur; the Nautilus is more or less an enlarged Plongeur in shape. This is likely even the source for the Nautilus's unusual accessory boat, a covered vessel concealed in an airtight cavity that can pop up to the surface from underwater.

Inside, the Nautilus is opulent: there is a luxurious salon-museum and library, the famous pipe organ, comfortable quarters (though Nemo's room is more ascetically furnished). The number of Captain Nemo's crew is never made clear--we never see very much of them, aside from his first officer, who speaks only in the unintelligible conlang that Nemo seems to use as a lingua franca for his crew--and the protagonists' uncertainty about whether he has ten men or several hundred is a brake on Ned Land's proposal to take the boat by force.

The capabilities of the Nautilus's batteries go far beyond plausibility to the regime we'd expect of a nuclear power plant. Verne finesses this by explaining that they're not the batteries you might know, but a super-advanced cell of Nemo's design based on sodium (sodium-ion cells actually are a focus of modern research!) They are not rechargeable, in the usual sense--it seems to be an open cycle based on replenishing the cells with sodium extracted from undersea coal at Nemo's secret volcano base. Very much not a carbon-neutral process.

In a nifty segment toward the end, Verne makes the surprise revelation that the Nautilus can retract its protruding external elements to prepare to ram a ship, a kind of anime-esque battle-mode transformation. That really tickled me when I read the Butcher translation, for some reason.

The Sea

And, of course, there's Verne's depiction of the sea itself. As in Round the Moon, he's showing his research on the page as often as he can, having Prof. Aronnax sometimes spout page-long lists of species of fish. It's an interestingly outdated depiction in some ways: there is no inkling of plate tectonics or sea-floor spreading, of course, and I can only imagine the delight with which Jules Verne would have described the subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges, had he known about them. Instead, he takes the Atlantis myth literally and describes the Atlantic Ocean as the remnant of a vast continent sinking into the earth.

In one episode, Nemo takes the Nautilus under the Antarctic ice pack and becomes the first person to reach the South Pole, which is depicted as existing on a conveniently ice-free shoreline rather than the miles-thick continental ice plateau where we now know it to be. It wasn't too bad a guess.

The attitude taken toward human relations with the sea as a whole is interesting, too. Reading this now, it occurs to me that a modern Nemo would probably be written primarily as an ecological avenger, protecting the fragile seas from human depredation. There are a few places where that kind of sensibility emerges--Nemo disapproves of the wasteful overhunting of right whales, and forbids Ned from doing any whale hunting that isn't necessary to feed his crew.

But for the most part, especially earlier in the novel, the sea is depicted mostly as a place of endless bounty and freedom. The Nautilus keeps its crew well-fed on the inexhaustible take from its fishing nets, and rare delicacies and even crew uniforms are fashioned from sea life. Nemo seems constantly bowled over by the riches the seas give him for the taking. His indignation is mostly reserved for oppressors of human beings. He's not quite a Captain Planet figure, not yet.

And there's a weirdly moralized angle to the book's take on the sea in one or two places as well. After Nemo forbids Ned Land from hunting right whales, he then immediately goes right ahead and uses the Nautilus's ram to exterminate a bunch of sperm whales that are, he says, coming to kill the right whales. The sperm whales are described even by Aronnax in terms of horror that paint them as misshapen creatures of pure evil, errors of creation that would be best extirpated entirely. It comes across as very strange to a modern sensibility. But it also effectively foreshadows Nemo's behavior as a bloody avenger at the climax of the novel, and I think that is a secondary purpose of the passage.

All in all, though this drags a bit in its long middle and its conclusion is a bit hurried, this is a fantastic read, justly regarded as Jules Verne's masterpiece. I always enjoy coming back to it.

In the aftermath of the US Civil War, the nation's artillery engineers are despondent that they will no longer have such rich opportunities to build massive killing machines... until their trade association, the Gun Club of Baltimore, decides to start an extraordinary project to build a gun that can shoot a cannonball to the Moon. They carry it out with the slightly insane gusto characteristic of Americans, motivated by murderous resentments, a love of excitement and celebrity, and notions of technological manifest destiny. But to elevate the project from a merely audacious engineering exercise to a seeming suicide mission, by substituting a crewed projectile... that level of insanity requires a Frenchman.

(Warning: the following includes spoilers for a couple of 19th-century novels. They're the sort where knowing the ending doesn't really hurt the enjoyment.)

Jules Verne wrote a lot of early science-fiction/techno-thriller/"extraordinary voyage" books, but only a few of them were the top-tier ones that get adapted all the time (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days), and many others are considered minor works and have been nearly forgotten.

And then, somewhere in between, there's Verne's moon voyage, which was a two-parter (a fact that many descriptions of the story seem to omit, lumping them together under the first volume's title). From the Earth to the Moon covers the project to build and fire the Gun Club's titanic moon launcher, a cannon buried vertically in the Earth in central Florida, and it ends in a cliffhanger after the gun is fired, the projectile's ultimate fate unknown. Round the Moon moves the POV to the interior of Verne's spacecraft, and describes the circumlunar adventure of the three astronauts and what became of them.

This was my favorite Verne story for a long time when I was a kid--and I specifically preferred Round the Moon, the second half, because that was the actual travelogue-like story of the space voyage, with lots of leisurely infodumps about traveling in space. At that age, I ate that kind of thing up. I recently re-read these, and I read them for the first time in the original French, thanks to Project Gutenberg and the wonderful ability of e-books to instantly give you pop-up dictionary definitions of unfamiliar words. I actually think e-books may be the best way to read things in a language that isn't your native one.

Shooting the Moon

To me today, From the Earth to the Moon actually was the more entertaining read of the two. A thing that kind of went over my head as a kid was the extent to which the first volume was written as a comedy, a half-mocking, half-admiring satire on Americans--their enthusiasm for forming ad-hoc organizations run on Robert's Rules of Order (perhaps a lost characteristic?), for building giant machines and for killing each other. The Gun Club's meeting hall is described as a kind of temple of firearms with columns and ornamentation formed out of howitzers and rifles. It's wild and hilarious.

But Verne made his most audacious lunatic French. Up to the midpoint of From the Earth to the Moon, the protagonists are the Gun Club's visionary President Impey Barbicane, a tall Yankee with a stovepipe hat and chin whiskers, and his excitable sidekick J. T. Maston. Serving as a shadowy antagonist is the project's only naysayer in the entire United States, an armor designer named Nicholl who, over the course of the war, has grown to hate Barbicane with all his heart, not because of any Union/Confederate split, but because of the eternal contest between guns and plate armor, presumably sold to both sides all around. Barbicane has refused a public contest to pit Nicholl's latest invention against his own, and the end of the war has prevented a demonstration in battle; Nicholl feels deprived of satisfaction. But Verne kicks up the energy level of his story midway through by introducing a dashing and flippant French daredevil named Michel Ardan (possibly partly inspired by the great photographer Nadar, who took some of the first aerial photos from a balloon). Ardan's precise profession is unclear but we're told he's already internationally famous for his wild adventures. Now he wants to ride the Gun Club's cannonball to the Moon, and seems unconcerned with such details as being smashed to jam by the launch or being unable to breathe when he gets there.

In Verne's comical America, once sufficiently daft giant projects are proposed, they immediately fire the universal public imagination to such a degree that they can't not happen. So the Gun Club, having already built their mega-gun, sets about making the projectile habitable. Meanwhile, the feud between Barbicane and Nicholl, who's placed large public bets that the project is hopeless, escalates to the level of a duel, carried out in what Verne imagines to be the American manner: more of a redneck-"Most Dangerous Game" human-hunt in the wilds of Florida. The gallant M. Ardan, worried that this business will kill the whole Moon project, intervenes at the climactic moment and converts the duel into the recruitment of a three-man crew: Barbicane and Nicholl are going to settle the whole thing for themselves by going with him to the Moon!

Much of the book is taken up by the planning and construction of the giant gun, and Verne is fascinated by the organizational and logistical details of how this gets done. For all that, it actually is a pretty breezy read.

Prescience?

Round the Moon is a bit rougher going unless read with the attitude of me aged about 13, capable of extracting sensawunda from the driest infodumps. Having somehow survived the firing of the cannon (Verne's mechanism for this is fairly unconvincing, but at least he attempts an explanation), Ardan, Barbicane and Nicholl come to in what amounts to a richly provisioned padded cell hurtling through space. They have no control to speak of over their trajectory, but busy themselves with surviving the trip at least as far as landing. A chance close encounter with a second, tiny satellite of Earth (which some scientists of Verne's time apparently claimed to have discovered) alters their trajectory to the point that it's circumlunar rather than a one-way trip to the lunar surface, a prospect that disappoints the intrepid travelers greatly, but does raise the possibility that Verne could suppose they returned to tell the tale. 

I feel as if these books were, in my childhood, more widely described than read, and it was always in light of the actual Apollo Moon missions of the late sixties and early seventies. Lots of authors took it upon themselves to describe the ways in which Verne's story was a prescient prefiguring of Apollo. Some of these, such as names of characters resembling those of Project Apollo figures, were meaningless, cherry-picked coincidences on about the level of "Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln!!" Sometimes Verne's space voyage was likened to Apollo 8 (the first circumlunar trip), sometimes to Apollo 11 (the first landing). In terms of events, the closest match was really Apollo 13--a landing mission that became a hairy free-return circumlunar voyage after a mishap.

Other points of prescience arose from basic physics and the fact that Verne was trying his imperfect best to write a technically plausible story. The energy densities necessary to get people to the Moon mean that the weapons industry will be a natural driver of space travel, somewhat as it was in real life. One main element of Verne's "prescience" was that he correctly guessed the people to do it would be American. Given that, such details as Texas and Florida being prime contenders for the launch site are not coincidences, but follow directly from the science.

Wrestling with plausibility

All that said... Verne does get some stuff wrong that he could have gotten right, aside from the things he had to get wrong out of narrative necessity, like not smashing his space voyagers to meat sauce. He doesn't quite understand how free-fall works. He knows that objects tossed gently out of the projectile (animal lovers beware--this includes a dead dog) will seem to float along with it, yet he doesn't extend this reasoning to the interior. Barbicane, Nicholl and Ardan walk around on the floor of their spacecraft according to the strength of gravitational force wherever they happen to be, and experience weightlessness only at the neutral point where the gravity of Earth and Moon balance out. The projectile tends to naturally orient itself like a pendulum so that the heavier bottom points toward the stronger gravitational attractor; this isn't quite right.

But he's trying. Verne clearly either did the math or had someone do it for him, on many points, and, boy, he wants to show you. Since his travelers from this point on have no actual control over their fate, they seek to understand it instead, and Barbicane and Nicholl, having completely forgotten their enmity from the previous book, do a lot of calculating and theorizing. Meanwhile, Michel Ardan turns into the comic relief and reader-surrogate who always says the equivalent of "Give it to me in words of one syllable, Professor!" in between poetic speculations about what the Moon might be like.

And concerning the Moon, there's another tension. Verne had an early version of the hard-SF fan's disdain for other people who attempted to perpetrate science fiction without being as rigorous about it as he was. He wanted a story heavily grounded in reality, to the extent he could make it. So he couldn't be true to himself and get too fanciful, with some pulp adventure among the bug-eyed Selenites. But at the same time, astronauts just asphyxiating on a dead, inert Moon is boring and sad. So he had to strike a balance, which he does by being a bit of a tease. Our heroes never actually land on the Moon, they just go around it. And they've unfortunately planned their trip for a time when the Moon is full, so the unseen far side is shrouded in darkness when they pass over, and there are all manner of speculations about how it might be different from the near side. Suddenly, they are afforded a fleeting glimpse of it by the light of an inexplicably exploding meteoroid, and for an instant, it appears they might be looking at a habitable, life-bearing world--on the far side, there seems to be a substantial atmosphere, clouds, liquid water and forests! But the vision fades, and they're not sure they saw what they saw.

Over the near side, the characters make detailed observations of lots of lunar features that Verne knows from the literature, and about those, he infodumps, and infodumps, and infodumps. It's a 19th-century thing and you have to roll with it. He subscribes to some theories of the time now known to be wrong, such as that the craters were mostly volcanic cones rather than impact features. But he's describing his contemporary science about the Moon as well as he can, and extrapolating only modestly.

The books had nicely done engraved illustrations, and it's interesting to see how many of them especially in Round the Moon are fanciful depictions of things the characters describe in idle musings, rather than of literal events. That's one way to make the story less dry.

I enjoyed reading these books again, and reading them in the original for the first time. Verne was not a master stylist; his prose is workmanlike and translation didn't really ruin it, per se. But I was able to actually confirm that. I've got some more Verne from Gutenberg to read.

 I hadn't actually read The Hobbit in several decades and had forgotten how some of it goes. Some observations:

Tolkien sets us up to believe that the defeat of the dragon Smaug will be the climax of the story, but it actually only opens the last act, which I'd largely forgotten the details of, but which was the most interesting part on this reading. For a while, Tolkien seems to be setting up the tragedy of Thorin Oakenshield: the would-be King under the Mountain's unwillingness to give up any of the mountain's treasure, even a reasonable amount as aid in the wake of a disaster he was involved in causing, to help the people who actually killed the dragon, comes very close to starting a new war with the Men and Elves. If Shakespeare were writing this, that is how it would go. Instead, Tolkien seems to want to avert it at the last minute by a kind of diabolus ex machina: they all get attacked by goblins and wargs, and end up uniting after all in the Battle of Five Armies. Thorin still dies, but it's straightforwardly heroic, rather than as the tragic hero, and he's clearly come to his senses. I suppose Tolkien wants to dial back on the tragedy because it's a kid's book, but it's interesting that he actually does this by increasing the amount of violence.

Fili and Kili also die at the end, but this gets tossed off almost in an aside. It might have been a mistake to put so many dwarves in there. Most of them don't get strongly differentiated as characters.

I'd forgotten how many talking animals are in this story--it gives it a more fairy-tale quality than The Lord of the Rings, which goes a bit lighter on them. It's been observed many times that ubiquitous cell phones killed a lot of thriller plots because people can communicate, and even before that was true in the real world, the writers on Star Trek kept having to come up with contrivances to separate the away team from their communicators. But here, Tolkien really seems to want his characters to carry cell phones--a lot of things require the rapid transmission of information to distant people, and he uses... talking birds! In particular, it's how Bilbo can be crucially involved in the killing of Smaug even though he's nowhere near the guy who does it and hasn't met him.

 Adaora is a marine biologist whose husband has suddenly become paranoid and controlling after joining a predatory church. Agu is a soldier who fears for his family's safety after trying to stop his commanding officer from raping somebody. Anthony is a famous Ghanaian rapper haunted by strange visions while performing on stage. The three of them are all already feeling a little lost when they converge on the same stretch of beach in Lagos, Nigeria, only to be abducted by aliens hiding in a giant spaceship under the sea... and when they're returned, it's with a fourth party: an alien visitor with scarily impressive powers, such as the ability to shapeshift into any form, rearrange matter arbitrarily on a whim, and transform the sea life of the surrounding waters into monsters. An alien who announces that her people, who are present in large numbers under the water, simply want to settle permanently in Nigeria--but who won't hesitate to retaliate with extreme violence if someone tries to hurt her.

The revelation throws the city of Lagos into chaos. Everyone who isn't in understandable terror seems to be trying to work some kind of angle. Every social and class division in the city gets thrown into sharp relief. And to complicate matters, the aliens aren't the only supernormal force at work. The three decide the only way this has any hope of ending well is if they take their new friend to their leader, which is easier said than done under the conditions, and they'll end up calling on abilities they never entirely knew they had.

I'm really starting to like Nnedi Okorafor's writing a lot. Her novel Lagoon is a kaleidoscopic, multi-POV description of a city in crisis that reminds me a bit of John Brunner's big ambitious social-problem novels from the 60s/70s, only with more touches that Western reviewers might call magic-realist, and with the same headlong, unpredictable quality as the Binti stories. But this one is set not in a strange far future, but in more or less present-day Nigeria (there are apparently some touches of modest futurism in the set-up, but I'm unfamiliar enough with Lagos that I didn't notice them). Only Okorafor is also unconcerned with maintaining any kind of rationalist fantasy/SF distinction, and it makes this book stronger.

Lots of stuff that is fairly disturbing happens in Lagoon, but Okorafor doesn't feel obliged to give it a downer ending.

I've always thought the novella was a good length for science fiction, but it's one that can have trouble finding a market, because they can be too short to sell as individual volumes and too long to collect easily. One of the interesting consequences of e-book sales is that suddenly this is a tempting format--you can offer a novella à la carte for just a few bucks, and it's no more or less convenient than any other length of book.

I picked up Nnedi Okorafor's Binti by this means, but I probably shouldn't have, because, hankering for its sequels Binti: Home and Binti: The Night Masquerade, I then realized that buying the omnibus Binti: The Complete Trilogy was a better deal. (It's actually what Douglas Adams would have called the more-than-complete trilogy, since there's an additional short story included, "Sacred Fire", which fills a gap between the first and second novellas.) So that's what I recommend. The Binti stories form a tightly connected narrative, so the omnibus is worth reading straight through.

Binti is a teenage girl of the Himba, a real group of people who live in northern Namibia. But these stories take place in a distant future world that has been substantially transformed by contact with extraterrestrials and technology-indistinguishable-from-magic. Binti's family business is making "astrolabes", which seem to be a handcrafted distant descendant of the smartphone. The regional (maybe global) superpower is the Khoush, who have interstellar travel in intelligent organic spaceships, and a long-running, brutal war going on with jellyfish-like aliens called the Meduse.

Binti is a harmonizer: she has abilities we might regard as magical that arise from her perception of mathematics. Her skills have, over the objections of her insular family, won her admission to Oomza Uni, a centuries-old institute of higher learning covering an entire planet and attended by intelligent beings of many species. But on the way there, the living Khoush spaceliner she's in is mercilessly attacked by the Meduse, who plan to invade Oomza Uni for reasons of their own. By a happenstance Binti manages to survive... and prevail in startling fashion.

If the ending seems a little too pat, well, Okorafor evidently agrees, because the subsequent stories reveal that it's not that simple. Binti adjusts to life at Oomza Uni and deals with the trauma she's experienced, then decides to go home again bringing a representative of the Meduse, which only brings more trouble. In the process, there are new revelations about, and physical transformations of, Binti's own identity. To a large extent this is a story about having a liminal identity, not entirely one thing or another, and Binti's accumulates more and more layers of liminality as the story goes on. But this doesn't happen without pain and violence. Okorafor portrays her altered far-future Namib as, if anything, a place holding more wonders and surprises than the extraterrestrial university.

A thing I really liked about this series is that at any given moment, I honestly could not tell where it was going--it breaks the mold of any science-fiction or fantasy story structure I was familiar with (the closest I can think of in atmosphere might be Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia, another coming-of-age story set in an almost dreamlike far future). If I have a quibble, it's that Binti is supposed to be a mathematical prodigy--her abilities are mathematics-based--but the math we actually see her use is all fairly basic stuff that you might encounter in popular-mathematics works. I suspect that is intentional, though; this isn't aimed at as technically esoteric an audience as, say, Greg Egan's books, and it might have been off-putting otherwise.

So having re-reviewed The Invincible in the light of Bill Johnston's translation, I guess I should do the same for Solaris. The difference is less stark here--the previous translation, from the French edition by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, was not that bad; it just had its language somewhat more distorted by passage through an intermediate language. The most noticeable thing was that it changed the names of some of the characters.

This is a hard one to write about, though, because while it's clear that Solaris absolutely is one of Lem's greatest novels (and there's so much packed into it that it may exhaust my ability to analyze it), it's also one of those older books (written 1959-60) where you're brought up short by that one bit that has aged so poorly that it makes it hard to proceed. And to explain the one bit, I need to get spoilery about the plot.

The ocean and the guests

Solaris is a planet almost completely covered by an ocean of apparently living goop that may be a single organism, and exhibits complex enough behavior that it may even be intelligent. The story takes place at the tail end of a largely unsuccessful program of attempts to understand what's going on there and establish some kind of contact with the ocean. The protagonist, a psychologist named Kris Kelvin, arrives at a research station hovering over the surface of the ocean, whose few remaining crew seem oddly disturbed, have let the place decay and initially react with baffling hostility to his arrival.

Pretty soon he learns why: something impossible and alarming is happening. Beings with forms seemingly extracted from the memories and obsessions of the crew are materializing on board the station. The living ocean must have something to do with it, but why and how, nobody can say. Maybe it's an attack; maybe it's an attempt at communication. They're not hallucinations--Kris can see them too, and they're solid and tangible.

That one bit

Here's the one bit that threatens to take me right out of the book. The very first one of these "guests" that Kris encounters is apparently an apparition out of the mind of Gibarian, a scientist who, he learns, committed suicide just the morning before his arrival. She's an incongruous figure: an enormous black woman wearing nothing but a grass skirt, who is described in the terms of visceral revulsion and horror that one might expect from a white guy in 1959 freaked out by a picture in National Geographic. It comes across as pretty racist and a couple of other -ists too. Fortunately, the passage is short. It's possible to read it sympathetically in a number of ways (Kris is a potentially unreliable first-person narrator, and whatever in Gibarian's mind led to this is left unexplained) but I don't particularly feel like defending this passage and I wish Lem had made other choices here. Moving on.

Kris and Harey

We never get a completely clear look at the guests of the other two crewmembers, Drs. Snaut and Sartorius, because they're so intent on hiding them--the guests always seem to be characters associated with intense feelings of guilt or shame. But Kris's own guest appears soon enough: it's his dead wife, Harey*, who killed herself at the age of just 19 or 20 about ten years earlier, after a fight with Kris in which he threatened to leave her (so he blames himself). It seems that it's impossible to fully get away from these beings, or even to kill them: separated from their associated humans, they transform into a terrifying state in which they can inflict superhuman damage to remove any obstacles. Kris's first reaction to the Harey-being is horror, and he disposes of her by launching her into space in a probe rocket (in a scene that really makes me wonder whether the design of this station involved any thinking about safety at all)--but it's no use; she just reappears. (Snaut explains that they've all tried that already.)

Faced with this, Kris ultimately can't resist his feelings for Harey, and starts sincerely falling in love with her regenerated form, as she acts more and more like a human being with her own thoughts and feelings, rather than a character out of his memory. And from here on, one of the major threads in the novel is a heartbreakingly tragic love story, one of Lem's very rare seriously-intended romances. It's good and sad and there's no point in spoiling it.

Yes, as I think Sam pointed out once, it's saying something that Lem's most fully-realized female character is technically not even human. It is indeed very "written by a guy who didn't write women a lot in 1959-60". It's affecting nevertheless.

The Solaricists

That's the A-story of this book, the one that probably got it two different movie adaptations that both more or less emphasize the love story. But the parts where Lem is the most Lem-like here, and some of the most wondrous and bizarre parts of the novel to my mind, are the interludes in which Kris takes a break from the ongoing nightmare to peruse books in the Solaris station's library.

Whole generations of scientists, it seems, have attempted to study Solaris, and they've produced a vast scientific literature. This is the kind of thing Stanisław Lem absolutely loves to imagine. He describes in great, phantasmagoric detail the incomprehensible eruptions and structures that appear and disappear on the surface of the planet, which have all sorts of arcane names: extensors, rapidos, mimoids, symmetriads and asymmetriads, each behaving in a stranger manner than the last. There are whole catalogues of the hypotheses put forth and disputed by various scientists about what all of these structures are doing and what their function might be.

One section describes a discredited account that Kris thinks might have some bearing on the characters' current predicament, in which a pilot encounters structures made out of the Solaris ocean goop that seem to be mimicking scenes and people from human society, perhaps extracted from the mind of a missing explorer. The ocean seems to be interested in us, but exactly for what, no one can say. But this being a Lem novel, it's not much of a spoiler to say that no Rosetta stone making it all make sense ever appears. Lem, here as elsewhere, is interested in the tragedy of humans beating their heads against the wall of the unknown.

Adaptation

Much of this stuff about the ocean of Solaris and the human struggle to understand it gets lost in the film adaptations, which is probably why Lem never liked them (but while I find this material riveting, making a compelling movie of it would be very difficult). Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film did make a valiant effort to get some of it in, but he made the odd choice of re-linearizing the timeline of the story and putting this history right at the beginning, before Kris Kelvin even gets to Solaris, which means his movie takes a very long time to get going. I do admire the fact that he attempts to depict the ocean at all, with the resources available to him. Tarkovsky's vision of the decrepit Solaris station is absolutely spot-on, and Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk are 100% who I imagine as Kris and Harey.

The strange phenomena of the ocean actually could be depicted pretty well using modern CGI (some of it evokes quaternion Julia sets and Mandelbulb fractals to me) but it's not the kind of detail that generally lends itself to a blockbuster film. Stephen Soderbergh made the choice of simply sidelining most of it in his 2002 adaptation with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone. If I recall correctly, his images of Solaris just look like images of the Sun in invisible wavelengths of radiation. He makes the movie very shiny and clean compared to Lem's stage-setting.

(There was apparently also a Soviet TV adaptation in 1968, which I never heard of until just now.)

Both Tarkovsky and Soderbergh felt compelled to tack an additional twist onto the ending of Lem's story. The book doesn't really end with a twist at all, just an evocative scene that brings the A- and B-threads together in a final tableau of hurt and bafflement.

*The Kilmartin and Cox translation anagrammatizes "Harey" as "Rheya", and Soderbergh's movie follows that. I don't know whether that was their choice or that of the French edition they were working from.

People who know me from way back remember that I'm a big fan of the cantankerous, erudite Polish science-fiction author Stanisław Lem and used to have a website with capsule reviews of all of his work that was, at the time, available in English. A source of frustration for that project was that not all of his work (particularly the early stuff) even existed in English translation, and of the works that did, a couple were only available in translations that were not very good: The Invincible (1964) and one of Lem's best-known novels, Solaris (1961), the book the Tarkovsky and Soderbergh films were based on.

These were both actually translations of translations, rather than direct from the Polish. While some of his works have actually come through all right by that avenue, these two... did not. Solaris was at least tolerable, but The Invincible was a nearly unreadable translation from the German edition by Wendayne Ackerman, translator of the Perry Rhodan pulp series. Over the years people had tried to persuade Michael Kandel, the author of some the very best English Lem translations (such as The Cyberiad, a seemingly untranslatable book), to tackle these, but Kandel had other things to do and the extant translations, however poor, made it a low priority.

In the 2000s, Bill Johnston took it upon himself to translate both of these novels. These editions were only or mostly available as e-books and I never did get around to reading them. But getting a new Kindle finally gave me the motivation to get my hands on them, and I just read The Invincible. Guess what: it's good!

Good, but old-fashioned. This book has a basic structure that appeared in several of Lem's earlier novels and in his late, dark masterpiece Fiasco: intrepid space explorers attempt to probe the mysteries of an unexplored or misunderstood planet, things go badly wrong and they come up against the limits of understanding and human ambition, ultimately discovering as much as or more about themselves as the things they're supposed to be learning. This one was written in 1962 and '63, and the opening has an almost Rocky Jones, Space Ranger feel, describing the titanic and powerful starship Invincible with its crew of manly* spacehands and scientists descending stern-first on the mysterious Regis III. Quaint neologisms are thrown about: the ship's complement includes such things as "energobots" and "infobots"; servomechanisms, atomic piles and magnetic tapes are described in loving detail. This bit might be a little hard for modern readers to get into.

It gets better as everything goes to crap, and the story becomes one of Lem's more atmospherically scary narratives. The Invincible is here to investigate what happened to the previous ship that attempted to explore Regis III, the missing Condor. The planet is a wasteland with no apparent terrestrial life (animal life is abundant in the oceans, but anomalously shy of their attempts at investigation). There are enigmatic ruins that seem artificial but make no sense as buildings. When they do find the Condor, the ship has been trashed and there are signs that the entire crew abruptly lost their minds. It becomes increasingly clear that something terrible happened to the Condor, it's the same thing that happened to all the living things on the planet's continents, and it's going to happen to the Invincible unless they can be smarter about it than everyone else was in the past ten million years.

Not to spoil too much, Lem first explores some themes here that would show up repeatedly in his later books, including Fiasco and the late Ijon Tichy novel Peace on Earth, and in his futurist essays. There's some thoughtful exploration, sophisticated for the time, of how teleological accounts of evolution can be wrong, how notions of human manifest destiny can be equally wrong, and the limits that might exist to people spreading throughout the universe for the sake of it. Its human characters are treated more gently than in Lem's later works--the crew of the Invincible are intelligent folk, not easily driven to mad responses to a situation, and when they do unwise things it's largely motivated by the need not to leave a man behind.

In Johnston's translation, The Invincible is a solid read, provided you make the necessary allowances for its early-1960s provenance. It's perhaps not one of Lem's greatest novels, but it's interesting as an early stage in the development of ideas he'd come back to again and again.



*Like many of Lem's novels, The Invincible takes place in an entirely male universe--I don't think a woman is even mentioned in the story. Stanisław Lem, for his many virtues, was frankly sexist as hell and (as he stated outright in interviews) regarded adding female characters to a story as tantamount to adding a romantic or sexual angle, so unless he wanted to do that, which he usually didn't, he wouldn't bother. Even in his nutty robot fairy tales, the lady robots who showed up were generally treated as prizes or temptresses.