Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THAT ARROGANCE is an attractive proposition. It breeds easily in an institution that professes to take The Long View of human affairs, to see The Big Picture it is the heady sense of self-importance that dawns when you realize you are looking way beyond the trivialities of daily life. It lets you forget a part of your humanity--the troublesome part, the conscience--because you are so busy studying economic models and abstract political theories. It patterns itself after the detached arrogance of the scholar, who must look beyond people to ideas, because people are only transients, while ideas...
...altogether a different thing to condone it. It is wrong to believe that Derek Bok is evil, but it is just as wrong to believe that he is not responsible, for his actions. Bureaucrats, administrators and scholars may spend their lives pretending that they are not human, that their august positions relieve them of the need to subscribe to common human virtues--but in 30 years, when they will have grown old and face the awful burden of their mortality, they will probably think differently...
...story can have the crushing gravity of a collapsing star. His sentences are frequently dense with logic and his points aphoristic: "The progress of human knowledge was a gradual renunciation of the simplicity of the world." Lem's own worlds are complex, twittering word machines ingeniously wired to philosophy, probability theory, cybernetics and literary conventions, which he parodies brilliantly. Unlike most science-fiction writers, he animates his creatures with lively explanations, as in the Cartesian send-up from The Cyberiad: "Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water...
...world from scratch, dreaming into being a manservant named Snibbins and a three-legged female companion called Wendy Mae. The course of true creation never runs smoothly. "Thus the logically perfect hero," writes Lem, "outlines a plan that later will destroy and mock him-can it be, as the human world has done to its Creator...
...then the entire Universe that surrounds us is already artificial. " With such delightful leaps of the imagination, Lem outdistances nearly all of the most popular star trekkers. He is the Borges of scientific culture, whose "mortal engines" promise that mystery will not end with the last flesh-and-blood human. Reading A Perfect Vacuum, one can easily imagine banks of Lemian cybernoids arguing whether man exists and how many science-fiction writers could fit on the head of a microchip. - R.Z. Sheppard