The Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s fiction is known for its interest in the porosity of boundaries—between nations, between ethnicities, between fiction and reality, consciousness and dreams. As her novels and stories stage the constant flux of national borders, particularly in Eastern Europe (Tokarczuk is Polish), they also delight in supernatural and science-fictional elements. In “House of Day, House of Night,” out from Riverhead this week, she writes, “All over the world, wherever people are sleeping, small, jumbled worlds are flaring up in their heads, growing over reality like scar tissue.” Not long ago, Tokarczuk sent us some remarks about a few of her favorite sci-fi and speculative-fiction writers, whose books mix the fantastical and the prosaic masterfully. Her notes were translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
The Star Diaries
by Stanisław Lem
I started reading science fiction at an early age. I was quite sure that by the time I grew up we’d be flying to Mars and the moon without a second thought. I was going to work in space medicine or as a physicist. At first I read books for young people, but Stanisław Lem was my true initiation into the genre. My favorite of his books are “The Star Diaries,” about a lone space traveller and scientist named Ijon Tichy, and “The Cyberiad,” a set of stories about robots and intelligent machines.
Lem was way ahead of his time, especially on the topic of machine intelligence. He had a superb sense of humor and a unique genius for discovering all sorts of paradoxes; his writing challenges the imagination, posing the sorts of questions that are the subjects of philosophical studies. In the story “The Seventh Journey,” Ijon’s spaceship falls into a time loop, resulting in a swarm of different Ijons from different parts of the same day. Which is the “real” one? Nowadays, I’d tell myself the real one is the one who’s telling the story. The real one is the observer.
As we’re mesmerized by artificial intelligence today, going back to Lem’s stories, which anticipated every kind of intelligent machine, is a must.
Ubik
by Philip K. Dick
Most sci-fi doesn’t depend on literary refinement. It’s more about conveying a concept, a paradox, a vision. Sometimes the vision is so powerful, and the desire to express it so intense, that it reduces language to its most pragmatic 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’s real and what’s produced by our brains. The multiplicity, diversity, and innovation of his work changed not just sci-fi but literature in general. In an incredibly modern and acute way, it considers questions that humankind has been asking itself for centuries.
In Poland, Lem was a great promoter of Dick, and they corresponded until Dick decided Lem wasn’t a person but a spy network called L.E.M. I started with “Ubik,” and will never forget its depiction of reality coming apart: modern objects suddenly change into ancient ones, food instantly goes bad, technology loses its power. Only the temporarily awakened dead, and a polymorphous product known as Ubik, can help. We may read the story as a metaphor for a disintegrating mind, but also for a “fallen cosmos” that must be constantly kept going by an unknown force.
