The invincible

The Invincible ( Polish Niezwyciężony ) is a science fiction - novel by Stanislaw Lem from the year 1964 .

title

The German title is not an exact translation of the original. “Niezwyciężony” means either the adjective “undefeated” or the noun “(the) undefeated” in Polish. The title of the original therefore means “The Undefeated”.

content

The novel describes the course of a rescue expedition from the perspective of First Officer Rohan.

The Invincible , an armed heavy space cruiser, is sent on a rescue mission to the planet Regis III. The spaceship under Commander Horpach is supposed to clear up the disappearance of the sister ship Kondor on the planet. The two ships represent the ultimate in technical capabilities of mankind in their time and are seen as an expression of the superiority of human technology and ingenuity, hence the allusion in the spaceship name.

After landing, the crew found that there was no life on the mainland and that there were only algae and fish-like sea creatures in the oceans, which, however, strictly avoided the shore zones. On the mainland there are ancient relics, which are initially interpreted as the ruins of a city. When examining the ruins, however, it emerges that the metal objects have no rooms and no entrances or exits, so they could never have served as living quarters. It must have been a question of machines - as it turns out later, probably local cybernetic units.

When the condor is found, it is first determined that the spaceship is externally intact. Several dead are rescued from the ship, almost all of which have starved to death. The facilities in the interior of the spaceship have been devastated by the effects of violence, but the food supplies, as well as the fuel and energy reserves, have not been touched. There is a reference to fly-like creatures in the logbook entries. The scientists of the invincible, however, consider the existence of insect-like creatures impossible in a world without a land ecosystem.

In an unexplained accident in a cave, a researcher loses his entire memory with all memories and learned skills, his brain is practically erased. The affected person is then as helpless as a newborn. The crew of the invincible is forced to conclude that the same thing must have happened to the crew of the condor , whereupon these people died of starvation.

While searching for a missing reconnaissance team, two reconnaissance planes are destroyed by a cloud of metallic particles. The flying particles behave like swarms and attack with strong magnetic fields. The observed memory loss can also be caused with such fields. The particles seem to have no intelligence of their own and only to be capable of coordinated actions as a swarm. The specialists of the invincible hypothesize that the particles are the result of an evolution of machines. The forerunners of these machines were brought to the planet by an extraterrestrial civilization millions of years ago and have since evolved in order to survive in the battle for the planet's scarce raw material and energy reserves against other machines and the once-existing ecosphere.

The search for the missing crew members now demands ever greater losses from the spaceship crew. A rescue operation under Rohan's command can track down 18 of the 22 missing men, but they all suffer from total memory loss. In addition, while searching a ravine, Rohan's squad are attacked by the swarm, killing several people. Rohan himself survived the attack unharmed.

An unmanned armored special vehicle with heavy armament is then sent into the gorge and also attacked by the swarm. In a bitter firefight, the swarm succeeds in wiping out the armored vehicle's artificial intelligence. The vehicle then destroys the telescopic probes and steers into the desert. When the tank returns later that night and attacks the invincible , Horpach has him destroyed.

After that, tensions arise among the crew members. The scientists are developing scenarios for how the swarm can be destroyed. Rohan and large parts of the crew, on the other hand, want to leave the planet as quickly as possible. When Horpach lets Rohan decide what to do next, Rohan admits that the spaceship cannot take off until the fate of the four missing crew members has been determined.

Since Rohan has already survived an attack by the swarm, he dares to make one last search. Without metal on his clothes and unarmed, he sets off again into the gorge where the missing are suspected. It is protected by a transmitter that simulates the brain waves of a 'deleted' brain. He is not attacked by the swarm and finds three of the four missing people dead, whereupon he no longer doubts the death of the fourth researcher. He witnesses an inexplicable ritual of the metal particles.

With the last of his strength, Rohan finally returns to the spaceship, determined to protect the swarm and its form of life. In the last scene Rohan drags himself towards his spaceship, which in the last sentence of the book is portrayed once again as a technical marvel and a symbol of human superiority. The sentence ends with the words "... as if it were really invincible". This alludes to human hubris , which becomes clear here through the primitiveness of the metal particle beings who, thanks to their simplicity and adaptability, were able to defeat the first "invincible", extremely complex spaceship Kondor and force the invincible to retreat.

output

The invincible. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1967, ISBN 3-518-38959-9
The invincible. Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin (GDR) 1967, LN 302, 410/33/67