BOOK REVIEW: “The Invincible” by Stanislaw Lem (1964, English Translation 1973)

What we’ve got here is your basic “Mysterious Planet” kind of storyline, a basic puzzle-box mystery where weird shenanigans are going on, and we’re given specifically odd facts with which to figure out exactly what’s what. It’s a popular Science Fiction Mystery format, which dates from the Victorian Proto-SF “Mysterious Island” novels which date from even earlier fictional travelogues, which themselves no doubt descended from the whole gaggle of “Crazy lands across the western ocean” stories that have been replete in literature since time immemorial. And since Space SF is all-to-often simply tales of naval adventure writ large, it’s altogether fitting that this basic format should get re-used so often, even if it is a bit long in the tooth.

That said, it’s not the tool or format, it’s the writer who uses it. A great writer can tell the same exact story a thousand times over, and make it exciting and new every time. A lame writer can tell a completely different story twice, and yet it still sounds the same as his *other* story. Lem, a Polish writer who died last year after a long and brilliant career, is a pretty great writer on occasion, and he does a very fine job here.

The Starship Invincible arrives in the constellation Lyre to find out what happened to a sister ship, the Condor, which disappeared without a trace a year earlier, shortly after landing on the planet “Regis III.” Upon landing, the new ship discovers the planet seems to be unremarkable enough: Basically it’s Mars with oceans and a denser, nearly-breathable atmosphere. Things quickly turn odd, however:

1) There’s no plant or animal life on the surface, nor in the shallows, but there *is* plant and animal life in the depths, thereby violating all precepts of evolution (Life originates in the littoral zone of the oceans, and spreads out from there.) Furthermore, the fish they’ve studied all have an organ that detects electrical currents, so they can avoid ‘em.
2) Occasionally, small gravely bits of metal rain from the sky
3) There’s alien ruins here and there on the planet. Initially, this is thought to be the ruins of a city, and comes across as looking like a cross between Frank Gehry’s LA Disney Concert Hall and a whole bunch of towers of melting cheese. Eventually, however, they conclude that it’s an inscrutable alien whoosewhatsis of unknown purpose and provenance.
4) When they find the Condor, the ship has been vandalized, and the crew is dead, but otherwise it’s unharmed.
5) Crewmen start turning up with their complete lifetimes worth of memories completely wiped, putting them in a semi-permanent tabula rasa state.
6) Massive, massive storms come up out of nowhere, boasting enough electrical discharge to destroy a city.
7) It’s known that several million years ago there was a sentient species at Zeta Lyre, 16 years away from Regis III, and legend says that some of them were able to escape the nova that destroyed their homeworld…

And so it goes. It’s a fun little mystery that starts off at a slow boil, and gradually picks up speed, with the characters learning new information as we do. Finally, about halfway through the book all this hits a crescendo, and one of the characters ventures a theory which ties all the facts together, and is pretty