A Perfect Vacuum presents a bunch of story seeds disguised as reviews of non-existent books; these story seeds are somehow at once a little bit less and a little bit more than a story. The last two sentences of the first review, a review of the book itself, sums up the entire book quite nicely: “It is a book of ungranted wishes. And the only subterfuge the evasive Lem might still avail himself of would be a counterattack: in the assertion that it was not I, the critic, but he himself, the author, who wrote the present review and added it to— and made it part of— A Perfect Vacuum.” Lem artfully holds a mirror in front of a mirror in this statement; the result is a hundred reflections of what this book could be about.




At least two of the stories deal with randomness and probability. One is De Impossibilitate Vitae, in which a professor examines the chances of his various ancestors and other factors of his birth and ancestry, to try to come to a figure, mathematically, of what the exact chance of being alive actually is. A huge, sprawling, epic book could be made from this review, going all the way back to Professor Kouska’s ancestors and working its way forward. But I think that a gigantic epic would lose the point of the story, which is, I suppose, that thinking overmuch of chance, of probability, is a ridiculous affair when taken to the extreme. But, as the “reviewer” (i.e. Lem) states in A Perfect Vacuum, “The Attack is carried out in a clownish setting, and this is meant to blunt its edge.” I think that Lem, throughout this book, is gently poking fun at himself; it is a book of self discovery.




The other review that would make a long novel is Sexplosion. This one read like a story; it was the least like a review. Lem starts us with an old man looking in the darkness of a basement at the relics of a bygone age— an age of some kind of crazy sexocracy, culminating, in the end, of an entire world that views sex as a nun would view it: a laborious and repulsive act. Again, if this story was fleshed out more, and given a huge cast of characters (as would be required for such a long period of history), dozens of scenes and events, explanations of devices, etc.— all of this would somehow defang the bite of the story, which seems perfectly summed up in the review. This review is indeed, like all of the reviews, basically a “what-if” this and that happened; and in this “what-if” Lem creates a specific genre apart from either novel or short story, and converting any of these reviews into a novel or short story would change it into a different art form.




The best of the reviews is the one titled Being, Inc. I could not help but think of the parrallels of a corporation that deals with reducing the randomness of life with the phenomenon today known as the internet, for it, too reduces randomness, though not in the same way. There is no way– to my knowledge– for the internet, (referred to here as a single tool), to stage a train wreck for the sole purpose of making a man who hired(?) Being, Inc. to make him a hero in front of a woman he has the hots for. But a big part of Being, Inc. is the linking of several minds together at once. “Being, Inc. is an organization the like of which is unknown in history. This is essential. The matrimonial computer united a mere two persons and did not concern itself with what would happen to them after tying the knot.” Keeping the internet in mind, this statement is no longer at all true. The world wide web is just that, a network of hundreds of corporations and millions of individuals. One has a huge source of connection at one’s fingertips. Though you can’t place an order to become a hero, or to commit murder, or be the subject of spontaneous attraction, many other things are possible, things that would not be as easy with the internet ingrained in out society as it has become. An individual, with a search engine, can find a niche somewhere in the world that could possibly need something he is specifically good at— going there to help the needy, he may become a hero in the eyes of his peers. One can find websites on how to make excellent explosives out of lawn fertilizers, thus becoming the best pyromaniacal killer one can be. And cheaply. If one is into being spanked, then one can easily find a chatroom with like minded individuals— both spankers and spankees— communicating with them, a good spanking is a mere exchange of address– and possibly a plane ride– away.




But a difference between Being, Inc. and the World Wide Web is that the web is technically not owned by just three companies, as is the destiny companies in Lem’s review. It is, however, strikingly corporate. Thinking about the future of the Web after reading Lem’s review is a rather scary thought; while it is true that I’ve thought about how much more control one has with Web out there, I’ve never before thought about the price we pay for such control. It’s more than just a 19.99 a month connection fee. Does the gaining of more control ultimately result in a loss of freedom, or more specifically, a loss of free will? The last words of the review are ringing in my ears: “The thing will certainly not come about in the form of Being, Inc., but who can say whether fate will spare our descendants other forms of this phenomenon— forms perhaps less amusing in description but not, it may be, any less oppressive.”




So is the Web in any way oppressive? To a certain degree, I don’t think so. It is a useful tool and nothing more, kind of like the telephone was all those years ago. But this is perhaps a bad analogy, for we are nothing if not enslaved by our telephones. To most people, it is a practical impossibility to not answer the phone when it rings, even though we know— deep down in the backs of our minds we know— that chances are that phone call will be something unimportant. We have a cell phones now, so we will never, ever— oh, perish the thought!— miss an important call. So will the Web, with its myriad aspects and uses, be even more enslaving, oppressive? Will email and chat rooms and search engines and news groups all become something we are horribly uncomfortable when we go without, as if we are disconnected to this hive mind of humanity? Questions that I can’t answer. But I do think that technology in general can be viewed enslaving; and even though I think that, I still spend hours in front of TV, on the telephone, or surfing the internet.

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Created Feb 05, 2002 at 11:13am • Submit your own review...