The Invincible by Stanisław Lem

First published:Niezwyciezony i inne opowiadania, 1964 (English translation, 1973)

Type of work: Experimental science fiction

Time of work: The distant future

Locale: Planet Regis III in the outermost quadrant of the Lyre Constellation

Principal Characters:

• Horpach, the commander of the spaceship Invincible
• Rohan, the navigator, from whose point of view much of the narration proceeds

The Novel

The Invincible is ostensibly a traditional science-fiction adventure novel whose tight and engaging plot describes an investigatory expedition to a distant planet. It is, in addition, a parabolic commentary upon the difficulties of human and nonhuman communication.

The narrative begins with the landing of the spaceship Invincible on the planet Regis III in the outermost quadrant of the Lyre Constellation. The goal of the crew, led by Horpach, the spaceship commander, with the assistance of Rohan, the navigator, from whose perspective subsequent events are recounted, is to retrieve a lost spaceship, the Condor. Satellite photographs reveal a series of geometric formations suspected to be abandoned cities. These prove instead to be lifeless, impenetrable, metallic mounds of wiry tangles supported within by huge pillars which intersect innumerable rods and folded layers of honeycomb structures.

The crew also locates the Condor. Its interior is in shocking disarray, and dead crewmen are scattered in and about the ship. It appears that the Condor crew died of natural causes, although one Invincible scientist suggests mass insanity. Rohan leads a second squad to the abandoned “cities” but is ordered to return to the Invincible when a member of another investigative group returns to the craft a helpless amnesiac. A prospecting expedition under the command of Regnar sets off to analyze minerals but instead comes in contact with “furiously dancing...sparkling black iron crystals” that form an immense cloud and swallow up the expedition’s scout. Dispatched to rescue this party, Rohan finds most of Regnar’s men in a confused stupor. Four of the team’s members—Regnar, Benningsen, Korotko, and Mead—have disappeared.

Lauda, a physicist, proposes that intelligent life from the Lyre Constellation may have brought robots and computers to Regis III in an unsuccessful effort to escape an exploding supernova. While the voyagers died, their robots adapted and flourished. A process of machine evolution took place, however, in which solar energy and miniaturization enabled the predecessors of the “tiny pseudo insects” to triumph. The ruins of the “cities” found earlier are the remains of the inanimate self-reproducing structures that lost the battle for existence to the “insects.”

Rohan and his party return to the Invincible, having been attacked by a swarming black cloud which killed one man and left the remainder infantile. From samples captured by Rohan, it is learned that the “insects” are Y-shaped with tiny wings and crystalline structures. When joined together, these “insects” can fly, generate heat, and produce electrical or magnetic fields to protect themselves.

Horpach sends a huge robot ship, the Cyclops, to track down the four missing men. The “insects” attack it. In defending itself, the Cyclops produces an enormous and devastating conflagration. The Cyclops emerges outwardly unscathed, but the Invincible crewmen quickly realize that it has lost its bearings and is wandering aimlessly around the planet. Subsequently, the defeated Cyclops attacks the Invincible and is destroyed by a tremendous shot of energy from the mother ship. Following the attack, Horpach, who now appears quite human and frail, admits that he is unsure whether to leave or to remain on the planet and asks Rohan to make the decision. Rohan resents this abdication of responsibility but grudgingly agrees to search for the missing men in what will be a very dangerous solitary mission.

In the course of the one-man reconnaissance, the cybernetic “insects” attack Rohan, but by remaining immobile he experiences no ill effects. He stumbles upon the bodies of three of the four men, witnesses strange behavior by the “insects,” and becomes convinced that the expedition should leave Regis III. Rohan finds an abandoned vehicle which carries him safely to the Invincible.

The Characters

The Invincible has elements of both the classic detective novel, in which the characters investigate some unusual event, and the futuristic adventure story, in which there is no convenient or unequivocal solution to the problem at hand. While the setting is not as conventional as that offered in Sledztwo (1959; The Investigation, 1974) or Katar (1976; The Chain of Chance, 1978), the detective genre laced with Stanisław Lem’s ubiquitous irony and sense of play serves the characters well. The quest of Horpach and Rohan for their missing comrades proves to be an exploration of man’s ethical dilemmas made tortuous and bitter by an alien contact that can be pursued only from the narrow perspective of human understanding.

Horpach and Rohan emerge as distinctive characters during this enterprise. Horpach, the unrepentant rationalist and conqueror, is technologically confident, grimly certain of the rightness of contact, and determined to overcome the cybernetic creatures of Regis III. On the other hand, Horpach is also courageous and, within the sphere of technology, quite resourceful. He expresses the themes most critics agree are central to Lem’s work: the tension of living in a universe of “chance and order” in which the natural desire to gain knowledge of the world often becomes an arrogant need to dominate and control what is discovered.

Rohan, in contrast, is a struggling, suffering character whose human limitations are brought to the surface by a confrontation with the unknown. Lem’s central characters are often loners who display a range of personalities. While Ijon Tichy, for example, of Dzienniki gwiazdowe (1957; The Star Diaries, 1976), is a genial amateur and unpredictable Gulliver who indulges in intellectual high jinks, Rohan, like Kelvin in Solaris (1961; English translation, 1970), is outwardly self-assured and inquisitive about the cosmos, but often psychologically unguarded. For example, he is initially confident about the meaning of the mission to Regis III and seemingly subscribes to Horpach’s ideals and values, but as the cybernetic “insects” inflict one humiliating defeat after another on the crew of the Invincible and their formidable hardware, Rohan’s assessment of the mission is clouded by anxiety, sleeplessness, and uncertainty.

Rohan is very much a typical Lemian protagonist. Despite the horrific specter of fellow humans stripped of experience, knowledge, and personality by the cybernetic swarms, Rohan comes to see that the alien creatures have a right to exist apart from human expectations and that conquering them or seeking revenge is pointless and illusory. He makes a painful but authentically ethical decision that humans have no business on Regis III and should simply leave.

Critical Context

In pre-1956 Polish material such as Astronauci (1951; the astronauts), Sezam i inne opowiadania (1954; “Sesame” and other stories), and Obok Magellana (1955; the Magellan nebula), Lem demonstrated an untempered faith in science, human reason, and the inevitable triumph of a just and classless society marked by ubiquitous love, humane sentiments, and beneficent technology. After 1956, Lem became concerned with the alienated individual in the cosmos and how that individual comes to know not only the world of familiar experience but also the larger universe. This led inevitably to an examination of a standard science-fiction theme: human and nonhuman encounter.

Lem has explored this theme brilliantly in Solaris, The Invincible, and Fiasko (1986; Fiasco, 1987). All three of these novels are parables about humankind’s thirst for meaning in an apparently meaningless and random universe and the concomitant difficulties of communication with nonhuman life-forms; all three reveal the consequences of technological hubris. Finally, for all of their dizzying range of speculation, all three suggest that human consciousness is the chief riddle of the universe.

Bibliography

Barnouw, Dagmar. “Science Fiction as a Model for Probabilistic Worlds: Stanisław Lem’s Fantastic Empiricism,” in Science-Fiction Studies. VI (July, 1979), pp. 153-163.

Engel, Peter. “The World of Stanisław Lem, Cybernetic Moralist,” in The New Republic. LCXXXVIII (February 7, 1983), pp. 37-39.

Jarzebski, Jerzy. “Stanisław Lem, Rationalist and Visionary,” in Science-Fiction Studies. IV (July, 1977), pp. 110-126.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “European SF: Rottensteiner’s Anthology, the Strugatskys, and Lem,” in Science-Fiction Studies. I (Spring, 1974), pp. 181-185.

Science-Fiction Studies. XIII (November, 1986). Special Lem issue.

Ziegfeld, Richard E. Stanisław Lem, 1985.