Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on Stanisław Lem's literary work. This article attempts to further explore this subject. Its aim is to show how Lem in Powrót z gwiazd [Return from the stars, 1961] depicts the return from space travel as analogous to coming home from war. This analogy is based on a complex interplay between the science fiction narrative on the one hand and references to the Homeric epic poem The Odyssey on the other. The article highlights some peculiarities of this intertextual fabric of Return from the Stars. From this point of view, the science fiction work forms, in Adorno's term, a “constellation” with the epic tale. In this constellation the science fiction narrative exposes in its transtextual interplay with the Greek tradition the deheroization of the hero as well as the ambiguities of a biopolitically organized society in the future. With the transtextual reassessment of the mythical narrative and the emerging literary representation of an odyssey without homecoming, Lem's novel exemplifies a fundamental dismantling of positivity. Seen from this angle, the science fiction novel can be situated in the context of postwar Polish literature which in its attempts to come to terms with the traumatic experiences of war and occupation challenges or even rejects a cultural heritage of traditions and values that have—in the wake of World War II—lost their immanent value.
This paper deals with Lem’s “Fables for Robots” and sheds some light on the genological interplay between science fiction and fairy tale. Its aim is to show to what extent a key feature of fairy tales like magic is transformed within the framework of science fiction. Lem depicts peculiarities of technological civilisation (Gotthard Günther). By referring to the fairy tale Lem draws the attention to the non-technological background in this civilisation, namely the desires and aspirations on which technologies as well as social order are based. In this interconnection of desire and technology lies in the core of Lem’s literary synthesis of fairy tale and science fiction. This synthesis is contextualised on the basis of Lem’s own theoretical works, related discussions of magic in technology (Norbert Wiener, Arthur C. Clarke), and Max Horkheimer’s critical reassessment of modern rationality.
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