Note from Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.: The present interview was conducted in writing, following conversations that I had with Lem in Vienna in May of 1985 and a year-long correspondence that surrounded them. Our original plan had been to converse with the help of a Polish-English interpreter. But when I arrived in Vienna, no appropriate interpreter was available. Lem had no desire to speak for the record in English or, through a third-language interpreter, in German or French. With the help of Dr. Franz Rottensteiner's able mediation from German, and Lem's own quite competent English, Lem and I did manage to discuss many of the things that later formed the basis of the interview. We agreed that the ideal format would be for me to submit my questions in English, to which he would reply in writing, in Polish. I think both of us preferred this format anyway, since it minimized the loss of information. The result was the 22 replies and 2 postscripts of the present interview, which I have annotated with Dr. Rottensteiner's assistance.

This interview was originally published at Science Fiction Studies #40 = Volume 13, Part 3 = November 1986

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.: You are highly regarded as a writer of both fiction and "experimental" philosophy of science. You use fictional elements in your philosophical works, and philosophical-essayistic elements in your fictions. What distinguishes these two modes for you? Why don't you "specialize" in one or the other?

Stanisław Lem: All my books, both the belletristic and the discursive in nature, were written spontaneously — that is, choosing the mode of expression that seemed most appropriate to me because it made me write. Aside from essays, I also wrote three discursive books (Summa Technologiae, Dialogues, and Science Fiction and Futurology - I forgot about the fourth one, The Philosophy of Chance), and there is nothing fantastic about them. Because when beginning to write each of these books I had neither a plan nor any kind of knowledge of their content, they basically got written unaffected by any genological or taxonomic considerations; that is, I did not spend any time thinking about the questions of what genre they are meant to belong to. These books contain a lot of speculation and I am aware of it. This speculation could be termed sui generis fantasizing on the themes of future development (of technology or literature, for example), but I was merely expressing my convictions, not intentionally setting up hypotheses. In this sense, I functioned as an unwitting futurologist — before the futurological goldrush itself took place — and an unwitting philosopher, too. I suppose that my inclination towards armchair philosophizing was induced by my acquaintance with certain people who edited a philosophical journal, for example Helen Eilstein and Leszek Kolakowski.¹ Be that as it may, I never had the urge to "speak my piece" to the world at large, as far as philosophy goes. Perhaps this disinclination comes from my conviction that the time of crafting seamless, unified philosophical systems is long past. This is so, I claim, because the results of the new "hard" sciences, led by physics, begin to exceed the abilities of reasoning — the various events and descriptions of states which fly in the face of visual perception as well as any other human sense or intuition, all that stuff conjured by the human mind. Yet the sober science marches on, registering the "smells" and "colors" of quarks, all the while discarding the help that we naturally owe to our bodily sensorium and lifelong personal experience. Thus, if the scientific results exceed the horizons of human intellectual comprehension, then human philosophy must be left behind, limiting itself to reflection on the way the world is thoroughly known to us as a niche for a certain thinking species or to considerations of the human position in this world, its correctness and dangers. But as science evolves ever faster, negating its prior solutions and pronouncements, it is futile to attempt to create a philosophical system "once and for all" in harmony with the effects of empirical discovery.

Issues such as these are what I packed into my discursive works, because I was constantly fascinated and haunted by them, and yet I saw no way of including them in my belletristic endeavors. The fact that I did not choose one or the other (I alternated between writing discursively and writing belletristically) basically stems from my human nature: that of being like baking dough — my interests grew every which way at once. I would hate to have to give up using these various strategies of relating the themes of my life.

On several occasions you have written that modern writing adheres to, or is dependent on, literary paradigms derived from sacred-mythological culture predating the rise of empiricism. Have you developed any new narrative paradigms in your own work that are appropriate for contemporary scientific culture?

I always approached my belletristic creations pragmatically; that is, by trial and error. In a sense, I was like a person who tries to jump as far as possible without pausing to think about theories of jumping. This is why the question of whether I have created any new narrative paradigms, or crossbred some existing ones and thus benefitted from hybrid forms, or whether I made some new headway for either Form or Content, or none at all — none of this has ever interested me. Neither do I consider myself to be the person most competent to answer this question of yours.