I try to read a diverse selection of science-fiction but one of the biggest holes in my reading are the works of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. He is indisputably one of the greats of the genre and Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of his Solaris is one of the greatest films of all time. I chose not to begin with that as it seems a little obvious and I have already watched two adaptations of the novel. The Invincible isn’t as well known but I have read about how it’s eerily prescient about some science-fiction tropes that would become commonplace only much later.

In a setting in which humans have mastered interstellar travel, a heavily-armed starship named the Invincible arrives on a seemingly uninhabited planet known as Regis III. Its mission is to investigate the disappearance of a sister ship of the same class some months before on this very planet. Being forewarned of danger, the crew takes extraordinary precautions: a powerful force field constantly protects the ship, every expedition out is accompanied by robots that generate force fields as well, and they are well armed and equipped with atomic blasters with scout aircraft and other types of equipment. Despite all this, they struggle to determine any source of danger or any life on the planet at all. They stumble into strange structures that they at first think are cities but are actually tangles of metallic branches. They discover the site of the first ship and find it is intact but the crew seem to have mostly killed themselves. Their first encounter with danger is when a crew member seemingly has his mind wiped, his faculties reduced to that of an infant. The eventual conclusion is that this planet is home to insect-sized robots that are stupid in small numbers but can organize themselves into gigantic swarms, the result of a different kind of evolution between different types of machines.

Today nanobot swarms and the gray goo scenario are staples of science-fiction but this novel predates all of that. These are insect-scale machines however and the novel doesn’t depict them as being able to consume raw materials to replicate at an exponential rate so they are far less nightmarish than the modern versions. Still it’s quite a feat of the imagination for Lem to come up with the idea ahead of anyone else. The novel’s primary impact lies in the sheer horror of realizing that there could even be such a phenomenon as non-biological evolution and that the simple logic of such machines could result in behavior sophisticated enough to defeat human ingenuity and the advanced technologies born of this intelligence. Given that these humans are equipped with gigantic tanks featuring impenetrable force fields, energy weapons powerful enough to turn rock into lava with seemingly inexhaustible energy reserves, and are apparently guided by programming complex enough to respond instantly to changing combat conditions, plus accompanying air support with weaker versions of the same technologies, this is a showdown of rather epic proportions.

The problem is that this isn’t a terribly interesting fight from our modern perspective. As the characters themselves in the book note, the machines could trivially destroy them all if they were just a little smarter. Their force fields only extend to the ground which means the robots need only tunnel up from underneath the ground to reach the humans. It’s also obvious that however absurdly powerful the humans’ weapons are, they are poorly adapted to an enemy type that they have never encountered before. It’s the equivalent of using cannons to kill insects. The plot gives the need to rescue imperiled crew members as the reason for the Invincible to engage the robotic swarm in direct combat and there is some drama about the human need to protect human life even when the chances of survival seem low. But I note that most of the crew members are not truly in peril as the ship can escape any time and their main interest lies in understanding the nature of the threat. The book relies heavily on the swarm being scary and unfathomable, but it’s really not by modern standards.

The early parts of the book are more interesting to me as the crew do their best to gather information about the planet. They try to understand why there is life in the oceans but none on land and try to explore the weird tangle of what amounts to a forest made out of metal. I enjoyed reading the perspectives of the different experts who are part of the crew as they speculate on the evolutionary history of life on the planet. Unfortunately I feel that their arrival at the correct conclusion of the nature of the swarm is a leap out of nowhere unwarranted by the information available to them at the time. I also found the retro-technology portrayed here off-putting after a while, such as how they powerful force fields and atomic cannons alongside weak photographic cameras and the reliance on printing out paper versions of reports. I actually enjoyed the retro-style at first but as the specifics of the technologies involved become more relevant to the plot, the lack of realism started to grate on me. I suppose that isn’t entirely fair as this was first published in 1964 and understandably represented Lem’s best guess on how future technological development would go at the time, but it is what it is.

I do note that the tone of this book feels distinctly Eastern European and completely unlike the attitudes of science-fiction stories by contemporaneous Anglo-Saxon writers. The characters have irritable and depressive personalities and don’t seem to like each other much. Right from the beginning they are annoyed at how onerous the enhanced security protocols are and the second-in-command, through whose eyes we follow much of the story, comes to increasingly resent the captain. Yet I feel that the story eventually ends up in a place that wouldn’t be too far different from that of any American story, as they still affirm the value of individual lives however reluctantly. I think I would have been more intrigued if it took the opposite approach all the way with an ending that is much darker than what appears here. In the end, I still commend Lem for being so far ahead of anyone else in imagining this scenario but I don’t see much value in this beyond the historical precedent it sets. I am confident that Solaris is much better because it is in fact much darker in tone and I think I probably should have started there all along.