Representations of Borges’ Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story ‘The Library of Babel’ has provided a rich source of imaginative speculation for architects, artists, authors, critics, librarians, mathematicians, metaphysicists, physicists, philosophers, and of course readers (among others). In providing hints as to the dimensions and layout of his Library, an indefinite and perhaps infinite series of hexagonal galleries, connecting passages and stairways, Borges invited – and often collaborated with – attempts to depict it.

The story first appeared in the 1941 collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) and again in 1944’s Ficciones, where it was revised for a 1956 edition. The first English-language publications arrived in 1962, by Anthony Kerrigan for a translation of Ficciones, while James E. Irby contributed to a new collection, Labyrinths, which only appeared in English and remains an enduring anthology – a 2007 edition was introduced by William Gibson. 

The next translator of the story into English was Norman Thomas di Giovanni (in partnership with Borges), whose version was superseded by that of Andrew Hurley, commissioned to replace di Giovanni’s work by the Borges estate for presumed copyright – and specifically royalty-related – reasons. Each translator wrestles with conveying precise meaning in a text positing the existence of every possible permutation of language – and the meaninglessness of such a repository.

Antonio Toca Fernández & Alex Warren

 
Enrique Browne, Cristina Grau, Antonio Toca Fernández and Alex Warren all address the architectural questions raised by Borges’ text – itself revised in 1956 to rectify certain anomalies in the structure. They and others have all sought to create a blueprint which would satisfy the descriptions of identical hexagonal galleries of bookshelves, narrow passageways, spiral staircases and ventilation shafts, traversed by the nearly-blind narrator. Grau, author of Borges y la arquitectura (1989), wrote extensively about Borges and also met him; she is especially concerned with his use of labyrinths, among which she places the Library. Browne relates her study of the story’s origins:

In an interesting essay, Cristina Grau indicates that the story’s source of inspiration is found in Pascal’s book Penseés (Thoughts), which Borges had in his home. “Thought” no. 72 says, “The universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere; there is no circumference.” Borges transfers that concept to the library, indicating that it is “a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.”

Above: Borges with Cristina Grau

Below: Thomas Basbøll (top) & Rice+Lipka

A series of architectural renderings were made by Rice+Lipka Architects as part of a series on ‘Fairy Tale architecture’ curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and architect Andrew Bernheimer. In considering how the library structure might be built, they concluded that it is “at once completely ordinary and impossible.”

Digital and mathematical models have been the focus of Thomas Basbøll, William Goldbloom Bloch, Jean-François Rauzier and Jamie Zawinski’s approach to the Library, with an emphasis on geometry and repetition – exploring the ‘beehive’ pattern implied in the text. In the case of mathematics professor Bloch’s investigation, this has taken the form of a full-length study, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel (2008).

Above: Bloch book cover
Below: Jean-François Rauzier (top) & Jamie Zawinski

Fine artists and illustrators have also attempted to portray the Library, notably Pierre Clayette, Érik Desmazières (collected in a 1997 series of prints), Zdravko Dučmelić and Paul Rumsey – who credits the story alongside Elias Canetti’s novel Auto da Fé (1935) as “inspirations for my Library-head drawings.” Dučmelić, an expatriate Croatian artist living in Argentina, was a friend and collaborator with Borges.

Many of these depictions, straying from the literal descriptions in the text but attempting to convey its atmosphere, show the influence of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. His series of ‘Prisons of the Imagination’ in their vast scale, vaulted halls and elaborate stairways pre-figure the Library – echoed by the author’s admiration for the artist. Cristina Grau identified a Piranesi print on Borges’ living-room wall when visiting the author. While Borges stated, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”, the dystopian aspect of Babel is hard to ignore. The suggestion of imprisonment within a vast structure implied in the story is often interpreted with reference to Piranesi’s Prisons. Like the Biblical source it draws on, man’s enterprise is seen to be futile, ambitious plans of a universal language thwarted.

Above: Pierre Clayette & Érik Desmazières
Below: Zdravko Dučmelić & Paul Rumsey

 

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

The story draws on Borges’ personal history and specifically his lifelong relationship with libraries, which began in the family home. He later remarked,

If I were asked to name the chief event in my Iife, I should say my father’s library. In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library. I can still picture it. It was in a room of its own, with glass-fronted shelves, and must have contained several thousand volumes.

Only on his father’s death in 1938 was Borges compelled to find a job, as an assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library, Buenos Aires, where his duties were to classify and catalogue the library’s holdings. Though his sight was already failing, he was able to complete these tasks in a morning – having been warned not to work too quickly – after which he retreated to the basement to write in the afternoons, where many of his famous short stories were first sketched out. Borges described these nine years at the library as ones of “solid unhappiness”. In 1955, by then nearly blind, Borges was appointed Director of Argentina’s National Library (on Calle Mexico, Buenos Aires), a position he held until retiring in 1973. Books and libraries were arguably the dominant, recurrent themes in his work, as in his life.

Olaf Bisschoff & Polina Isurin

Numerous artists have continued to furnish 21st Century representations of Borges’ creation. Artist and illustrator Andrew DeGraff includes the Library in his book Plotted: A Literary Atlas, in which he maps its structure and dimensions. An accompanying essay by Daniel Harmon, ‘Infinite Intelligence’, notes that, “It all sounds so straightforward, but complexity and paradox are infused throughout.” That so many artists continue to find the Library a source of fascination is testimony to the enduring appeal and enigma of Borges. One of them, Polina Isurin, commented of her work The Library of Memories that, while inspired by the story,

Rather than conceiving the universe as a library of books, this painting views the library as a location housing memories, both identifiable and non. Where we enter and what we select is up to the viewer to decide.

Nina Abadeh & James Koehnline

Evoking the imagery of the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel, the narrative draws on an earlier essay, ‘The Total Library’ (1939) where Borges speculates on a Hellish “vast, contradictory Library”. The essay, in raising the same questions as the later story, itself references a short story by Kurd Lasswitz, ‘The Universal Library’ (1901) in which the protagonist, Professor Wallhausen, declares “all possible literature must be printable in finite number of volumes.” The same story anticipates the impossibility of sifting “truth from nonsense” in a “library for which there is no room in the universe.”

‘The Library of Babel’ blends these sources with the myriad references of Borges’ vast reading. The result is a characteristically complex multi-layered web in which Borges the author, ‘Borges’ the character, the unreliable narrator and intertextual references blend fiction and non-fictional texts and characters – creating the maze or labyrinth so often explored in his work, here expressed as the ‘infinite’ Library (“which some call the Universe”).

The concept is echoed in Borges’ later (1975) story, ‘The Book of Sand’, in which the myopic narrator is sold an ‘infinite’ volume by a stranger, and so called “‘because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end’”. Finding it “monstrous... a nightmarish object, an obscene thing”, the narrator eventually disposes of the book by hiding it among the shelves of the Argentine National Library on Calle Mexico – where he (and Borges) worked before retirement.

Andrew DeGraff

In addition to a VR / Metaverse iteration of the Library, Derek Philip Au has experimented with AI software (DALL-E) to produce a set of sophisticated visions of Borges's creation. I was also sufficiently curious and motivated to experiment with AI imagery myself, with the following crude results from my attempts. However, the text content of this blog post is entirely human-generated and humbly submitted to the library catalogue.

Jonathan Basile draws together Borges scholarship in a multitude of disciplines, and in addition to his detailed study Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality (2018) has created an online, searchable Library of Babel. His exhaustive Borgesian investigations are a major influence and inspiration for this post.

I discovered many of the images reproduced here in a post on twitter / X by Federico Italiano, which gave a focus to my initial ideas.


List of Works:

Jorge Luis Borges, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths; Sur, 1941)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New Directions, 1962)
Antonio Toca Fernández, from ‘La Biblioteca de Babel: Una modesta propuesta’ (2009)
Alex Warren, from ‘Library of Babel Pin Up’ (posted at https://alexwarrenarchitecture3.blogspot.com, 16 February 2011)
Cristina Grau with Jorge Luis Borges
Thomas Basbøll, from ‘The Floor Plan of Babel’ (posted at https://pangrammaticon.blogspot.com, 9 May 2007)
Rice+Lipka Architects, The Universe (2013) from Kate and Andrew Bernheimer, ‘Fairy Tale Architecture: The Library of Babel,’ Places Journal, December 2013
William Goldbloom Bloch, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Jean-François Rauzier, Bibliothèque Babel (c-type print, 2013)
Jamie Zawinski, from ‘The Library of Babel’ (posted at https://www.jwz.org/blog, 14 October 2016)
Pierre Clayette, lllustration from ‘The Library of Babel’ (no date)
Erik Desmazières, The Library of Babel (1997) & in book form (Godine, 2000)
Zdravko Dučmelić, La biblioteca de Babel (oil on canvas, 1984)
Paul Rumsey, Library Head (charcoal on paper, 1998)
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Gothic Arch (etching, 1761) from Carceri d'invenzione / Prisons of the Imagination
Andrew DeGraff, from Plotted: A Literary Atlas with Daniel Harmon (Pulp, 2015)
Kurd Lasswitz, ‘Die Universalbibliothek’ (‘The Universal Library’, 1901)
Nima Abadeh, The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges (illustration, 2017)
James Koehnline, Logosphere IV (mixed media, 2008, the words are from “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges)
Olaf Bisschoff, The Library of Babel (Jorge Luis Borges, 1941) (oil and canvas, on board, 2023)
Polina Isurin, The Library of Memories (oil on canvas, 2015)
Derek Philip Au, from ‘DALL-E 2 & 3 Library of Babel’ (posted at
https://www.derekau.net/this-vessel-does-not-exist/, 16 July 2022)
Jonathan Basile, Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality (2018)

J.G. Ballard, Pop Art and the New Wave in Science Fiction

Although J.G. Ballard is not always associated with science fiction, he started his career writing short stories for the science fiction magazines Science Fantasy and New Worlds. He later remarked that it was only through these short stories that he discovered what sort of writer he wanted to be. 

Shortly after the publication of his first story in 1956, Ballard visited an exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery that left a lasting impression on him. Now recognised as a key moment in the emergence of Pop Art, ‘This is Tomorrow’ featured works produced by the Independent Group, which included the artists Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Lawrence Alloway, Nigel Henderson and Alison and Peter Smithson.  The artists formed groups, each producing an installation that represented their vision of the future. The Smithson-Henderson-Paolozzi partnership used found objects to depict the remnants of civilization after a nuclear disaster, while Richard Hamilton’s collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, presented a world entirely constructed from popular advertising. Ballard was particularly inspired by these pieces, and the way they interpreted the modern cultural landscape. 

The exhibition reinforced his belief that artists were ahead of writers in acknowledging the significance of the media and accelerated developments in technology. Ballard explored similar themes in his own writing, which he explained as a desire to decode the myths of everyday experience. This experience was intimately bound up with a fascination for material culture, an aspect of Pop Art that Ballard admired. He observed that ‘Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future’. 

Because they shared many interests and influences, Ballard and Paolozzi later became collaborators and friends. The art and literature journal Ambit, edited by Martin Bax, was a testing ground for their experimental ideas. Paolozzi’s imagery appeared in Ballard’s notorious fake advertising campaign and his use of assemblage and collage techniques was mirrored by Ballard in the form of short stories such as ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, which would later appear in the novel The Atrocity Exhibition. 

April 1966 ed. of New Worlds

1990 ed. of The Atrocity Exhibitio. 

Perhaps because of these influences, in the 1960s Ballard was linked to the ‘New Wave’ avant-garde science fiction movement. Taking its name from the New Wave in French cinema, the movement’s writers were distinguished by their preoccupation with popular culture, often experimenting with unconventional literary styles. However, because he was very much immersed in the culture he was writing about, Ballard was generally dismissive of attempts to locate his work within a particular literary tradition, at the risk of neglecting its populist origins. 

Ballard was never a conventional science fiction writer. In many ways he saw himself as an observer of the present day, finding more inspiration in contemporary society than in the dream of a distant future. Stating his influences as the surrealists, advertising, the mass media and developments in science and technology, Ballard pushed the boundaries of science fiction with his concept of ‘inner space’. Unlike the intergalactic fantasies of outer space, Ballard described inner space as ‘the internal landscape of tomorrow that is a transmuted image of the past’, a form of speculative fiction that reflected the obsessions and imagined landscapes of his characters.

This post adapts text from the booklet Visions of the Future: The Art of Science Fiction by Paul Whittle and Liz Stainforth.

William Gibson in the 1990s: Virtual Realities

William Gibson established himself as one of the foremost contemporary SF writers with 1984’s Neuromancer. The first instalment of the ‘Sprawl’ trilogy was followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Set in a futuristic dystopia where all-powerful multinational corporations have largely replaced national governments, Gibson’s characters survive as ‘outsiders’ within the lawless post-industrial cities of the Sprawl. His aesthetic is an updated noir “combination of lowlife and high tech”. Together with the short stories collected in Burning Chrome (1986), Neuromancer and its successors were the precursor of the short-lived cyberpunk movement. Most significantly, Gibson’s 1980s works serve as an early exploration of the scope of the Internet as global information source, and the potential for autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In the following decade, the ‘Bridge’ trilogy began with Virtual Light (1993) in a near-future federated Northern and Southern California, c. 2005. Moving primarily between Los Angeles, a reconstructed San Francisco and Tokyo, the subsequent Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) continue Gibson’s investigations of cyber- and pop-culture. The interwoven themes are today mainstream preoccupations: meditations on the development of AI, the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace, the data-flows and ‘nodal points’ of information on the Web, digital identity, the fusion of big tech, celebrity, consumerism and mass media. The societal impact of new technologies and virtual realities reverberates throughout the Bridge trilogy, as the new phenomenon of the Internet reached a wider public.

The eponymous ‘idoru’ or idol, Rei Toei, is a computer-generated holographic, whose marriage to a rock star is at the heart of the second novel. Discussing the body as personality construct, author Dani Cavallaro attributes the creation of the idoru to a branch of nanotechnology which renders “the very distinction between the animate and the inanimate somewhat obsolete”. While a post-human construction, Rei Toei “carries traces of personal history”, presumably programmed. Colin Laney, the character who sifts the Internet to identify the significant ‘nodal points’ of incipient change, is described as “an intuitive fisher of patterns of information” – a gift he owes to the ingestion of experimental drugs as an orphaned child. The interaction of the real and the virtual is arguably the defining strand of science fiction tradition that Gibson explores as distinctively as Philip K. Dick before him.

All Tomorrow's Parties brings many of the earlier threads and characters together – Laney is now resident in a cardboard box in a Tokyo subway station, permanently plugged into the Web – and returns the series back to the Bridge. The trilogy’s emblematic setting of the Golden Gate Bridge, now a semi-autonomous zone or outsider community, serves as a counterpoint to the corporate world and provides a (temporary) refuge beyond the reach of an all-pervasive digital surveillance network. The arrival of the Lucky Dragon convenience store franchise signifies not only commodification of the Bridge – now a tourist attraction – but a disruption of its independent status. The Bridge’s virtual analogue is the Walled City (based on the physical location in Kowloon, Hak Nam or the City of Darkness, which was fully demolished in 1994), a self-regulated space within the web’s data-flows created by disaffected programmers and hackers. This attempt to “create a private realm for themselves where they would enjoy complete autonomy” has evolved outside the control of the multi-nationals; the ‘ownership’ of the Internet is a recurring concern of Gibson’s.

1995 saw the cinematic release of Johnny Mnemonic, an adaptation of his 1981 short story. Starring Keanu Reeves as the title character, a data courier who transports information stored in his head, Gibson was involved in the production but was dissatisfied with the final version – reflected in its mixed reviews. He complained of changes made late in post-production which “destroys the integrity” of the movie, together with the replacement of the original score. Many of the sets dated rapidly, and the film as a whole failed to capture the distinctive vision found in his fiction.

Gibson also contributed to the decade’s hugely successful sci-fi TV series, The X-Files, which was largely filmed in his adopted hometown of Vancouver. He collaborated with friend and fellow author Tom Maddox on the script for ‘Kill Switch’, broadcast in 1998 during the show’s fifth season. Many of the themes familiar from Gibson’s fiction are condensed into the episode, combining a rogue autonomous AI with virtual reality scenes – and still categorised as ‘cyberpunk’. Gibson confessed that his daughter (then 15) had introduced him to the series, and she also insisted they be present for the episode’s filming. Also in 1998, Gibson wrote an introduction to The Art of the X-Files, cementing his affinity with the show, which he described as “a disturbing and viscerally satisfying expression of where we've come from, where we are today, and all those places we simultaneously yearn and dread to go.” He again collaborated with Maddox on a second episode, ‘First Person Shooter’, which aired in February 2000 and explored a deadly presence in a role-playing VR game. 

After the impact of the Sprawl trilogy, Gibson was in demand during the 1990s as a cultural commentator and observer of technological developments. In his interviews and non-fiction, he cast a critical eye over emerging trends from an addiction to eBay to the evolution of the World Wide Web, speculating on where the changes might lead society. Famously, in ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’ (an article which now has its own Wikipedia page), his record of a visit to Singapore for Wired magazine, he found disturbing signs of totalitarianism beneath the prosperous, sterile façade of the city-state. The publication was promptly banned there, adding weight to his argument. Gibson also continued to insert musical references into his work, including Nick Cave, Steely Dan and the Velvet Underground in the Bridge trilogy, whilst being cited as an influence by Billy Idol, Sonic Youth and U2 among others.

 

He described the significance of the Internet in a 1994 interview:

“The advent, evolution and growth of the Internet is, I think, one of the most fascinating and unprecedented human achievements of the century. I sometimes suspect that we’re seeing something in the Internet as significant as the birth of cities. It’s something that profound and with that sort of infinite possibilities. It’s really something new, it’s a new kind of civilization.”

Gibson discussed the potential consequences of the Internet in myriad interviews, even as its scope expanded over the course of the decade, anticipating that it would become “completely ubiquitous”. While he believed that “we’ll see some amazing social changes” as it evolves, he recognised within AI and the virtual worlds, “something almost pathological growing out of this technology.” Such observations translate seamlessly to his fiction, and while the narrative viewpoint is generally detached, fears that technological developments may not be entirely beneficial are articulated throughout the Bridge trilogy.

bridge_trilogy_image by_dahliainosensu

Within its physical and virtual worlds, Gibson’s cast of disenfranchised and rootless characters seek a place in an increasingly de-humanised and polarised society. Counter-cultural remnants carve out a fragile existence in the shadow of omnipresent techno-corporations – what one of the protagonists hopes to document as “interstitial communities”. These urban ‘interzones’, spaces for the marginalised or “places built in the gaps” are found recurrently in Gibson’s work. The settings of Tokyo’s cardboard-box cities and the amorphous jumble of the Golden Gate Bridge are a reflection of the author’s belief “that there are viable degrees of freedom inherent if not realised in interstitial areas.”

Characterised elsewhere as a continuation of the “combination of high-tech gadgets, low-tech environments” found in the Sprawl novels, Gibson himself has described the Bridge trilogy as being “my take on the 1990s,” in a decade where technology was shaping an uncertain future. Recalling waiting for “the Soviet Union to collapse” before completing Virtual Light, in a 1993 interview he acknowledged the setting as “just ‘now’ with the volume cranked up.”

All Tomorrow's Parties in particular introduces the concept of 3D printing (later developed in 2014’s The Peripheral), while nanotechnology permeates the trilogy as a whole, in the reconstructed buildings of San Francisco and Tokyo. As a contemporary SF theme, both 3D printing and nanotechnology are even more exhaustively explored in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995), his follow-up to the influential Snow Crash. Also notable for its depiction of the ‘neo-Victorians’ which anticipates the Steampunk aesthetic, Stephenson’s novel depicts a future where the Matter Compiler (a more advanced 3D printer) is commonplace and nanotechnology ubiquitous – inside bodies, interactive books and the physical environment the characters inhabit. Gibson has acknowledged in Stephenson’s fiction “a natural overlap” with his own. The work of both authors in the 1990s is a guide to the digital landscape which was to come, as much a warning as a celebration of the potential for technology to re-shape the world.

On Decybernation

The suggestively titled ‘On Decybernation’ is the name of a report written by the British management cybernetician Stafford Beer, as part of Project Cybersyn (1971-1973). This has been the subject of previous posts on the blog. Cybersyn was one of Beer’s biggest claims to fame, a cybernetic initiative to manage the national economy of Chile. The aim was to build and implement a system to boost economic production, while also maximising self-regulation at the level of factories and workers. The history of Cybersyn is extensively chronicled in Eden Medina’s book Cybernetic Revolutionaries. The Decybernation report has never been published, so I went with a colleague to view it in the Stafford Beer archive (at Liverpool John Moores University) last April. 

The report was written in April 1973 at a key turning point in the project (the Chilean President Salvador Allende would be overthrown by a military coup the following September). The report details Beer’s frustration that the technology his team had developed was not being used as he’d originally envisaged. Beer believed in the power of cybernetics to change the organisation of government but, perhaps unsurprisingly, others were more interested in how the technical components of Cybersyn could be used to support existing structures. 

‘On Decybernation’ muses on the relative successes and failures of Cybersyn, highlighting the need to understand the project as an instrument of revolution; beyond changing systems of economic production, Beer outlines his ambition for Cybersyn to change the very organisation of society, beginning with government institutions. Without this level of change, he concludes, ‘we do not get a new system of government, but an old system of government with some new tools’. 

I thought it might be interesting to reproduce a few passages from the report here, for those interested in Beer’s cybernetic theory of government: 

If we want a new system of government, we have to change the organization of the established order. All my proposals as to how this should be done have been discarded as ‘politically unrealistic’. Maybe they were. In that case it was for others of our group to make alternative proposals. For without any practical proposals for changing organization in the established order, we cannot have a new system of government.

[…] 

If what we wanted to do was to meet the objectives listed for Project Cyberstride and Project Cybersyn, then we have succeeded. Those were technical objectives, and meeting them may count as success to some people. 

If what we wanted to do was to display the technical achievement in management action, then we may yet succeed. This is the technocratic objective, and meeting it may count as success to some people. 

If we wanted to ‘help the people’, this was a social objective, and the outcome is ambiguous. For if the invention is dismantled, and the tools used are the tools we made, they could become instruments of oppression. This would count as failure. 

If we wanted a new system of government, then it seems that we are not going to get it, This too must count as failure. 

Any one person who has worked on this team may have a complex motivation, in which the technical, technocratic, social and political objectives are mixed in unique proportions and constitute his own ‘objective functional’. 

This would explain the confusion, and the disagreement about success. 

While, at first look Cybersyn reads as a classic science fictional case of techno-utopianism, Beer’s perspective shows a genuine belief in the project as an instrument of social change and dismay to see that potential going to waste. The fascinating reference to ‘decybernation’ encapsulates this sense of a critical threat to the dream of cybernetic revolution he saw in Cybersyn and its socio-technical possibilities.

The Story of Stalker

The 1972 novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-2012), is described by Ursula Le Guin as “a ‘first contact’ story with a difference.” The alien ‘visitors’ have been and gone, apparently indifferent to Earth and its inhabitants, leaving behind in the Visitation Zones a range of objects which remain completely mysterious to Man. Some are deadly, others highly useful and technologically valuable (such as ‘eternal batteries’) – but their operating principles are totally impenetrable to science, despite institutes dedicated to their study. Le Guin makes the comparison with Solaris, “in which the human characters are defeated, humbled by their failure to comprehend alien messages or artefacts.”

The plot focuses on one of the six Zones – the location is never specified but resembles North America – and the characters who operate in the scientific institute and black market which have grown up around it. Among the troubling phenomena in the wake of the visit are mutated children, reanimated corpses returning to their former homes and catastrophes which follow emigrants from the Zones. The unpredictable hazards within the Zone itself defy the laws of physics; there have been attempts to seal and guard it, but the value of the mysterious artefacts within attracts intruders, or ‘stalkers’. They risk their lives amid the dangers of ‘burning fluff’, ‘mosquito mange’ and ‘witches’ jelly’ to return and sell their bounty. Red Schuhart is one such stalker, and the main protagonist of the novel, last seen in search of the ‘Golden Ball’ which reputedly has the power to grant wishes.

Arkady Strugatsky was a translator and editor, Boris an astro-physicist and computer mathematician. The brothers began writing together in the late 1950s and were the most popular science fiction authors in the USSR but, as Yvonne Howell relates, this did not stop them falling into “a precarious position as writers neither wholly approved of, nor yet officially black-listed.” Boris Strugatsky later charted the tortuous publishing history of Roadside Picnic, which had originally been written in 1971. After appearing in the journal Avrora in 1972, it took eight years to navigate the labyrinth of Soviet-era literary bureaucracy and the eventual book publication was heavily censored. He gives one instance of an 18-page document submitted by the ‘language editors’ – a list of removals and substitutions, covering such categories as ‘Comments Concerning the Immoral Behaviour of the Heroes’, and ‘Comments About Vulgarisms and Slang Expressions’.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

On its English translation in 1977, the novel found admirers including Le Guin abroad. In the Soviet Union, the director Andrei Tarkovsky had been so impressed with the story in its journal form that he almost immediately decided to embark on a film version, his second foray into science fiction after Solaris. The term ‘stalker’ was previously unknown in the Russian language – the brothers borrowed it from Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co and Tarkovsky adopted it for his title. By 1975, he had agreed to work with the Strugatsky brothers on the script, and shooting began in 1977; after initial filming in Tajikistan was interrupted by an earthquake, moved to locations around Tallinn, Estonia.

Arkady Strugatsky recalled the tortuous process of scriptwriting for the film – frustration at the frequent changes demanded and last-minute re-writes. Besides the liberties Tarkovsky was taking with the plot, the script was often discarded completely in favour of improvisation on the set. While the brothers were nominally the scriptwriters, the director was seemingly keen “to move away from the original science fiction concepts and premises of the original story”. A baffled Arkady was advised by Tarkovsky that “Stalker must be quite different… I don’t want that bandit of yours in the screenplay.” Eventually they were compelled to write a completely new script, now ‘a fable’, which continued to be adapted, on the set and in post-production. Like Lem before them with Solaris, the Strugatskys more or less disowned the film, claiming the final script was essentially Tarkovsky’s.

There were further hazards awaiting the film, beyond the usual wrangles with the authorities – after several months, it became apparent that the film stock was defective and useless. Tarkovsky somehow managed to get permission (and money) to re-shoot from scratch and it progressed to a general release in May 1979 without significant cuts. In their study The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Johnson and Petrie record however that: “Official disapproval was exhibited in the almost complete absence of reviews in major Moscow newspapers and journalists.” Most of the minimal publicity was negative, the director “accused of wasting public funds for films he made ‘for himself and his friends’.” A prize-winner when screened at Cannes in 1980, Stalker was well received in the West with a steadily growing cult reputation. It was the final film that Tarkovsky made in the Soviet Union; he spent the final years of his life in Europe.

The filmed version retains the basic outline of Roadside Picnic – the Zone with its altered laws of physics and incomprehensible dangers (such as ‘the meatgrinder’) – and the concept of stalkers. As he had indicated to the Strugatskys, Tarkovsky made significant changes to the characters, namely Red, who is replaced by the eponymous Stalker as the guide to the Zone. The opening scenes show the Stalker, his daughter evidently altered in some way (as is Red’s daughter Monkey in the book), and begged by his wife not to return to the Zone, emerging into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Rather than a hard-bitten mercenary prone to violence, compelled to return by financial necessity, his is a more philosophical quest as, avoiding military patrols, he leads his companions into the Zone. This pair, known only as Professor and Writer, have even more obscure motives for entering the Zone, with their goal the enigmatic Room at its heart (an analogue of the ‘Golden Ball’).

By the time Tarkovsky died in Paris on 29 December, 1986, Stalker had taken on darker significance with the Chernobyl disaster of April that year, and the resulting fall-out Zone around the plant. The overgrown wasteland and bleak industrial ruins of the film’s Zone have been seen to anticipate the Soviet tragedy. This theme is made explicit in the video game franchise S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (beginning with Shadow of Chernobyl), as mercenaries brave the irradiated landscape in search of its treasures. Many of the novel’s hazards and artefacts, discarded in the film, are revived in the game – ‘burning fluff’, ‘mosquito mange’, ‘black sprays’ and ‘full empties’. Johnson & Petrie note that: “Among Russian film buffs, Stalker has become a kind of cult figure and film, foreshadowing Chernobyl and the ecological, social and moral collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Among the film’s Estonian locations were two abandoned hydroelectric power stations; downstream along the Jägala River from a chemical plant. Stalker’s sound designer, Vladimir Sharun, recalls it pouring out “poisonous liquids… white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison.” Sharun attributes the death of Tarkovsky, his wife Larissa, actors Nikolai Grinko, Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn and others involved in the production to this sinister setting.

Map of Stalker's locations

Stalker inspired Geoff Dyer’s meditation, Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, a detailed examination of the film. Dyer is among the critics to see echoes of the Soviet Gulags in Tarkovsky’s work, finding it “haunted by memories of the camps,” in the vocabulary of the Zone and the Stalker’s shaved head. James Norton’s article ‘Stalking the Stalker’ reaches a similar conclusion, that the Zone “was also the term by which the Gulag was known, as the Russian audience would have recognised.”

The Strugatsky brothers continued to influence Soviet science fiction, with other popular film adaptations of their work including Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, and Hard to be a God. The director Konstantin Lopuchansky was an assistant to Tarkovsky on Stalker, and the influence of film and director can be seen in the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Letters from a Dead Man (1986) and Visitor to a Museum (1989). Lopuchansky returned to the dystopian sci-fi theme in 2006 with The Ugly Swans, also based on a novel by the Strugatskys. The Ugly Swans revisits many aspects of Roadside Picnic in its setting of a quarantined zone, mutated children, and allusions to the aftermath of alien visitation.

Arturo Aldunate Phillips

Aldunate Phillips (left) with Norbert Wiener

In November 2020, I wrote a post about a project I’d been involved in, to translate Juana y la cibernética (1963), a short story by the Chilean SF writer Elena Aldunate, with my colleague Ana Baeza Ruiz. The publication, a Spanish-English bilingual edition of the story, had an online launch at the Desperate Literature bookshop in Madrid. During the event, Ana and I reflected on the translation and aspects of the story we’d found intriguing. One of the questions raised by Juana concerns cybernetics itself. The plot, which revolves around an erotic encounter between the protagonist (Juana) and her factory work station, never explicitly touches on the topic of cybernetics and is very far removed from Norbert Wiener’s influential definition of ‘the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal’. However, the human-machine relationship which is central to the story does suggest a thematic link to the idea of cybernetics as it relates to the imaginary of robots and automated life. 

This is where the figure of Arturo Alduante Phillips (the author’s father) comes in. A writer-poet and engineer, Aldunate worked for the Electricity Company in Chile (later Chilectra) and as a university lecturer teaching courses in cybernetics. Even more significant, he published two books on cybernetics, Los robots no tienen a Dios en el corazón (Robots do not have God in their hearts) (1963) and Por las fronteras de la cibernética (On the frontiers of cybernetics) (1973). In the first of these books, published in the same year as Elena’s story, Aldunate Phillips explains the fundamentals of cybernetics and the current state of the discipline in relation to machine intelligence, as well as discussing the implications for industry, construction and healthcare. A contemporary review remarks that the book will be of interest to readers who want to know more about how today’s scientific developments will contribute to ‘the material progress of the world and the social transformation that will follow from their application’.

Pages from Los Robots (1963)

In this context, the reference to cybernetics in Juana appears to be less incidental, as it seems likely that the topic was discussed in Elena Aldunate’s family. There is one moment in the story that especially chimes with the issues and debates covered by Aldunate Phillips in his book. Juana remembers some articles she's read in the newspapers: ‘One day the machines will rebel against their masters. They will not depend on them, they will take control of their future’. By contrast, Los Robots is dismissive of the idea of autonomous automated life. One of the concluding remarks in the book reads ‘I believe that it will never be given to the machine to replace the capacity of the human brain, which will continue to be the inspirer, the guide, the one that will have to manage the world of machines’. The message of Juana is more ambiguous and can be read as a cautionary tale. In the final passages, in the consummation of Juana’s desire, she is simultaneously released and obliterated by the machine’s motions: ‘The movement demands surrender […] its expression is burning, lacerating’. An interpretation of this ending might be that humans underestimate machines at their peril, with Juana’s fate serving as a warning about the destructive tendencies of automation…

The Story of Solaris

Solaris is the best-known work of the Polish novelist Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a philosophical science fiction writer. It has been adapted twice into major feature films and on each occasion met with the author’s disapproval.

Lem’s 1961 book re-evaluates the nature of Contact with a truly alien intelligence, an immeasurable and unknowable entity. It opens with the arrival of a psychologist, Dr Kris Kelvin, at the station on Solaris, a distant planet dominated by its sentient, plasmic ocean. The disordered state of the station is reflected in the mental distress of the beleaguered remaining crew – the ocean apparently sends ‘visitors’ to them, (re-)constructed from their memories. From the initial premise, Kelvin recounts the science of Solaristics, the planet’s discovery, exploration and studies/theories of the ocean’s enigmatic organic structures, before he receives his own ‘visitor’. 

The Yugoslav SF writer, Darko Suvin, a contemporary of Lem’s, credits the Polish author with raising sci-fi “to the dignity of a major literary genre,” praising Solaris as “puzzle, parable and cognition of freedom”. Critics have attempted to unlock the book’s “psychological puzzle” by placing it within a Freudian framework or interpreting it as a parable of madness/schizophrenia. Acknowledging the novel’s complexity, Richard E. Ziegfeld saw in it Lem’s depiction of “the infinite nature of the universe,” contrasted with “the limits of man’s knowledge”.

Both the English and Russian translations of Solaris are problematic – an English version (the first of any of Lem’s work) was not available until 1970, Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox basing it on a French translation. The background to the film adaptation is similarly complex and difficult. The very first film was made for Soviet television in 1968, directed by Boris Nuremberg and, though low-budget, regarded as faithful to the novel (more so than the following versions). It was Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, released in 1972, that remains the most celebrated and controversial version of Solaris.

An “uncompromising visionary” working within the Soviet system, Tarkovsky had no love of science fiction, but (correctly) reasoned that working within the genre would grant him greater leeway. He had seen numerous projects blocked outright, and others subject to lengthy delays before release. According to artist and the set designer of Solaris, Mikhail Romadin, in the eyes of the authorities sci-fi “was hardly serious and intended for youngsters”. Tarkovsky’s proposal of “a futuristic thriller set on board a remote space station” was granted official approval by Goskino (USSR State Committee for Cinematography), though an initial draft of the screenplay re-located two-thirds of the film to Earth. After meeting a disapproving Lem in Moscow, and working with writer Friedrich Gorenstein, Tarkovsky settled on another draft, closer to the novel. 

Andrei Tarkovsky on the set of Solaris

However, the final version of Solaris, clocking in at more than two and a half hours at a stately pace, concentrates more on the ‘human’ aspect of the narrative. The film inserts a lengthy prologue on Earth, at Kelvin’s dacha, where the pilot Berton’s report on the phenomena he witnessed in the ocean is delivered. Kelvin’s relationship with his own ‘visitor’ and the response of the other inhabitants of the station to theirs remains central. Even after filming was completed, at a reduced budget, further changes and cuts were requested by the authorities. Ostensibly science fiction, Soviet censors still objected to the religious themes (present in all Tarkovsky’s work) and caused the usual delays in the film’s release; meanwhile Lem, already irritated by the liberties taken with his novel in the screenplay, accused the director of making “Crime and Punishment in space”.

Coming soon after Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated 2001: A Space Odyssey, there was bound to be a perception of Solaris as a Soviet equivalent. Where 2001 used compositions by Johan and Richard Strauss, J.S. Bach provides the main theme for Solaris, with additional soundtrack contributions from the contemporary Soviet electronic music composer Eduard Artemiev (in the first of his three collaborations with Tarkovsky). The production values reflected the respective budgets, with Mikhail Romadin in charge of the slightly kitsch interior design of the Solaris space station at the state studio Mosfilm – cutting-edge certainly in terms of Soviet film at the time, the future has dated rapidly in this instance. However, Tarkovsky clung to his vision of a mysterious, philosophical epic, haughtily dismissing 2001 as “phony... a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth,” and continuing to bemoan his own film’s sci-fi trappings as “a distraction.” 

After winning the Grand Jury Special Prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival (and also the BFI’s ‘Film of the Year’ award), the international reputation of Solaris was secured. Its many admirers see it as a high watermark for the genre in film: “the benchmark against which all sci-fi should be held accountable.” The English writer Trevor Hoyle was “absolutely blown away” by Tarkovsky’s “magical” film. Other critics have found it confusing, overly long, pretentious and – presumably in contrast to 2001 – commented on its “visual poverty” (New York Times). The director himself later came to regard Solaris as the least favourite of his films.

Like 2001, Solaris has been subjected to innumerable academic re-readings and critical interpretations, and remains the director’s most enduring work. Tarkovsky returned once more to science fiction for the similarly fascinating, grandiose and troubled Stalker in 1979. He left the Soviet Union the same year, made two further films during his European exile and died of cancer in Paris, aged only 54, in 1986.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long after Tarkovsky’s death, a third adaption of Solaris was made, this time in the United States. Steven Soderbergh’s slick and expensive 2002 film version, while cutting more than an hour off the running time, is essentially a Hollywood re-make of the Soviet epic thirty years on rather than an attempt to return to Lem’s text. The author was distinctly unimpressed: “And I thought Tarkovsky’s Solaris was bad.”

In continuing to distance himself from both major versions of the film, as late as a 2002 interview, Lem stated: “As Solaris’ author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images.”

 

Stanisław Lem