Welcome back to Mining the Genre Asteroid, where I look at older works in science fiction and fantasy that you probably have missed or maybe not even heard of, but that I believe contribute to the genre conversation and have something interesting to say today.
Utopias.
Utopia, in the original Latin sense of the word, means “No Place”. This is an etymology lost on many who see it as the ideal place or society, or one that is striving for perfection. But more interesting than utopias, for me as a reader, is the idea of an “ambiguous utopia”. A utopia that purports or strives to be one, but has clear setbacks and drawbacks, enough that it not only is useful to compare to contemporary society, but also to critique utopias as an idea in and of itself. Not all utopian novels, perhaps not even many of them, dare this high wire act. Since it is about 50 years since publication, I will mention perhaps the most famous of these, The Dispossessed: an Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K LeGuin.
But that’s not the novel I want to talk about in terms of ambiguous utopias, today. Instead, I want to go behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet and Eastern European take on utopias and utopian novels is a very different beast than in the West, given the origins and expressed goals of communism, and their utter failures. And of course trying to write a novel that will get past soft or hard government censorship. Dealing with oppressive governments or organizations that are critical of science fiction is, now, something I seem to have personal experience with.
And so, in order to look at some science fiction in such an environment, we turn to an early work by Stanislaw Lem. No, not Solaris. Instead, I want to look at an earlier novel of his that you may not have read, called Return from the Stars (1961).
Hal Bregg is one of the members of an expedition to Fomalhaut (I will come back shortly as to why I think Lem picked this star). Thanks to time dilation, although only about 10 years of ship time have passed for him, on Earth, 127 years have elapsed. Just about everyone he knew when he was alive is long dead. And society is different, very different. Disregarding the advice of his handlers who want to debrief and acclimate him slowly to society, Bregg opts to go off on his own and see this brave new world that has such people in it. And through him, the reader gets to engage with just how different the world and society have become.
And therein hangs the tale.
We start off right away wrong-footed. Bregg has been dumped into a transport hub, and we the reader are as confused as the narrator is as he tries to navigate technology, people and a setup completely and utterly alien to him. The simple act of trying to find a train – understanding advertisements, signs, or even just basic navigation and to find a way out of this center – becomes an exercise in frustration, but also subtle worldbuilding, as we the reader can start to try to see what Bregg does not quite grasp as yet.
Lem is clever. We start off with technological wrong-footing, to show that the technology of society has radically changed in the hundred-plus years since Bregg has been on Earth. Lem, being Lem, then moves to a sociological misfooting. Bregg meets a young woman, Nais. She takes him back to her place, but the social mores, customs and expectations are all different. And we, the reader, start to see just how society, custom and the whole psychological outlook of humanity have undergone radical shifts in tone, perspective and focus. Bregg does start to find answers, but his attempts to make a life for himself on Earth continue to reinforce, develop and work on the theme of just how the assumptions of late 20th century culture have been completely overturned. In all, we get the Earth of the future as an alien planet, and Hal Bregg is our stranger in a very strange land indeed.
So what happened? What did Bregg find, and why does he fit in so poorly? And what can he do to make himself fit in? And does he in fact want to?
Return from the Stars shows a planetary unified Earth society that had decided that the best way to live in peace and fulfillment and to provide for all is to forestall and remove the possibility of aggression. Betrization, a procedure done on everyone in utero, biologically makes it very difficult to engage in aggressive acts of any nature. This somatic manipulation is enhanced and reinforced with other means, such as the drink Britt. The aforementioned encounter Bregg has with Nais shows this, as she naturally offers him a cup of Britt, with the expectation that he will drink it and thus will be completely unable to act violently to her against his will.
You can see the problem right away, although Bregg takes a bit to work it out (with the help of a couple of chance encounters he has with people interested in his era and his mission). He was never Betrizated, so chemicals such as Britt do not work on him, period. He is a loose cannon, something that Olav, one of his crewmates from the Fomalhaut expedition, makes clear to him. He can’t be controlled in the same way the rest of society can. But the paradox of tolerance is that this society that has for decades been this way can’t even see, fully, that Bregg is a major problem. They clearly tried some techniques, but in the end they let him out into the world, even though he is a factor in their utopian, pacific society they cannot control.
This is a Lem novel, so there is a lot of interior work here, too. Once we have a setup and Bregg has a hold and a sense of what is going on, we can see Bregg work out the implications of the society, especially as he starts to read history and learn how Betrization happened, and what happened to society as a result. Bregg does also get married in the course of the novel (no, not to Nais, but to a woman, Eri, with whom he was sharing a villa in what seems to be the Pacific Northwest of America). That marriage does not end well, sadly, as Bregg takes the entire novel to come to terms with the implications that he works out in his head, and for us the reader.
A society that forestalls all aggressive impulses, in Bregg’s experience, and in the future presented, is a society that is extremely risk-adverse. This is a society that provides for everyone, the basic standard of living is adequate and many things are simply free. (On top of this, Brregg, with the miracle of compound interest, has enough wealth to last him the rest of his life). But this society is one that eschews risk and gambling on uncertain ends, and no longer really looks outward. It’s a stable society, satisfied, and looks on its past, if it does at all, with distaste and horror. Bregg is a throwback, an anomaly, a part of the past best tolerated with cold indifference. His mission? Worthless. All the data and the stories of what he did (which we get in flashbacks throughout the novel?) Only he, and Olav, his fellow pilot, are the ones that truly care. The 10 or the 127 years he spent on his mission? Wasted, in the minds of contemporary society.
In the end, it makes Bregg feel extremely isolated and alone (he naturally has something of a falling out with Olav and that just makes Bregg feel worse). He is separated, isolated and alone, and in that condition, he is extremely dangerous, especially to himself. The novel doesn’t quite go as dark as it might, but I certainly felt for Bregg’s plight here, feeling like he was, in some ways, the last man on Earth. This interior feeling is mirrored with Bregg’s reading of history and showing that when society embraced Betrization, the older generation could not understand or connect with the younger generation’s radically new attitudes and ideals. I am not sure that the transition would have been quite as peaceful as Lem makes it out, but clearly, the older members of society, back at the time of the change, found themselves increasingly isolated, irrelevant, forgotten and ignored. It reminds one of several post apocalyptic novels where holdovers from the before times feel very out of place in the new reality after the collapse, although instead of a collapse here, it’s a sociological and cultural revolution that causes the older generations to find their ways, thoughts, and belief systems to be out of step with the new reality. Ways, thoughts, and belief systems that just so happen to be the contemporary ones that the reader experiences in their day-to-day life.
It’s a radical shift and I am going to give you a metaphor to help you understand and show the ambiguity of the situation. Take a hunter-gatherer from before the dawn of Agriculture, say, 20,000 years ago. Their life is extremely different from the typical reader of this piece in terms of how they get food, shelter and go about the daily business of life. Transport that hunter-gatherer into Chicago, London, Tokyo, Mumbai and giving them enough knowledge to understand what they were seeing, what would they think of the way we live now? They likely would see that a lot has been lost in our move to cities and not gathering off of the land individually as they do. They might see our society as weaker, inferior and a loss for our species.
So too, Bregg, and the risk-adverse, automated, safe and contented society that he encounters in Return from the Stars. Frederik Pohl in his short story “Day Million” makes a similar point, depicting a future society extremely alien and weird to the reader, but then turns it back onto the reader and says “Well, how do you think Attila the Hun or the Assyrian king Tilgath-Pileser would think of the way YOU live, hmm?”
So you see, Return from the Stars is a most ambiguous Utopia, indeed, and anyone who reads The Dispossessed (and if you haven’t yet, you should go fix that, too) should also read Return from the Stars and ponder its questions.
But I promised to tell you about Fomalhaut. Lem could have picked any star for the destination of Bregg’s trip. The details of the story as revealed and slowly dripped out in the course of the novel, as we have seen, really do not and did not require a specific star or location for the expedition to have gone to. Why Fomalhaut? I have a theory. Given that he lived in Poland, Fomalhaut is a star that does not always come up above the horizon or very high when it does. And when it does, it is in a patch of night sky that doesn’t have any nearby stars in its region of sky to rival its brilliance (Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the sky in fact). It is often called “the loneliest star” for this reason, and if you can triangulate it (best in early fall), it’s unmistakable because it stands out among everything in its region of sky. A lonely spark of light in the sky DOES sound a lot like our main character, Hal Bregg, doesn’t it?
Is Return from the Stars a perfect work? No, clearly the story itself struggles with some of its own ideas. Lem seems unsure of his own answers, even more than being just ambiguous. But that is true of every novel that tries to depict any sort of Utopia, I think. The ideas and concepts and framework of Return from the Stars are something Lem would not end working with, here. A decade and a half later, he would return to the themes of the novel, and ironically hew a little closer to LeGuin, in a similar but different setting, in his novel Observation on the Spot. But that, as they say, is another story.
