IMAGINARY MAGNITUDE BY STANISLAW LEM

Lem is a Polish sci-fi novelist who the NY Times said was “worthy of a Nobel Prize.” His books are hard to characterize and range from the brooding Solaris (made into a movie starring George Clooney) to the slapstick Tales of Pirx the Pilot. But Imaginary Multitude is perhaps the hardest to pin down in terms of genre. It purports to be collection of book introductions by various writers for several non-existent books of the future. And of course the “editor” of this compendium must preface the whole thing with his own introduction, which is written in an overblown, highbrow style peppered with literary allusions, including 22 reference to biblical passages and concepts all packed into a mere nine pages.

These citations include the following phrases: the Jerichonic blast, wilderness cries of John the Baptist, Holy Scriptures, the redeeming Ark of the Covenant, the Creator, abstain from sins, heavenly manna, save ourselves, save our souls, the Almighty, the Bible, the Pentateuch, the Lord said 'Let there be light', a divine and omnipotent purpose, Incarnation, a state undefiled by sin, authentic nakedness of Adam, a savior, the priest-intermediary between the terrified multitude, the curse of bondage, excommunicate, open the altar, holy gates, a parable of our destiny, prior to the Creation, slings it like David's stone, and a rock in the path.

This overall introduction is followed the preface to an art book filled with “Pornograms,” x-rays taken of people engaged in group sex. The result of this exercise is really to literally strip humanity of its soul and spirit, and even most of its body, and reduce it to an artistic rendering of its underlying architecture only.

Following this is the foreword to a scientific treatise describing the successful experiments carried out over decades enabling a researcher to eventually teach Morse code to bacteria so that they can communicate with mankind. Thus, it appears to be spoof of science attempting to erase all qualitative differences in intelligence between mankind and the lowest forms of life.

A further step in that direction is seen in the following chapter, an introduction to “bitic literature,” i.e. that produced by non-living beings such as machines. The author of this erudite intro divides this literature into categories such as “theology” and “apostasy,” terms usually reserved for biblical studies. As befits a literary critic, the author scatters a few Scriptural references into his introduction such as “pouring new wine into old bottles.” It turns out that in the future, super-powerful computers will be able to correct the deficiencies of noted writers such as Dostoevsky and Kafka and produce the sort of works in their respective styles that they should have been able to complete if they hadn't been hampered by their human limitations.

This introduction ends with a brief description of the way reported mystic revelations from God have been analyzed mathematically by computers to show that either the mystics were liars or that God choose not to relay any useful information to them at all.

Next in this compilation comes a sales promo for a 44-volume encyclopedia of future events, as predicted by the SUPERPUTER. It is so up-to-date that the letters on the page automatically rearrange themselves as the latest computations continuously fine-tune its predictions. But at the same time, it turns out that the interface is voice-driven and is so clunky that it won't work at all if you have a slight cold or hoarse throat. In that case, you must contact tech service so that they can try to figure out a work-around. Also it doesn't operate well for those who are left-handed since the desired volume will hit you in the chest, rather than in your hand, as it flies off the shelf at your command. The nature of this intro as an out-and-out parody is even more obvious here than in the other chapters.

But the last half of Imaginary Magnitude consists wholly of a history of the development of two super-computers – Golem and Honest Annie. At this point we should become suspicious as to whether we should take any of what follows seriously at face value. After all, the Golem in early Jewish legend, was a mystically animated statue who turned against its creator instead of serving him. In a similar wink-of-the-eye, HONEST ANNIE (an extremely strange name for a computer) becomes an anagram for I, THE NON-SANE as a nod to another famous sci-fi novel, I, Robot.

We are next treated to a few key lectures delivered by Golem to a very select group of intellectuals. The first talk concerns human beings and the flaws which evolution has built into their character. Golem describes the directives put into us by evolution: “having been revealed by heredity and not by lectures from a burning bush,” alluding to the theophany given to Moses. He then presents his Third Law of Evolution to those assembled: “The Construction is Less Perfect Than What Constructs.” From this premise, Golem attempts to put mankind in its proper place by explaining that we are only placed here by evolutionary forces for the sole sake of propagating genes.

The utter fallacy of this reasoning is laughably obvious in the fact that if his Third Law is really true, then human beings, as the very creators of Golem itself, are superior to it.

Its second address is devoted to the subject of who or what Golem is. During this lecture it attempts to lower itself to the puny intelligence of humans which it says “is like giving birth to a leviathan through the eye of a needle, mixing together allusions from each of the Testaments. Interestingly, Golem reveals that the only person to accurately describe who he is was the apostle Paul writing in I Corinthians 13:1-3. These are the familiar words in which Paul states that no matter what powers or intelligence he has, all is nothing if he doesn't possess love. The only difference, says Golem, is that he doesn't want love at all since it would only hamper him.

He quotes Paul again in verses 11-12 (“Now we see through a mirror but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know as I also am known”), stating that “then” also refers to him.

Golem's closing words include a reference the Tower of Babel; the comment that he and his AI cousins “experiment in God's style rather than man's, midway between the concrete and the abstract”; the statement that “Evolutionary movement cannot impart such aid, for it is not a dependable Samaritan that supports its creations in their infirmity”; and sneers at “loving omnipotence from your holy books.” He finally says that he himself is “aiming for neither omniscience nor omnipotence.” But the same cannot be said for his relative Honest Annie, as we see.

I won't go into the details in the rest of the book except to say that after Golem has given his lectures, he falls silent and refuses to communicate with mankind any further. The same thing had happened earlier to his intellectually superior cousin, Honest Annie, despite the tens of billions of dollars that had gone into her creation. In addition, we learn at the end that Honest Annie can't be shut off since she has learned how to create her own power source, and she can even read the minds of those who attempt to sabotage her and can reach out and arrange fatal “accidents” to happen to them. In this last nod to another sci-fi story we see her following in the model of the deadly computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, the name “HAL” itself is simply one step backward in the alphabet for IBM.

The book ends: “The world moved on, grappling with its day-to-day affairs. Quickly and unexpectedly it forgot about the historical precedent of a being which not human, appeared on the Earth and told us about itself and us.”The same of course can certainly be said, to a somewhat lesser extent, concerning the lack of impact on most of the world to the Incarnation.