Science-Fiction Novel Liberates Itself from Political DuesThe present issue of "Colloquia Humanistica" contains Professor Ryszard Handke's two last essays, until now unpublished. They belong together and deal with the works of Stanisław Lem, namely with the creation of a sui generis dictionary of this outstanding sci-fi writer. Handke highlights the coming of a new age in the evolution of the genre, already foreshadowed in Lem's early novels. This new sci-fi abandons uncritical beliefs in the power of science leading man to the conquest of cosmos and to a perfection of Earth's civilization. In Handke's analysis, in his first essay discussing "Astronauts" and "Magellan's Nebula," and in the second devoted to "Eden," Lem's evolution starts from a blind faith in the Marxist progress of civilization based on materialistic technocracy and moves towards an increasingly open polemic with this point of view, clearly demonstrating the beginning of doubts or of caution against an excessive faith in progress. The author of the essays is principally interested in the linguistic layer of the novels, the sci-fi terminology designating phenomena, objects or equipments from the imagined future. Handke analyzes the world reflected in the language and attempts to assemble a corpus invented by Lem in order to create an illusion of the future. The language seen from the perspective of the two texts remains a meaningful platform, but not a transparent one. This is where the space of the author's game with the readers begins, the space of inter-textual, cultural references, where the mentioned earlier naiveté of the older science fiction breaks down and an element of doubt, surprise, or irony surfaces frequently. The use of concrete linguistic means is conditioned by the creation of a world displaying a clearly determined character that borrows its particularities from the linguistic image of a fictional quasi-reality. It also results from the applied technique of story telling, from ways of verifying narration and from mechanisms of the reader's understanding of the meaning of words as building blocks of the presented world. The first novel discussed by Handke – "Astronauts" (1951), remains in the essayist's view still in the optimistic current of science fiction; the "fantastic" terminology, while already foreshadowing Lem's later plays with words, is deeply rooted in the traditional perception of the technical world. In the later novel – "Magellan's Nebula" – the focus of interest veers to how to construct with words a world in extreme conditions, i. e. when mimetic support in creation and in spelling out relations between the linguistic signs and what they designate, is curtailed. That is why, the attention is not centered on the spaces where the author takes advantage of the possibility of referring to phenomena and names known to the broadcaster and to the receiver in the real reality. The narrational situation constructed in the novel relies also on the premise that not much had changed in these fields, despite the passage of centuries, because human nature remains significantly the same. Both novels, while a system of "fantastic" concepts has been imposed on the presented world, reflect in fact current socio-political problems that cannot be grasped outside of the context provided by the communist faith in progress. "Eden" on the other hand, shows Lem's wavering in his faith in progress. In the novel, Earth people face another civilization; the author of the essay compares this narrational situation to the building of utopia, only situated in the Cosmos. The linguistic layer here resembles Lem's mature works, where irony in the creation of words keeps the readers at a distance when they view the displayed world and makes them ponder the author's intention.
Virginia Woolf and some aspects of the Russian novel of the 19th century