{"id":1372,"date":"2023-06-25T08:23:12","date_gmt":"2023-06-25T14:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/?p=1372"},"modified":"2023-07-09T13:43:13","modified_gmt":"2023-07-09T19:43:13","slug":"on-stanislaw-lems-the-chain-of-chance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/25\/on-stanislaw-lems-the-chain-of-chance\/","title":{"rendered":"On Stanislaw Lem’s The Chain of Chance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chain of Chance<\/em> is, first, not a direct translation of the title. The book\u2019s Wikipedia entry<\/a>\u2014not the greatest source, I know\u2014renders it as Catarrh<\/em>, or Rhinitis<\/em>. Hay fever. Not a disease, an annoyance.<\/p>\n

1.<\/h3>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most striking about The Chain of Chance<\/em> is its structure, which is not conventional at all. (As we\u2019ll see, this book\u2019s themes are directly integrated into the structure and the prose. This is something a lot of SFF could learn from!) The first section is a rambling avalanche of frustrations, raindrops building to a storm of aggravation. The narrator, John, is driving to Rome. Severe allergies clog his sinuses. It\u2019s too hot and too humid. Traffic is heavy; the fan blows exhaust fumes in his face. It looks like rain but the storm won\u2019t break, until suddenly it\u2019s a downpour. \u201cMy stomach felt like a lump of dough, my head was on fire, and stuck to my heart was a sensor that caught on my suspenders every time I turned the wheel.\u201d<\/p>\n

John doesn\u2019t explain what he\u2019s up to. He doesn\u2019t notice he hasn\u2019t explained it. He\u2019s the guy next to you on the plane who spends the flight pouring out his least interesting troubles. We pick out the plot from sporadic details like that sensor: John is posing as a dead man named Adams, using his belongings, monitored by electrodes as he follows Adams\u2019 last journey. How Adams died is a mystery; John imitates his actions precisely, hoping for clues along the way.<\/p>\n

Before he took this job John was an astronaut. He didn\u2019t get past orbit, disqualified by allergies. Even his memories of space are annoyances: chasing down floating crumbs and dandruff with a vacuum in zero-G, readjusting to gravity when he came back down.<\/p>\n

John stops at a gas station. It\u2019s empty except for a woman who walks in and for some reason faints. What does this mean? Does it mean anything? Just because something seems anomalous, is it important?<\/p>\n

An escalator in the station starts when John comes near and stops when he leaves as though, John thinks, it\u2019s announcing the end of a scene.[1]<\/a> But there\u2019s no intent there, just a sensor. A mechanical process.<\/p>\n

2.<\/h2>\n

Stymied, John flies to Paris, where his journey started. (He still hasn\u2019t gone into details. Who was Adams? Who\u2019s interested in his death, and what\u2019s mysterious about it?) He\u2019s delayed by an airport bombing.<\/p>\n

You might assume this is a plot point. It is later, although not in the way you\u2019d expect. For now it\u2019s a thematic bomb. The Chain of Chance<\/em> was published in 1975 and in the early 1970s terrorism was on everybody\u2019s mind\u2014there was an epidemic of hijackings (over 130 between 1968 and 1972<\/a>), and Italy was deep in the Years of Lead<\/a>. In 1975 a bomb would have seemed a logical way to inconvenience the protagonist of a novel in an Italian airport.<\/p>\n

Terrorism feels uncanny. The victims are random. The perpetrators are distant, unseen; there\u2019s no direct link. The motive is impersonal\u2014somebody thinks they have to make a point (or that they have a point at all) and to make it they\u2019re going to kill\u2026 I dunno, let\u2019s see, maybe you<\/em>? We don\u2019t know who the somebody is but we know there\u2019s a somebody. When disasters happen in patterns we expect someone is causing them for a reason, an enemy we can fight. As one character observes in an entirely different context, \u201cIt\u2019s always convenient to know who\u2019s to blame for everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

3.<\/h3>\n

In the 1960s a programmer named Joseph Weizenbaum created a program called ELIZA. ELIZA was what we\u2019d call a chatbot. It could have followed any number of scripts, but Weizenbaum set it up as what\u2019s known as a Rogerian psychotherapist. (This is the ELIZA we\u2019re all familiar with today, but Weizenbaum called this script DOCTOR.) The technique involves asking open questions and reflecting the patient\u2019s answers back to them, which could be simulated simply by saying things like \u201cThat\u2019s quite interesting,\u201d and \u201cCan you elaborate on that?\u201d and occasionally regurgitating whatever the \u201cpatient\u201d just typed (\u201cYou say the owls are not what they seem?\u201d). What Rogerian psychotherapists thought of all this is not recorded.<\/p>\n

In his book Computer Power and Human Reason<\/a><\/em> Weizenbaum described what happened next.[2]<\/a> When he suggested recording conversations with ELIZA colleagues objected that this \u201camounted to spying on people\u2019s most intimate thoughts.\u201d Not that Weizenbaum was cool with spying on intimate thoughts, but it hadn\u2019t occurred to him anyone would share intimate thoughts with ELIZA. People were treating ELIZA like a real therapist<\/a>. Even Weizenbaum\u2019s secretary asked him to leave the room so she could chat privately. Three psychiatrists (including his colleague Kenneth Colby) writing in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease<\/em> saw a future where \u201cSeveral hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system.” To Weizenbaum this was weird and creepy. Any real therapeutic relationship is based on empathy. How could anyone think this half-assed algorithm was capable of empathy?<\/p>\n

Pareidolia<\/em> is the psychological quirk that makes you see unintended images\u2014often faces\u2014in random or meaningless arrangements of shapes. It\u2019s what\u2019s happening when an electrical outlet looks like a surprised little guy, or when you see a major religious figure in your English muffin. It\u2019s a form of apophenia<\/a><\/em>, the temptation to find meaning in things that aren\u2019t meaningful or even connected. Like, lefty urbanists sometimes insist cities don\u2019t plant fruit trees along the streets due to active collusion between planning departments and supermarket owners, who meet in smoky backrooms nationwide to prevent free food. Nobody thinks of the ordinary and obvious fact\u2014because it\u2019s not an interesting story\u2014that fruit leaves a goddamn mess on the sidewalk<\/em>. This story takes isolated data points\u2014ornamental trees don\u2019t have fruit, business owners don\u2019t like competition, they\u2019re often tight with local politicians\u2014and perceived a pattern that isn\u2019t there. That\u2019s a form of apophenia.<\/p>\n

Humans also tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects; some small corner in every human mind will see a stuck Roomba banging around under a couch and imagine it\u2019s frightened. Sometimes people see more humanity in objects than humans. The point of all this being that no one who has accidentally sent a text message about ducks thinks the autotext feature on their phone is smart, but put a better version of the algorithm in a different context and you\u2019ll convince a lot of people\u2014educated people, even\u2014they\u2019re talking to Deep Thought<\/a>. People like to see people and, more than anything else in the world, people want to believe in agency.<\/p>\n

4.<\/h3>\n

Stymied, John visits Dr. Barth, a computer scientist who consults with the S\u00fbret\u00e9. We\u2019re halfway through the book and up to now we\u2019ve had to piece the plot together by picking relevant details out of a torrent of grumbles, but here John finally explains what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

John\u2019s story is the best kind of telling instead of showing, not a dramatization but a report. It\u2019s a long chunk of exposition, but efficient<\/em>. The Chain of Chance<\/em> takes advantage of its status as prose and doesn\u2019t draw the explanation out with flashback scenes or extra dialogue. Lem loved crossing fiction and nonfiction; he was a master of storytelling through exposition and his novels include Borgesian volumes of reviews and introductions to nonexistent books.<\/p>\n

Adams was one of a series of men\u2014all middle-aged, all single, all balding, all with allergies\u2014who visited a spa famous for its sulfur baths. Each one subsequently developed paranoid delusions\u2014hinting they were on to some mysterious journalistic scoop, or being hounded by terrorists. (Apophenia again.) Finally each man either committed suicide or died through accidents so careless they might as well have been intentional. Adams\u2019 family noticed the similarities and hired John to make sense of this\u2014not that he\u2019s had much luck. Is it a poison? Is someone testing a chemical weapon? Why balding, allergic men, and why single\u2014is that part of the profile, or did they just not have anyone to notice their strange behavior and get help? Just because it\u2019s a point of commonality, is it important? John isn\u2019t sure what details to pick out; he\u2019s been reading the situation the same way we read the first sections of the novel.<\/p>\n

5.<\/h3>\n

Dr. Barth introduces John to a colleague, Dr. Saussure (no relation<\/a>). Dr. Saussure doesn\u2019t have a solution but he does have a hunch, expressed in metaphor: imagine a table held together with nails, the nail-heads visible on its surface. Imagine a drop of water perfectly positioned on each nail. You\u2019d conclude someone had been by with an eyedropper. But leave the table out in a rainstorm and of course<\/em> the nails will be wet, no eyedropper required: in a storm some drops will inevitably hit.<\/p>\n

Or imagine a fly landing on a firing range. To hit the fly with a single bullet would be impressive marksmanship. But what about a real fusillade, a room packed with bullets? Shoot long enough, and one\u2019s bound to hit. The dead fly would only impress you if you didn\u2019t notice the misses, if your perceptions were somehow limited to that single bullet.<\/p>\n

As an astronaut, John had a metaphorical long-distance view of humanity; he could take in the entire world at one glance. On Earth, he\u2019s one of the flies on the firing range.<\/p>\n

6.<\/h3>\n

Here John returns to his catalogue of annoyances. Chief among them is a tabloid suggesting impropriety between John and the young woman who survived the bombing with him; he\u2019s pissed off enough to get careless. In his angrily random roamings he ingests exactly the wrong combination of snacks, allergy medicine, and shampoo\u2014and now<\/em> he stumbles into the solution to the mystery, nearly adding to the list of victims in the process. The dead men weren\u2019t poisoned by people. What drove them to suicide was an unlikely chemical reaction involving sulfur, allergy medicine, hair tonic, and candied almonds (hey, everybody likes candy).<\/p>\n

Lem opens a chapter of his novel Fiasco<\/em> by insisting \u201cThat which mathematically has an extremely low probability also has this characteristic: that it may nevertheless sometimes happen.\u201d Lem keeps coming back to chance and contingency; when he published a book of literary theory he called it The Philosophy of Chance<\/a><\/em>.[3]<\/a> The Investigation<\/em> is another mystery where the villain may be an improbable natural process. His Master\u2019s Voice<\/em> offers this as one possible explanation for an apparently alien signal.<\/p>\n

Any wild improbability may be inevitable including, the last line suggests, the writing of The Chain of Chance<\/em>, a novel that looks at the twentieth century and sees more people alive than at any point in history and a world moving faster every year. This is a human rainstorm: every day enough people take enough weird and random actions to hit every spot on every table and then some.<\/p>\n

Surely such a complex repeating pattern must have been planned? But a lot of people die, and a lot of those deaths also have complex backstories, and a lot of those backstories inevitably happen more than once. It\u2019s just that no one picked those specific wet nails out of the many raindrops hitting the table, assumed they\u2019d found a pattern, and deduced intent. John\u2019s investigation is based in the same kind of apophenia the dead men experienced.<\/p>\n

Of course, there is an intent behind The Chain of Chance<\/em>: Lem\u2019s. But we aren\u2019t living in a novel. We can\u2019t read the world like a story. A lot of political discourse is real people fanfiction about the machinations of perceived enemies who are in reality confused and fumbling. Banal contingencies become plots. Anyone who is at all online has seen people confabulate elaborate stories to explain why strangers took actions that were in fact unimportant or random. Think of the people on Nextdoor who see a van driving slowly and warn that burglers are casing the neighborhood when it was just some guy looking for an address.<\/p>\n

Purpose and agency are weirdly comforting even when they seem malevolent. Things don\u2019t just happen<\/em>. Someone is running the game even if it\u2019s rigged against you. Anyone who\u2019s read a detective novel knows mysteries are caused by villains, and at the end of the story the villain will be revealed. You can do things about villains: arrest them, or fight them, or at least call them out. You can\u2019t call out a random combination of chemicals. You can broadcast warnings and pass laws and regulations; but they take a lot of work, and the work doesn\u2019t feel like a fun adventure, and anyway there\u2019s only so much you can do to protect people from their own haplessness. In that sense a villain is, oddly, less frightening. The Chain of Chance<\/em> is a detective novel where the villains are nature, chance, and apophenia. These are the enemy more often than most of us would care to admit.<\/p>\n

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  1. Which is is, but only from the reader\u2019s perspective.  ?<\/a>\n<\/li>\n
  2. I have read just excerpts of this book and would like to read the whole thing\u2026 but it\u2019s out of print, used copies are expensive, and the available ebook for some reason consists of page images cut in half and displayed sideways.  ?<\/a>\n<\/li>\n
  3. As far as I know this has never been translated into English but there\u2019s a summary at that Wikipedia page.  ?<\/a>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Chain of Chance is, first, not a direct translation of the title. The book\u2019s Wikipedia entry\u2014not the greatest source, I know\u2014renders it as Catarrh, or Rhinitis. Hay fever. Not a disease, an annoyance. 1. What\u2019s most striking about The Chain of Chance is its structure, which is not conventional at all. (As we\u2019ll see, … Continue reading On Stanislaw Lem’s The Chain of Chance<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[204,35,206],"class_list":["post-1372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-speculative-fiction","tag-mysteries","tag-science-fiction","tag-stanislaw-lem"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1377,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions\/1377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superdoomedplanet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}