This was my first Lem, and I picked it up "by chance" as it were, at a used book sale a few months ago. I don't usually read "speculative" fiction, but Lem is considered to be one of the genre's great masters, perhaps best known for "Solaris" which has twice been made into a film."The Chain of Chance" also riffs on the detective genre, featuring as its main character a paunchy middle-aged American former astronaut who is seeking to "solve" a series of unexplained and mysterious deaths of paunchy middle-aged men. I don't want to say more than that.The story-telling in the book is somewhat "clunky" at times - it was annoying how much of the narrative was "unloaded" all at once in a long section in the middle of the book. (Another reviewer appropriately calls it a "data dump.") That flaw notwithstanding, there's no doubt the Lem is a masterful storyteller, the plot is quite clever, and I was truly riveted by the last 25 pages. I thought that the ending was "a real corker"!But what really makes "The Chain of Chance" a notable book is Lem's persona - he is a bona fide twentieth century European intellectual, a survivor of World War II in Poland, a witness to the political, scientific and technological revolutions of modernity. The novel was originally published in 1975, and is saturated with a mid to late 20th century weariness, reminiscent of Camus or Boll, perhaps. (No coincidence that the action of the novel takes place amidst the great faded glories of Naples, Rome and Paris.) There's an atmosphere of unease, almost dread, a kind of bleak acceptance of the uncertainties of the present. There's no doubt that this is "literature," if you know what I mean. "Nonchalantly, the conversation turned to the tribulations of the world. Not nonchalantly, really, but in a mood of surrender now that Europe's eternal mission had come to an end. . . . Europe had survived, but only in an economic sense. Prosperity had been restored, but not the feeling of self-confidence. It was not the cancer patient's fear of malignancy, but the awareness that the spirit of history had moved on, and that if it ever returned it would not be here. . . . McLuhan's prophecies were coming true, but in an inverse sort of way, as prophecies have a habit of doing. His global village was already here, but split into two halves. The poorer half was suffering, while the wealthier half was importing that suffering via television and commiserating at a distance. That is couldn't go on like this was everwhere taken for granted, but it went on just the same."
Everyone's familiar with the philosophical joke that if you give enough monkeys with typewriters enough time, one of them will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare through sheer chance. But what's not discussed is the possibility that Shakespeare himself is one of those monkeys, and that the probability of some person, somewhere producing his works was just as high as it was for the monkeys. In Stanislaw Lem's The Chain of Chance, we're presented with a bipolar murder mystery. Either a dozen old men have been driven to insanity and suicide through a vast conspiracy, or they have died of completely unrelated natural causes. But the true tension arises when Lem's narrator, an eccentric ex-astronaut, finds out that those two possible causes could be one in the same. "We now live in such a dense world of random chance, in a molecular and chaotic gas whose 'improbabilities' are amazing only to the individual human atoms." "Then nothing; I died, and I didn't even find anything strange about the fact that I was conscious of dying. Later I had the sensation of swimming through black waterfalls of unknown grottoes, where the water's roar was so loud it was as if only my sense of hearing had survived."
What do You think about The Chain Of Chance (2000)?
En resumidas cuentas, una novela de desarrollo irregular. Tras un inicio in medias res bastante estimulante, ocurre un raro episodio que en realidad poco tendrá que ver con el resto de la novela, que muestra una estructura caótica y desordenada. La investigación se desmenuza por partes aunque de forma algo torpe, puesto que la técnica del "te cuento del tirón todo lo que sé" no resulta ser la mejor: habría resultado más interesante vivir el desarrollo de la investigación. Pero luego llega ese absolutamente decepcionante final para terminar de rematar una novela que, en algunos momentos, había parecido que iba a hacerte disfrutar de su lectura.
—Txe Polon
An ex-astronaut, some would say washed-up ex-astronaut, has turned detective in this novel, in which a number of men of a similar background and physique have all died in the same area. Our narrator (who I don't think is ever fully named) is involved in the investigation to try and solve the mystery.There is a sort of 'feel' to East European/Russian novels (SF or not) that I've read of this period and The Chain of Chance fits into it. The book feels very impersonal, especially in the early sections where this narrator is driving around Rome with electrodes attached to his chest, wearing a dead man's clothes, for no obvious reason. The plot is mostly infodumped on us as the narrator goes to seek the assistance of a French computer scientist in the middle of the book and we get a bit more warmth being injected into the protagonist at this point. Once I got through the infodump, I started to care a little about him and feel that his world was more than just monochrome and emotionless and I was somewhat drawn into the mystery, but even the solution to that feels very Eastern bloc (view spoiler)[with the idea that everything is chance (hide spoiler)]
—Raj
How I rated it, I did liked it. You don't know actually what will happen till the end, and then in the end, you cannot believe what just happened. Truly, I am not one fan of this kind of ends, where you leave without actually knowing a real end. I know to know the answers. (view spoiler)[ I mean, how would I leave the book world knowing that the actually solution of the entire problem of this book, is a casuality. (hide spoiler)]
—Luis Martínez
