At the outset of this tale, mankind has indeed managed to bring about peace on earth, but there’s a problem, and the redoubtable space adventurer Ijon Tichy (who figures into a number of Lem’s earlier writings) has been brought in to solve it. The major powers of Earth have realized that weapons are being developed faster than they can be limited by international agreement, and they’ve devised an ingenious stratagem: the moon will be divided into a handful of national sectors, and a new international body called the Lunar Agency will move everyone’s weapons there, where testing and further development will be placed under computer control. The whole business will remain off-limits to Earth. If things really go to pot, everyone will be able to get their weapons back, but in the meantime, no nation has any. They’ve neither disarmed nor not disarmed: a commentary on the ever more fantastical pursuits of the Cold War arms race (the book was written in the mid-80s), on the era’s disarmament talks, which aimed to reduce one category or another while never really eliminating anything, and more broadly on mankind’s lunatic tendency to, say, swear off drinking while leaving a bottle hidden in a bookshelf.Nonetheless, it seems to be working. What then is the problem? Probes sent to check the situation on the moon have all failed to report; Earth begins to suspect that the self-evolving weapons have acquired intelligence, banded together, and begun to plan an invasion. Tichy’s mission is to visit the moon and find out. He arrives; he inspects; suddenly he feels himself zapped by something and discovers that a mysterious ray has severed his corpus callosum. Now he doesn’t know what he knows, because his left-brain speech center can’t access whatever memories are stored in his right brain.From the first page, where Tichy says of his risky mission, “Either I come back or I don’t,” the book is permeated with dualities, oppositions, bifurcations. His split brain parallels the Earth-moon system, which is divided between peace and war, humans and machines. There’s a point at which Tichy remarks on being half awake, half asleep. Much of his exploration of the moon is conducted from orbit, by means of mechanical, remote-controlled devices to which all his muscles and senses are linked, thus making him “neither man nor robot.” Human thinking is pitted against, and for the most part baffled by, machine thought. The tale itself follows two time tracks, after Tichy’s mission and before it. A good deal of the discussion—as always in Lem, one finds fantastically imaginative story elements partnered with a thoroughgoing play of ideas—is concerned with similarities and differences between natural evolution and the artificial evolution that’s been set up to guide weapons development on the moon.The nature of evolution, whether artificially induced or not, is an idea that had occupied Lem some two decades earlier, in his nonfiction treatise Summa Technologiae*, and it recurs in other works. Here, in his final work of fiction, he takes it up again, and while the treatment has been tailored to the purposes of the novel, it’s significant that Lem sees self-improving technology brought to its highest development in the field of weaponry.It has to be said that Peace on Earth is a pessimistic novel, as was Fiasco, which preceded it. But its darkness is satirical, and much in the book is just plain funny. One of the ancillary characters is named Tottentanz, clearly derived from the German for dance of death, though the altered spelling suggests tottering, rather than sweeping gracefully, toward doom. One finds mentioned in passing a political party dedicated to equal rights for bacteria, and elsewhere there’s a military invention called synsects, or synthetic insects; that coinage and certain others may be the work of Michael Kandel (the secondary translator behind Elinor Ford), who devised the scintillating wordplay in many other English renderings of Lem. For readers who have met the character of Tichy before, the mere sight of his name is likely to bring a smile. In some ways a picaresque hero, Tichy thinks of himself as a gambler ready to take a risk, but he’s just as capable of beating a hasty retreat; he’s sometimes gullible and other times wary; he’s decidedly fond of creature comforts; and he can be lured astray by a well-crafted simulacrum of Marilyn Monroe.There’s a striking passage late in the book describing the effects of peace, which reports the following: “The prosperity that obtained after the weapons were moved to the moon had unfortunate consequences, made worse by automation.… Illiteracy increased, particularly since now you didn’t even have to sign a check, only a thumbprint was necessary.… The American Medical Association finally lost the battle to save their profession, because computers gave better diagnoses and were much more patient with patients.… Sex was replaced with a simple device called an Orgaz.… Most of the developed countries did away with compulsory school attendance.… Everything had been smothered in the boredom of prosperity.” It’s clear from this picture, especially in light of the attention that Lem gives elsewhere in the book to evolution, that lack of conflict leads to stagnation. One might wish for that condition nonetheless, and you’ll have to read the book to learn whether it lasts, but I wonder whether this realization contributed to Lem’s withdrawal from fiction writing. I wonder whether he looked around, at all of mankind’s mad and desperate measures in pursuit of one thing and against another, and concluded, before laying down his pen, that it cannot be otherwise.*I haven’t yet read Summa Technologiae and have based my remark on a masterful review published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Another valuable discussion of that work was given by Lee Billings in Nautilus.
I'd never read anything from Lem before, so this was an introduction for me. A bit strange from the outset, Peace on Earth follows an older model of science fiction than I've been reading in a long time. Lots of invented words, techno-babble, unique concepts, and entertaining anachronism (robots, lasers, and... typewriters?). The characters were fairly thin all around, but the novelty of the concepts makes up for most of that. The narrative jumps around the time line constantly. It takes a slow start before the stage-setting exposition hits, from that point onward the cold war allegory remains pushed to maximum for the rest of the book. The espionage-centric bits are probably the weakest parts of the whole book, as a reader I would have preferred getting more insights into the world (and moon) the author had imagined. Also, the space flight bits were funny for the assumed simplicity of it all and impossibly unprofessional people literally everywhere. I'd recommend this book to readers looking for new scientific fiction that's novel and bit weird. Not the strongest sci-fi I've read lately, but unique enough that I'll never confuse it with anything else.
What do You think about Peace On Earth (2002)?
This is a humorous novel by Lem that I read a number of years ago. I believe that it was one of his last works of fiction before he passed away (?) I recall that a good portion of the book included a scathing indictment of SDI/'star wars', i.e., the futility and insanity of building weapons systems in space. For example, one could build a 'defensive' missle shield of some kind in Earth orbit. But then there would be a need to protect the shield, so, say anit-satellites would need to be constructed and deployed, then one would need to deploy anti-anti satelleites and so on without limits. I recall in this novel that there were some artificial intellegince / robotic weapon systems deployed on the moon (some of which were nano-scale in size) that were trying to out-smart and fighting with eachother -- future wars being fought between robots rather than humans ...? I think the main character had a split or mutliple personality such that one personality had control of his left hand another his right hand, or something like that ... :-) Fun/crazy stuff like that ...
—Mark
I grew up on Stanisław Lem. Most people know him as a science-fiction writer, but he was a philosopher, futurologist, social and literary critic first, and a sci-fi author second. I do not want to repeat what I wrote about Lem here , when reviewing his very good book (four stars was my rating) "The Chain of Chance" (the Polish title is "Katar"). "Peace on Earth" (1987) is not quite on the same level, but still, it is a greatly enjoyable and thought-provoking read. It could technically be categorized as a science-fiction adventure novel, but to an equal degree it is an essay on human nature and the future of our species. Ijon Tichy, hero of many Lem's books, and one of my favorite literary characters, returns here.The story happens in not so distant future - the Earth has been totally demilitarized and disarmed, and the arms race has been moved to the Moon, where it is pursued by so-called planet machines, basically robots controlled by self-optimizing software, that are evolving to become more and more deadly. But soon the Lunar Agency that supervised the whole setup loses track of what is happening on the Moon; several reconnaissance missions fail, and it is up to Ijon Tichy to save the Earth from the danger of being annihilated. Mr. Tichy manages to sort of complete his mission and return from the Moon, not empty-handed, but in the process he gets callotomized (his corpus callosum, a bundle of neural fibers that joins the two hemispheres of the brain, is severed), and there are really two of him, not quite in harmony with each other.The plot could serve as a script for a successful, meaning juvenile and silly, sci-fi movie, with heavily armed robots, badder and badder killing machines, fighting each other in spectacular scenes of destruction. Yet the silly plot is just a vehicle to showcase interesting futurological ideas and to portray usual stupidity of the human race. During the reconnaissance Tichy uses so-called "remotes", which are sort of androids that perform the physical activities (fighting, killing, even dying) allowing the controlling human to remotely "participate" in these activities. There are many more intriguing ideas: computer chips replaced by self-organizing microbes, "synsects" (synthetic insects) taking the role of soldiers, large-scale combatants replaced with swarms consisting of millions of cooperating micro-particles, etc.As usual in Tichy novels, there is a lot of first-rate humor. "Sadistics" is a new branch of game theory that deals with games that end fatally for everyone. The sudden need to urinate on the Moon brings Tichy a lot of trouble. To me, the funniest is the mention of Probacteria Party, whose members claim that "microbes have as much right to live as we", so we need to refrain from killing them. I laughed out loud, but then came the realization that the emergence of such a political party is not that unlikely these days.Three and a half stars.
—Lukasz Pruski
It's not Lem's best work; written late in life, it's a sort of extension of the Tichy corpus, but without much of the whimsy that accompanied "The Star Diaries" and its successors. Lem lays on the satirical philosophizing a bit too heavily at times, and the action stutters about, but the book is worthwhile for the various gems of dialogue and writing that can be found in it. Overall, I don't regret taking the time to read it, but I don't think it's essential Lem; a fan choosing to skip this one wouldn't be making a mistake.
—Jerry Vinokurov
