| Sažetak (engleski) | This thesis analyses Stanisław Lem’s pessimistic first contact novels, Fiasco, Solaris,
and His Master’s Voice. The focus of the thesis is on the way in which the encounter with the
Other, that is alien civilizations, exposes human limitations and human susceptibility to
anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is heavily discussed in all three novels and it is seen
as the root cause of the protagonists’ inability to communicate with alien civilisations. In
Fiasco, an expedition is sent to a distant planet in order to make first contact with a
civilisation that might or might not exist. When the crew finally reaches the planet, all of their
attempts to establish communication with the inhabitants of the planet Quinta are futile. In
the end, their first contact mission ends with the destruction of Quinta. His Master’s Voice,
written in the form of a memoir, is a story of a scientist named Peter Hogarth, who brings his
account of a project code-named “His Master’s Voice”. The project’s goal is to decode a
message from outer space but after a few initial achievements, the project comes to a dead
end. From the start, Hogarth is convinced that they will not be able to decode the message
and the question of the existence of the Other is never actually answered. Solaris, on the other
hand, has its Other in the form of a planet that is almost completely covered by an ocean that
seems to be sentient. However, as in the previous novels, communication is never
established.
The first chapter of the thesis gives a brief introduction to science fiction and why the
chosen three novels belong to that literary genre or mode. The second chapter focuses on
science fiction from the perspective of postcolonial theory and how the Other seems to be at
the centre of both science fiction and colonial literature. The next three chapters consist of
analyses of the three novels and focus mainly on the problem of anthropomorphism. The aim
was to show how the protagonists gained greater insight into human nature in spite of their
inability to communicate with alien civilizations. |
