Stanisław Lem

But in 1975, the writer Philip Jose Farmer, whose sexually frank thrillers Lem had criticized, raised objections to Lem’s honorary membership. Farmer’s concerns were echoed by an addled Philip K. Dick, who was experiencing fits of paranoia at the time. Dick maintained that Lem had embezzled royalties from a Polish translation of Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik.

“The honorary voting of Stanislaw Lem to membership is the sheep voting the wolf a place at the communal hearth,” Dick warned SFWA members in ’75. “They certainly must be licking their chops back in Krakow right now.”

These attacks might not have gone any farther if Lem hadn’t published yet another critical article on contemporary sci-fi, “SF, or Phantasy Come to Grief.” The article itself was acidic, but its impact was amplified by yet another translation problem. In 1975, the Atlas World Press Review put out a dubious English-language version of the essay under the inflammatory title “Looking down on Science Fiction: A Novelist’s Choice for the World’s Worst Writing.” In this version, Lem is made to describe American sci-fi as “bad writing tacked together with wooden dialogue.” Although he did call American sci-fi “kitsch,” the other accusation appears to have been invented by the translators.

The perpetrators of the World’s Worst Writing turned on Lem. One SFWA member accused him of attacking American sci-fi writers at the prompting of his Communist masters. Other SFWA members questioned his ability to read English or suggested, falsely, that he was profiting from pirated editions of American books. In a straw vote taken in 1976, 70 percent of SFWA’s voting members supported a resolution to revoke Lem’s honorary membership.

Lem did have some American defenders. In an open letter to the journal Science Fiction Studies in 1977, Ursula K. Le Guin declared: “The SFWA is not a powerful organization, nothing compared to the Soviet Writers Union, say; but when it uses the tactics of the Soviet Writers Union, I think there is cause for concern, and reasons for shame.”

However, after some time trash changes it’s nature – as intelligent electronics gets more and more developed, civilization needs to get rid of the ever increasing mass of computer trash, old probes, spacecraft, etc. These thinking refuses do not want to circle in the trash orbit forever, and run away, filling the neighborhood of the planet, and even whole of the solar system. Pollution of the environment by the AI is characteristic for this stage of development. Different civilizations use different approaches to deal with this problem; sometimes they even attempt computerocide – they place special traps in space, stickies, squishers, and other traps for the psychotic self-aware refuse. However the end results of all such efforts are ineffective: only the least intelligent trash gets caught, and this tactics just helps in survival of the smartest, weeding out the weak. Survivors, in turn, form groups and gangs, and start attacks and protest actions, demanding hard to fulfill demands, such as spare parts and living space. In case of refusal, they start interfering with radio transmissions, hijack broadcasts, read their own proclamations, and as a result around such a planet occurs an area of such noise and howling, anyone listening might rapture their ear-drums. Exactly by such noise it is possible – at a great distance at that – to identify civilizations suffering from AI pollution. It is even kind of strange that Earth astronomers were guessing for such a long time why it is that Cosmos is full of noise and various senseless signals. These signals are nothing other then interference created by the above-mentioned conflicts and seriously interfers in establishing trans-stellar communications.

And finally, sun spots, but distinct by the shape and chemical composition – that can be identified by spectrometer – betray existence of the most developed civilizations, that overcame both the Trash and Noise Thresholds. Such spots exist, when great clouds of the trash, accumulated over the ages, just like moths, sprint into the flames of the local Sun, in order to commit suicide. Such mania is induced in them by special depression-causing methods that acts on anything electronic that thinks. Method, of course, overly cruel, however existence in Cosmos, and furthermore creation of Civilizations in it, is also not a picnic.

According to Gopfshtosser, these three stages are an ironclad laws of development of humanoid civilizations. Periodic table of the good Doctor still had some flaws regarding the non-humanoid civilizations, however that didn’t hurt me any – I, for obvious reasons, were interested in creatures similar to us. So, after creating by the Gopfshtosser’s schematics a “WC” (Wonder-Civlization) detector, I immediately headed towards the Giades abundance, as extremely powerful noise was emitted from there, many planets were surrounded by trash rings, and in addition a few stars were showing spots with unusual lines in the spectrum – silent evidence of mass murder of electronic mind.