Stanisław Lem's "A Perfect Vacuum"

February 18, 2025 6:14 AM

"A book like A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of reviews of non-existent books, is more akin to Borges than Heinlein. ... a book filled with ideas — in the form of compacted micro-books. The device of using faux-literary criticism for the launching of bold philosophical queries in miniature is novel, if not utterly brilliant. The execution is deadpan, believable, and totally hilarious."

Lem:

Nor do I now do what began in the first place rather as a joke: write criticism in the form of the reviews of nonexistent books or forewords to them (A Perfect Vacuum, Imaginary Magnitude). I do not publish these things any longer but use them to create my own knowledge of another world, a knowledge entirely subservient to my literary program — in other words, to sketch a rough outline that will be filled in later. I surround, myself, so to speak, with the literature of a future, another world, a civilization with a library that is its product, its picture, its mirror image.

A Perfect Vacuum (1971) is available in its entirety at Google Books. My favorite is "Gigamesh" - which satirizes the excesses of Joycean allusiveness.

posted by Lemkin (37 comments total)

I think Lem's "The Cyberiad" is one of the underrated masterpieces of SF. Probably because it's funny. People seem to want to take spaceships, planets, and galactic empires ever so seriously.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:36 AM on February 18 [18 favorites]

I love this book so much! Thanks for making me think of it today. I somehow ended up with two copies of this and lend one of them out almost constantly. Lem is so funny and elusive.
posted by modus_pwns at 8:42 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]

posted by Lemkin
Eponysterical!
posted by crazy_yeti at 8:46 AM on February 18 [6 favorites]

Thanks for posting this, Lemkin.

I read everything I could get my hands on by Lem (1921-2006) at an early age and he was a big influence on me in several ways - a gateway for me out of cheap genre sci-fi into more interesting literature like Borges and Calvino. I agree with CheeseDigestsAll that The Cyberiad is a masterpiece (including the illustrations by Daniel Mroz), but it's worth spending time with some of his lesser-known pieces too, such as A Perfect Vacuum and its sort-of-companion volumes Imaginary Magnitude and One Human Minute, which are also reviews and introductions to non-existent books.

The story cycles featuring Pirx the Pilot and Ijon Tichy(The Star Diaries) are a lot of fun too.

Also worth reading is Jonathan Lethem's "My Year of Reading Lemmishly" where he (like me, a Lem fan from an early age) re-reads and re-apprasies Lem's oeuvre - I don't agree with everything Lethem says but it's a thoughtful piece, where he identifies (at least) 5 different Lems ("Perfect Vacuum" was written by Lem 4). I never managed to finish Lem 5's Summa Technologiae but I should give it another crack.

And also, big props to translator Michael Kandel, who is my favorite translator of Lem's works.
posted by crazy_yeti at 9:09 AM on February 18 [5 favorites]

In my head The Cyberiad has always been The Cyber Iliad, which I suppose is a war between subreddits.
posted by neuron at 9:21 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]

This is getting a bit off the subject of "A Perfect Vacuum" (sorry Lemkin) but you got me thinking about Lem and Cyberiad and it occurs to me what an absolutely striking contrast there is between the writing machine described in "Trurl's Electronic Bard" (a "Homeostatic Homer") and the LLM approach so prevalent today. Constructor Trurl wants to create a machine to write poetry, but realizes that

"The program found in the head of an average poet, after all, was written by the poet's civilization, and that civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time, when those bits of information that concerned the poet-to-be were still swirling about in the primordial chaos of the cosmic deep. Hence in order to program a poetry machine, one would first have to repeat the entire Universe from the beginning - or at least a good piece of it.
[...]
He built a machine and fashioned a digital model of the Void, an Electrostatic Spirit to move upon the face of the electrolytic waters, and he introduced the parameter of light, a protogalactic cloud or two, and by degrees worked his way up to the first ice age [...] Next Trurl began to model Civilization."

Compare this to the shallow approach of LLMs which have no model of anything at all, just a soup of word frequencies, a glorified Markov chain. No world model, just words. I think Lem would be deeply disappointed!

Also the poems written by Trurl's machine are just fantastic, and it's amazing to that Kandel was able to translate them so well, especially the poem about a haircut where all words start with "S" ("Seduced, shaggy Samson snored....") and the "love poem in the language of pure mathematics". If you've never seen these, check them out. (These were both added to the Unix "fortune" database, a treasure of old hacker culture.)
posted by crazy_yeti at 9:32 AM on February 18 [12 favorites]

Haven't heard the name Stanislaw Lem in a long time, and immediately my brain made a connection to Omni magazine which I used to read as a kid.
posted by milnak at 9:46 AM on February 18 [3 favorites]

Omni magazine which I used to read as a kid

I remember being scandalized by the premiere issue costing two dollars.
posted by Lemkin at 9:52 AM on February 18 [3 favorites]

I haven't read A Perfect Vacuum. I've gone through a couple of periods where I'd read as much Lem as I could get my hands on, but there's so much! Eventually I'd get distracted by another author, and abandon the project by neglect.
I'll agree that The Cyberiad is wonderful, but then again a lot of his work is.
posted by Spike Glee at 10:25 AM on February 18 [2 favorites]

[to the tune of “Panama Red”]
Stanisław Lem, Stanisław Lem
He’ll steal your woman, and write a book for them
On his robot, Mescalito
he comes breezing’ through town
I’ll bet your woman’s found a gem in
Stanisław Lem
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:50 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]

I'll try this, I love Borges, but I can't finish any Lem title I've tried to read. I can't tell what it is ... it's too literary, somehow, but I read literary fiction with no problems. Somehow the high concepts seem artificial, or the writing is too dense for me? A friend recommended an obscure Lem "His Master's Voice" to me recently as hilarious, and I couldn't get through even a few pages.
posted by Vegiemon at 10:51 AM on February 18 [2 favorites]

I loved the Cyberiad in college, and enjoyed it on re-read, but found that 1. His few female characters are objects only, and 2. The pirate distracted by the Demon of the Second Kind story really is a personal attack on the amount of time I spend reading Wikipedia and/or metafilter
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:57 AM on February 18 [2 favorites]

I'm glad to see Stanislaw Lem here! If only some people in California would have read his ironic, humorous, philosophical and cynical stories - then we wouldn't have such naive and stupid visions of what future technology should be.
posted by Termite at 11:46 AM on February 18

There is a pretty funny german TV series adapting the Ijon Tichy Star Diaries. It was mostly shot inside some old Berlin apartment using kitchen appliances etc. as the ships controls.
Someone on YT added english subtitles to the first episode.
posted by debagel at 12:35 PM on February 18 [2 favorites]

I'll try this, I love Borges, but I can't finish any Lem title I've tried to read.

If you haven't already tried this one, I'd suggest The Futurological Congress. It's short, funny, doesn't get overtly philosophical, and in some ways prophetic. As with a lot of Lem stuff though, you have to keep in mind when it was written (1971). Some SF concepts which may seem obvious or hackneyed to modern eyes were essentially invented by Lem.
posted by xigxag at 1:14 PM on February 18 [5 favorites]

I love Lem! Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Futurological Congress. My reading of him is spotty at best, but I started up again recently with Fiasco, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Perhaps I should tackle a FPP someday, but my contribution comes largely from the film side, as I've been tracking down every Lem film adaptation I could find. Here's the list:

Milcząca Gwiazda (1960)
AKA, First Spaceship on Venus, The Silent Star

Szpital Przemienienia (1979)
AKA Hospital of the Transfiguration

Ikarie X-B1 (1963)
Released in the US, chopped up and dubbed as Voyage to the End of the Universe

Przekładaniec (1968)
AKA Layer Cake

Test pilota Pirxa (1979)
AKA Pilot Prix's Inquest

The Congress (2013)

Az Úr hangja* (2018)
AKA His Master's Voice

Solaris (1972)

Solaris (2002)

Sledztwo* (1974)
AKA The Investigation (TV series)

1 (2009)
(Trailer)

Aside: Try searching for a movie called "1" Hard mode.

I've tried to find accessible links to share. Some of the above are without subtitles. If you are determined, you can download them, and look for subtitles on Open Subtitles.

Some of the unlinked films I was able to watch on Eastern European Movies, which, omg, use at your own risk, but I was very happy with my interaction, and was able to see some stuff that would otherwise have been impossible to source.

Of the ones I've watched, top three are:

Solaris (1972)
The Congress (2013) and
His Master's Voice (2018)

Ikarie X-B1 is also good, and looks like Star Trek before Star Trek.
posted by chromecow at 1:21 PM on February 18 [6 favorites]

Fans of fun, thoughtful treatments of books that don't exist: Reid Byers's exhibit "Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books" will be in San Francisco, March 17, 2025 through July 21, 2025.

A cross between a book exhibition and a conceptual art installation, this exhibition consists of a collection of books that do not really exist. Curated by Reid Byers, the exhibition includes approximately 100 books and associated arealia from his collection—all simulacra created with a team of printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers—of lost books that have no surviving example, unwritten books that were planned but left unfinished, and fictive works that exist only in fiction. Highlights of the exhibition include William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won, the lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost....

"Imaginary Books" was recently at New York City's Grolier Club, which also produced an online version. I got to see Byers give a talk about it - I haven't watched this 2021 talk (47 minutes) but it is probably similarly fun.

While the experience of an imaginary book is generally ludic, it can also be caustically satiric or dramatically aesthetic. It invariably inspires reflection: what difference would it make if we could peruse these volumes? Would we laugh differently if we still knew what Aristotle thought was funny? What if Karl Marx had finished the comedy he started? What function does a fictive book serve in its fictional world, and what does that tell us about ours?

Maybe my favorite moment was seeing The Key to All Mysteries, Casaubon's (and Dorothea's) work from Middlemarch. Such an ordinary, boring-looking brown bound volume, an exterior that doesn't hint at its cost. But also, a slightly beat-up Loeb Library version of Homer's lost comedy Margites. The yearning melancholy of imagining these ancient lost works, next to the satisfying silliness of seeing a novel by P.G. Wodehouse's Rosie Banks, and a copy of a magazine that includes "The Giant Rat of Sumatra."
posted by brainwane at 1:31 PM on February 18 [5 favorites]

crazy_yeti, thanks for the Lethem link! That was a great read, and gave me both a greater understanding of the Lem I've read (One and Two), and gives me some great ideas for what to read next; The Cyberiad, Summa Technologiae, Solaris. And yes, to bring it back around, A Perfect Vacuum.

I'll leave it with this quote from the article, excerpting the Summa Technologiae:

Lem-the-seer is exasperated, eccentrically lyrical and permanently fresh. One has only to dip into the chapter called ‘Phantomatics’ to see that in 1964 Lem had already grasped more of the implications of virtual reality – of ‘Meta’ – than Mark Zuckerberg ever will. On the one hand, the inadequacies of the VR user’s imagination ensure that one is destined to be patronised and infantilised by one’s own devices:

Put briefly, the more the character one wishes to impersonate differs in personality traits and historical period from his own, the more fictitious, naive or even primitive his behaviour and the whole vision will be. Because, to be crowned a king or receive the pope’s emissaries, one has to be familiar with the whole court protocol. The persons created by the phantomat can pretend that they cannot see the idiotic behaviour of the ermine-clad national bank clerk, and thus his own pleasure will perhaps not diminish as a result of his mistakes, but we can clearly see that this whole situation is steeped in triviality and buffoonery. This is why it will be very hard for phantomatics to develop into a mature dramatic form.

Conversely, the feedback loop created by machines programmed to grow better and better at fooling you will rapidly spiral into narcissistic breakdown:

Psychiatrists would still see various neurotics in their waiting rooms, haunted by obsessions of a new type – the fear that what they are experiencing is not true at all and that they have become ‘trapped’ in a ‘phantomatic world’. I mention this point because it clearly indicates how technology not only shapes normal consciousness but also makes its way onto the list of diseases and disorders whose emergence it initiates.
posted by chromecow at 2:04 PM on February 18 [4 favorites]

I'm a fan, but a selective one, and I've not read this and it is exactly my jam so thanks.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:23 PM on February 18 [1 favorite]

During COVID, a group called Theatre in Quarantine did a one-man adaptation of one of Lem's Star Diaries stories that was a lot of fun. Behold, the 7th voyage of egon tichy.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:13 PM on February 18 [3 favorites]

Fascinating as always. I found his early 1961 novel Return from the Stars interesting, even though Lem himself was dismissive about it. The Wikipedia description leaves out much of the weirdness, as the protagonist Hal Bregg becomes impatient and sometimes turns violent in the docile disorienting world that he's returned to, and his fellow cosmonauts shun him when they start working on their next project. It's something.
posted by ovvl at 7:58 PM on February 18 [1 favorite]

There's also a videogame called "The Invincible" marketed as an adaptation of Lem's 1964 novel, although it is more like a direct prequel that takes place on the same planet where the bulk of the events of Lem's book transpire. I'd hesitate to call it "fun" exactly. Like a lot of videogames you're required to perform certain tasks for the story to progress, and sometimes those tasks can be tedious or slightly puzzling to figure out. (I got stuck for the maybe a few weeks on one section of the map based on a silly misunderstanding of the problem and almost gave up until I had a breakthrough). But it is really atmospheric and immerses you in an environment evocative of cosmonaut tech, effectively providing a Lem-like feeling of something familiar yet dated, and slightly askew.
posted by xigxag at 11:33 PM on February 18 [2 favorites]

The Cyberiad is indeed brilliant. One of the stories that has stayed with me for a long time is that of Mymosh the Self-Begotten. The premise is that the universe is large enough in space and time that perhaps it is possible for a conscious being to just come into being, arising literally from a garbage heap. That's Mymosh, the lonley consciousness that arises briefly, falls back into dis-assembly for centuries, comes alive briefly again and then eventually decays. It is very short and I found the entire story here. Excerpt:

That evening, something emerged at the edge of the dump, not
far from the puddle which had by now dried up, and this something,
a creature of pure accident, was Mymosh the Selfbegotten, who had
neither mother nor father, but was son unto himself, for his
father was Coincidence, and his Mother --Entropy. And Mymosh
rose up from the garbage dump, totally oblivious of the fact that
he had about one chance in a hundred billion jillion raised to
the zillionth power of ever existing, and he took a step, and
walked until he came to the next puddle, which had not as yet
dried up, so that, kneeling over it, he could easily see himself.

posted by vacapinta at 9:15 AM on February 19 [4 favorites]

I love this book. There's one toward the end avoid a lady who wants to pay whatever the price to live an authentic life, maybe someone can post the title. I think about that story All The Time now that we are fighting ai. Elephantiasis indeed.
posted by hypnogogue at 1:13 PM on February 19 [2 favorites]

@Crazy_yeti your description:

This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!

produced this on ChatGPT:

Steel shears slice, sever strands so slight,
Silken streams surrender, swept from sight.
Sacred style, a sundered soul now sworn,
Silent sorrow, shorn in shadow’s scorn.
Soft sighs spiral, specters swiftly stay,
Star-crossed, shaven, swallowed by the spray.

Which isn't as good as Lem's translator's, but it's good enough. My favorite though in that story is Love and Tensor Algebra, especially the lines:
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
posted by talos at 1:42 PM on February 19 [1 favorite]

Which isn't as good as Lem's translator's, but it's good enough.

Good enough for what? It's not good enough for me. To me, it is pure garbage. Sound without sense. It completely misses the point about the story of Samson. There is no subject. Just word salad. It's disrepectful to Lem, Kandel and to poetry to compare this drivel to the original. It's not even close.
posted by crazy_yeti at 2:01 PM on February 19 [4 favorites]

Also note, in addition to missing the opportunity to connect to the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah, it didn't even stick to the rules: "from", "now", "in", "by the".
posted by crazy_yeti at 2:17 PM on February 19 [3 favorites]

Where's the retribution? Where's the quiet heroism in the face of certain doom? Sorry for the multiple posts, but the more I look at this, the more I find it lacking. If this were the poem Trurl's Electronic Bard had come up with, the story would have been pretty disappointing.
posted by crazy_yeti at 2:29 PM on February 19 [2 favorites]

For posterity, here's the poem crazy_yeti links to, which is at least superior to the LLM in that it follows the instructions of having every word begin with 's':

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

which is a poem Kandel completely made up, not translated as far as I can tell. The Polish original seems to ask for and produce a different poem!

The Polish original asks for:

Let him compose a poem about cyberotics! - he said suddenly, brightening. - Let there be six lines at most, and in them about love and betrayal, about music, about Negroes, about high society, about misfortune, about incest, to rhyme and all the words should start with the letter C!!

and the original poem:

Cyprian cyberotoman, cynik, ceniąc czule
Czarnej córy cesarskiej cud ciemnego ciała,
Ciągle cytrą czarował. Czerwieniała cała,
Cicha, co dzień czekała, cierpiała, czuwała...
...Cyprian ciotkę całuje, cisnąwszy czarnulę!!

which translates as:

Cyprian the cyber sex fiend and a cynic, appreciating tenderly the miracle of the dark body of the Negro daughter of Caesar, constantly wove charms with a zither. She blushed all over, silent, waiting every day, suffering, watching ... Cyprian kisses her aunt, have abandoned the black beauty!

Kandel's translations are called out by Hofstadter in his book Le Ton beau de Marot which points out how translation is very much an Art form. Kandel produced a new book, with works of his own imagination, based upon Lem's Polish book. But that is pretty much what translation is and what human translators do.
posted by vacapinta at 2:31 AM on February 20 [6 favorites]

Kandel's translations are called out by Hofstadter in his book Le Ton beau de Marot

Such a great book. Way more re-readable than GEB if you ask me.
posted by xigxag at 10:56 PM on February 20 [1 favorite]

Am I right in thinking all the Polish "c" words start with the same sibilant as the English "s" ones?
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:03 AM on February 21

Sorry. Savvy surrogate scribe suggested similar sibilants, simulating sursurrations, saving supervening sense?
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:07 AM on February 21 [4 favorites]

Perceptive point proficiently put. Pondered: perfectly plausible.
posted by flabdablet at 2:16 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]

it didn't even stick to the rules: "from", "now", "in", "by the"

Programmed poet proves puny; proper people pick punctuation.
posted by flabdablet at 2:36 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]

Am I right in thinking all the Polish "c" words start with the same sibilant as the English "s" ones?

The "cz" sound is like "ch" in English - "czarnej" Polish (feminite form) for "black". It's also the root of what we spell "Chernobyl" in English, "Black wood" or wormwood - in Polish, "Czarnobyl".
posted by crazy_yeti at 5:35 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]

Oh, only oriented orthographically.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:57 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]

Perspicacious Polish pronunciation pundit provides pointers. Polyglot prevails, plausibility popped. Pity! Pleasing presupposition.
posted by flabdablet at 11:28 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]