Book Review: Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute

The final entry in Lem's pseudoepigraphy trilogy, One Human Minute collects the title review and two other writings relating to non-existent books together. While it's still no A Perfect Vacuum, this volume has clearer ideas and a more pleasant writing style than Imaginary Magnitude. It's hard to tell how much difference the translation makes; perhaps Catherine Leach was simply working with stronger material than Marc Heine was given for Imaginary Magnitude, while Michael Kandel somehow always gets the good Lem volumes to rework into English. At the very least, there are no drudgerous pieces like "Golem XIV", or much of Summa Technologiae, so even though these essays might seem a bit dry and could benefit from being placed in a narrative, even second-tier Lem is still good stuff.

• "One Human Minute". Imagine the Guinness Book of Records, but the "records" part is literal - the eponymous chronicle is a statistical abstract of various measures of the sum total of the human condition during a single minute of one day. Interestingly, we are not told exactly when the select minute occurred, so presumably it was a representative day in 1988, when the fictitious volume was published. From births to deaths to sexual encounters, the review explores how encountering data presented like changes the experience, as Stalin's line about how "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" is turned on its head. It's like an extended riff on that scene in the movie Amélie when she wonders how many couples in Paris are having an orgasm at that moment, and it's striking how different seeing the full measure of a single life is from seeing a lifespan's worth of minute slices from the equivalent number of different individuals.
• "The Upside-Down Revolution". In the 21st century, advances in military hardware will transform warfare yet again; stockpiles of overwhelming nuclear force have rendered the prospect of great clashes of tanks and planes and warships obsolete, and so the strategic deployment of great swarms of computerized insects, which have far more subtle effects, will be paramount, as will encouraging their evolution to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Lem is really good at working out of the complex game-theoretic logic of war strategy, and this reminded me a lot of his novel Fiasco, so much so that I wish he had turned this book review into a narrative short story. Some ideas work well on the page but don't work in movie form (the philosophical ruminations on the impossibility of truly knowing alien life in Solaris is a great example), but sometimes you see the opposite idea: instead of dryly describing the likely effects of autonomous swarms of nanobots on warfare, why not have Pirx the Pilot try to fight off an attack of one?
• "The World As Cataclysm". Lem argues with our framing of the Fermi Paradox (which he does not explicitly name) for 30 pages, insisting that our understanding of many of the variables involved is so poor that instead of trying to figure out why intelligent life did happen on Earth, it would be more edifying to figure out which disasters caused it to not happen everywhere else we see. Lem is basically arguing that we should import the distinction between risk and uncertainty from finance (the former is quantifiable whereas the latter is not) into models of the probability of intelligent life, so that we don't waste our time searching in parts of the galaxy out in the fringes or too near to the core, or elsewhere afflicted with catastrophe. Lem writes with his typical bubble-bursting remorselessness (again keeping Solaris in mind, I always get the impression that he would really hate optimistic shows like Star Trek that blithely depict humanity palling around with friendly alien life), yet I found myself wishing for the humor of Roger Lowenstein, who memorably summed up the crucial risk vs uncertainty distinction for me in When Genius Failed, his history of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management:

The problem with the math is that it adorned with certitude events that were inherently uncertain. "You take Monica Lewinsky, who walks into Clinton's office with a pizza. You have no idea where that's going to go," Conseco's Max Bublitz, who had declined to invest in Long-Term noted. "Yet if you apply math to it, you come up with a thirty-eight percent chance she's going to go down on him. It looks great, but it's all a guess".

Lem is constantly reminding the reader how much of science fiction is just a guess, and it's a valuable service.