"Not Welcome Here": Biological versus Postbiological in Lem's Space Operas

This essay offers a technocentric perspective on two space operas by Stanislaw Lem, The Invincible (1966) and Fiasco (1987), novels that span much of his creative career. As an evolutionary philosopher, Lem was decades ahead of his time in recognizing the idea of postbiological evolution and how technology shapes it. Pivoting around this central theory, Lem shows how our understanding of mind in the universe is narrow and anthropocentric, while engineering and the design space of evolution act as fixed Archimedean points.