Invincible Ignorance: Some thoughts on Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible and Solaris

I just finished Stanislaw Lem’s novel, The Invincible (1964) and thought it might be interesting to compare it briefly to his better-known Solaris (1961). This is not a book review. Nor is it an academic essay. What follows are simply some (hopefully) coherent thoughts on the nature of – and the relationship between – the two works …

On one level, the two books have much in common. Both begin with human beings encountering an alien intelligence that they are ultimately unable to fathom. In both texts, Lem is interested in the limitations of the human mind; particularly in the perils of anthropomorphism. Humans have a tendency to interpret the unknown in terms that are familiar. That tendency is, however, often an impediment to genuine understanding.

In Solaris, the alien in question is actually the titular planet’s living ocean; an intelligence so radically different than anything human beings have ever encountered that a century of scientific study and exploration has produced little more than a welter of contradictory hypotheses and almost mystic speculation. The scientists on the research station have at their disposal a vast literature (see my previous post, Solaristics: A Tentative Bibliography) of theories and observations about the planet. The station’s library, however, stands more as a monument to human failure – to a whole lot of useless scientific sound and fury – than it does a testament to human achievement.

The irony is that so much of the novel’s world-building takes place through these books, reports and historical accounts rather than through physical exploration itself. The psychologist, Kelvin, arrives on the station. From that point on, there is little actual investigation of the planet. Instead, he reads, talks to the other scientists and tries desperately to understand what has already been written. It’s an interesting narrative conceit … one that feels, in some ways, almost proto-postmodern in terms of its intertextuality.

The Invincible takes a different approach. There is considerably more exploration and more of the mechanism, if you will, of hard science fiction. The crew of the space cruiser, Invincible, investigates an alien planet (Regis III), examines physical evidence, deploys robotic machinery and gradually constructs a scientific explanation for what happened to its sister-ship, the Condor, that landed on the planet a few years earlier.

For these reasons, The Invincible seems far more “active” than Solaris. Still, the intellectual problem posed by both texts is essentially the same: the human explorers initially assume that the phenomenon confronting them, no matter how utterly alien, must somehow conform to familiar (human) categories of intelligence and purpose.

And here’s where Lem’s recurring attack on anthropomorphism really takes center stage …

In Solaris, the scientists repeatedly ask what the ocean’s intention is – is it communicating, is it hostile, do its enormous formations constitute some kind of language or response. They simply cannot stop themselves from treating the alien intelligence as though it were a gigantic version of … themselves.

In The Invincible, the crew makes a similar mistake; though in this case, the error is more technological, perhaps, than it is epistemological. Faced with the strange behavior of the planet’s tiny mechanical organisms – if “organism” is even the right word -- they initially search for an intelligence they assume must be in control. Eventually, however, they are forced to accept a much stranger possibility: that what they are witnessing may in fact be a form of evolution and collective behavior that has absolutely no terrestrial equivalent. Even more disturbing, there may be no individual or intentional “consciousness” behind it at all.

To reframe all of this somewhat, it might be said that in Solaris, Lem asks whether an alien intelligence might be so fundamentally different from humanity that genuine communication is impossible.

In The Invincible, he takes things one step farther. He asks whether intelligence itself needs to resemble anything we might even recognize as “intelligence” in the first place. The swarm-like organisms on Regis III, for example, don’t need to hate humanity, communicate with humanity or even take notice of humanity in any of the ways humans imagine or expect an intelligent entity should. Their behavior simply follows ineluctably from what they are. As one character in the novel suggests, they act the same as any law or force of nature. They may be intelligent in some sense, but that intelligence manifests not as thought or intention but purely as behavior. (Does a hurricane intend to destroy your home? Is it remorseful when it realizes what it has done?)

The two novels, therefore, arrive at similar philosophical destinations but by different routes. Solaris is almost, well … interior, claustrophobic. The characters are, more or less, trapped in a station. The alien ocean outside remains largely inaccessible. Its mystery is probed through psychology, memory, scientific literature and speculation.

The Invincible is, by comparison, more exterior or outward-looking. There are expeditions, machines, landscapes, discoveries and physical dangers. Of the two books, it reads more like conventional science fiction.

All of that being said, the real irony here is that neither book is really about discovering what the alien in each case is. The point, so far as I interpret the texts, is rather about discovering (or uncovering) the limits of the human mind to understand the unknown. Lem’s aliens are not simply scientific mysteries waiting for sufficiently clever human researchers to “solve” them. They challenge the assumption that everything in the universe can ultimately be known – or at least known by projecting human concepts onto it.

In that sense, it might not be a stretch to suggest that The Invincible may best be understood as a companion piece to the earlier Solaris. Although they follow different paths, both books are concerned with the same unsettling possibility – that the universe may contain life forms so different from us that the greatest obstacle to understanding them is not lack of data, but the inherent limitations of the human minds attempting to interpret that data.