Olga Tokarczuk recommends visionary science fiction

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novels are known for their interest in the porousness of borders – between nations, between races, between fantasy and reality, between consciousness and dreams. While her novels and stories represent the constant fluidity of national borders, especially in Eastern Europe (Tokarczuk in Polish), she also delights in supernatural and science-fiction elements. In her book House of Day, House of Night, released from Riverhead this week, she writes: “All over the world, wherever people sleep, little jumbled worlds smolder in their heads, growing above reality like scar tissue.” Not long ago, Tokarczuk sent us some notes about a few of her favorite science fiction and speculative fiction writers, whose books deftly blend fantasy and prose. Her notes were translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Star Diaries

By Stanislaw Lem

I started reading science fiction at an early age. I was pretty sure that by the time I was older we would be traveling to Mars and the Moon without a second thought. I would have worked in space medicine or as a physicist. At first I read books for young people, but Stanisław Lem was my real introduction to this genre. Among his favorite books are “The Star Diaries,” about a lone space traveler and scientist named Egon Tichy, and “The Cyberiad,” a collection of stories about robots and intelligent machines.

Lem was ahead of his time, especially on the subject of machine intelligence. He had a wonderful sense of humor and a unique genius for discovering all kinds of paradoxes. His writing challenges the imagination, and poses the kinds of questions that are the subject of philosophical studies. In the story “The Seventh Voyage”, Egon’s spaceship falls into a time loop, resulting in a swarm of different Egon beings appearing from different parts on the same day. What is “real”? Nowadays, I tell myself that it’s the real person telling the story. The real one is the observer.

As we are fascinated by artificial intelligence today, a return to Lim’s stories, which anticipated every type of intelligent machine, is a must.

OPEC

By Philip K. rooster

Most science fiction does not rely on literary polish. It’s more about conveying a concept, a paradox, a vision. Sometimes a vision is so strong, and the desire to express it so intense, that language is reduced to its most real role: pure communication. I think Philip K. Dick was a great visionary. He was the first writer to create a truly moving vision of a disintegrating world, and of the thin line between what is real and what our brains produce. The multiplicity, diversity and innovation of his works changed not only science fiction, but literature in general. In an incredibly modern and poignant way, the book addresses questions that humanity has been asking itself for centuries.

In Poland, Lem was Dick’s great promoter, and they exchanged letters until Dick decided that Lem was not a person but a spy network called LEM that started with “Ubik,” and I will never forget its depiction of reality disintegrating: modern things suddenly change into old things, food instantly spoils, and technology loses its power. Only the temporarily awakened dead, and the polymorph known as Ubik, can help. We may read the story as a metaphor for a decaying mind, but also for a “fallen universe” that must be constantly kept in motion by an unknown force.