Academic conferences

It is common knowledge that there are two kinds of scholar these days: the stationary and the peripatetic. The stationaries pursue their studies in the traditional way, while their restless colleagues participate in every sort of international seminar and symposium imaginable. The scholar of this second type may be readily identified: in his lapel he wears a card bearing his name, rank, and home university, in his pocket sticks a flight schedule of arrivals and depatures, and the buckle of his belt -as well the snaps on his briefcase- are plastic, never metal, so as not to trigger unnecessarily the alarms of airport scanners that search boarding passengers for weapons. Our peripatetic scholar keeps up with the literature of his field by studying in buses, waiting rooms, planes, and hotel bars.

(Stanislaw Lem: The Futurological Congress [1971])

On the following day Laurz Mur called the conclave of xenologists to order. Standing on the speaker's podium, he swept the audience with an appraising eye. Five hundred xenologists came under his purview: every sort of philosopher, explorer, biologist, anthropologist, historian, cultural psychologist, linguist, analytical aesthetician, philologer, dendrologist, lexicographer, cartologist, and a dozen other more recondite professions. Some were scheduled speakers; others would listen and engage in the important work of intellectual cross-fertilization. Still others had brought papers they intended to read, if the opportunity offered, or even if not: somehow, by hook or by crook, the precious paper with its carefully honed phrases and engaging new ideas must be heard!

(Jack Vance: Night Lamp. By the way, "cartologist" seems to be a real word. Is it a mere synonym for "cartographer", or has it some particular shade of meaning?)

One possible way to enliven the closing ceremonies of academic conferences would be to arrange a "PowerPoint collage" by taking one slide from each of the transpired presentations, and then forcing one unfortunate attendant chosen at random to defend it as if it were his own paper. If he didn't make a convincing case, he would be erased from the proceedings. Fun for everyone, except one! (If the congress is about Moral Philosophy, the utilitarian guy should be chosen.)

Lem's Solaris, or, Kuhn before Kuhn

At one point in Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, the protagonist goes to a library and examines the avaliable literature on the science of "Solaristics". He finds that the history of that discipline is characterized by a succession of paradigms and research programs that begin with a hopeful earnestness, then become mired in the fundamental inscrutability of the planet Solaris, and are finally discarded in favor new-and-coming approaches that promise a fresh and more fruitful way of looking at things.

What followed was internecine warfare between scores of new schools of thought. It was the age of Panmaller, Strobel, Freyus, Le Greuille and Osipowicz: the entire legacy of Giese was submitted to a merciless examination.

(Stanislaw Lem: Solaris)

The thirty or so years of the first three 'Gravinsky periods,' with their open assurance and irresistibly optimistic romanticism, constitute the infancy of Solarist studies. Already a growing scepticism heralded the age of maturity. Towards the end of the first quarter-century the early colloidomechanistic theories had found a distant descendant in the concept of the 'apsychic ocean,' a new and almost unanimous orthodoxy which threw overboard the view of that entire generation of scientists who believed that their observations were evidence of a conscious will, teleological processes, and activity motivated by some inner need of the ocean. This point of view was now overwhelmingly repudiated, and the ground was cleared for the team headed by Holden, Ionides and Stoliva, whose lucid, analytically based speculations concentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data.

(ibid.)

The publication of Lem's novel in 1961 predates that of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by a year. Lem was certanly in tune with the zeitgeist, because passages like the ones I quoted above are powerfully reminiscent of Kuhn's conception of the history of science.

Solaris is, among other things, a meditation on the limits of science. The novel presents a worst-case scenario, where any real progress in impossible. Since its object of study is ultimately inscrutable, the history and evolution of "Solaristics" is sufficiently explained in sociological terms. I wonder if string theory has a bad case of "Solaristics".

The english translation of Solaris is based on the french translation from the polish original, so english readers are twice removed from Lem's original words. Strangely appropiate, since one of the themes of the novel is the impossibility of communication.

Diaper-wearing astronauts (and Barry N. Malzberg)

The whole Lisa Nowak affair seems straight out of a Barry N. Malzberg novel. Malzberg delighted in depicting the Space Program as a futile enterprise mired in bureaucracy and incompetence, and astronauts as mentally imbalanced people. Check out his novel Beyond Apollo, for example.

As sometimes happens, the craziest and/or more depressing author has turned out to be the most prophetic. Anyway, it's almost comforting to know that astronauts are not always superhuman paragons of achievement and rationality, but can flip out and drive 1000 miles wearing diapers to kill some poor fellow with whom they have a grudge. Just like the rest of us.

The image of a former astronaut driving a car in such awkward conditions, and the general deranged quality of what happened, also reminds me of Lem's The Chain of Chance.

Gravitation: what a fraud

GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain— the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

"A phenomenon is subject to analysis only if the structure of its events, as in this case, conforms to a regular pattern. Science progresses by discovering the connection between one phenomenon and other phenomena, and this is exactly what I succeeded in doing. If I were to ask you why a rock falls when dropped, you would reply that it is due to the action of gravity. Yet if I asked what gravity is, there would be no answer. But even though we don't know what gravity is, we can determine its regular pattern of action."

(Stanislaw Lem: The Investigation)

Vance and Lem

Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem is usually compared to the likes of Philip K. Dick, Borges, and Kafka, but I think some interesting similarities can be drawn with Jack Vance too. (Of course, Lem would have a pretty low opinion of Vance, as he had of most western science fiction. But let's ignore that.)

First and foremost, both Lem and Vance like to deal with failures of communication. In the case of Lem, those failures tend to be between different species: The planet Solaris and the scientists who study it, the natives of the planet Eden and the astronauts stranded there, the Quintans of Fiasco and the human contact mission. He uses them as methaphors for the Cold War, as a way tho show the limits of knowledge, and to critique anthropomorphism.

Vance depicts failed attempts at understanding between human cultures. The most extreme case is the conversation between Kergan Banbeck and the Weaponeer in The Dragon Masters, but there are a lot more examples strewn across Vance's body of work.

"I heard you distinctly," replied the Weaponeer. "Your words have no meaning, they are absurdities, paradoxes.

(Jack Vance: The Dragon Masters)

"Can you not understand me?" barked Kergan Banbeck in exasperation. He glanced at the sacerdote, an act of questionable decorum, then performed in a manner completely unconventional: "Sacerdote, how can I deal with this blockhead? He does not seem to hear me."

The sacerdote moved a step nearer, his face as bland and blank as before. Living by a doctrine which proscribed active or intentional interference in the affairs of other men, he could make to any question only a specific and limited answer. "He hears you, but there is no meeting of ideas between you. His thought-structure is derived from that of his masters. It is incommensurable with yours. As to how you must deal with him, I cannot say." [..] The sacerdote reflected. "He speaks not nonsense, but rather a language you fail to understand. You can make him understand your language by erasing all knowledge and training from his mind, and replacing it with patterns of your own."

(ibid.)

There are few aliens in Vance's stories: humans are more than weird enough. Not to be able to understand an alien mentality is unsettling; not to be able to do the same with a human one is even more so. For Vance, like for Max Weber, human societies are "suspended in webs of meaning they themselves have spun". But the configuration of those webs can diverge radically, even if their outer strands are attached to the same physical universe and a common human nature.

Vance and Lem are both satirists. In the case of the former it's a little difficult to see because of all the pulpy adventure, but it's there. Many passages from the Dying Earth books are reminiscent of Lem's Star Diaries, with their bizarre societies and strange cosmovisions. Both authors have penned roughly comparable satires of bureaucracy (Dodkin's Job and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub). Both authors have made fun of academic culture (compare the beginning of The Futurological Congress with the conclave of xenologists in Night Lamp).

Another similarity is that they share an uncanny ability to coin new words that sound just about right. Take for example the creative insults used by the robots to denigrate humankind in the eleventh voyage of the Star Diaries, or the ones directed at people who violate the societal norms of the utopia described in Vance's Wyst.

The apartments were originally intended to house male or female couples, or mated couples, but the philosophy was denounced as "sexivationist", and apartment assignments are now made at random, though often persons will trade about.

(Jack Vance: Wyst)

"Port Mar is hardly notable for sophistication; the Rhunes, however, consider Port Mar a most worldly place, characterized by shameless alimentation, slackness, laxity and a kind of bestial lasciviousness to which they apply the term 'sebalism'.

(Jack Vance: Marune)

Rearding female characters, neither Vance nor Lem posssess any remarkable skill at depicting them. Gustave Flaubert they are not.

Finally, Vance is no stranger to the Borgean delights of fictional erudite books and the reviews thereof. He did a little of that in the Demon Princes novels, which feature extracts form the work of a pompous philosopher-sociologist, Baron Boddisey. Although Vance hasn't devoted an entire book to reviews of imaginary texts, like Lem did in A Perfect Vacuum.