Lem's latest futuristic satire sends his redoubtable protagonist Ijon Tichy - hero of The Futurological Congress, among other works - to the moon, which has been given over to intelligent, self-evolving war machines in a kind of super-detente. Weapons are banned on Earth, while each nation's robot army runs an arms race on the moon. When the governments of Earth become concerned that the machines are planning an invasion of the mother world, the Lunar Agency dispatches Tichy and several remote-controlled robots to investigate.

  What Tichy finds on the moon provides Lem with a first-class opportunity to skewer military thinking and arms-race politics. Even stranger, however, is what happens to Tichy himself - a bizarre encounter with an unusual weapon results in a unique twist on the theme of split personalities. Humor and a breathless pace create a delightful and thought-provoking read.

Publishers Weekly

 

 The plot of the Peace on Earth was not base on the political situation of that time - I usually tried to shield myself from such influences. Current information regarding growing tension between the Soviet Union and the United States had no effect on the process of writing. Only now we are aware of the fact that a nuclear conflict was much closer than we suspected - and of course I did not know it at that time. However even after the end of the Cold War the danger of a nuclear war is still high initiated - for example - by certain terrorist groups.

  I never attempted to incorporate a real story into my books, I never wrote the so-called "political fiction" since I strongly believe that no political events can be foreseen - regardless whether on the global or on the local scale.

  In this book I tried to imagine and describe a psychical situation of a human being whose cerebral hemispheres have been separated (callotomy). I was fascinated by the situation in which each hemisphere could possess a separate consciousness. Before I started writing I spent a long time studying scientific literature - I allowed myself to invent certain things, however about eighty percent of what I wrote was directly based on scientific data. The rest was my own "supplement" that was necessary because of considerations related to the development of the story.

 

 

Peace on Earth

Doubled

  I don't know what to do. If I could say "I'm miserable," it wouldn't be so bad. I can't say "We're miserable" either because I can only partly speak for myself even though I'm still Ijon Tichy. I used to talk to myself while I shaved but I had to stop because of my left eye's lewd winking. Coming back in the LEM, I didn't realize what happened to me just before lift-off. The LEM, by the way, doesn't have anything to do with the American NASA module manned by Armstrong and Aldrin to collect a couple of moon rocks. It was given the same name to disguise my secret mission. Damn that mission. When I returned from the Calf constellation, I intended to stay put for at least a year. But I agreed to go for the sake of mankind. I knew I might not come back. Doctor Lopez said my chance of survival was one in twenty point eight. That didn't stop me: I'm a gambler. You only die once. Either I come back or I don't, I said to myself. It never occurred to me that I might come back but not come back because we would come back. To explain I'll have to release some highly classified information but I don't care. That is, partly. I'm writing this too only partly and with great difficulty, typing with the right hand. The left I had to tie to the arm of the chair because it kept tearing the paper out of the machine. It wouldn't listen to reason, and while I was immobilizing it, it punched me in the eye. It's because of the doubling. Our brains all have two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum or great commissure. Two hundred million white nerve fibers connect the brain so it can put its thoughts together but not in my case. It happened on that range where the moon robots tested their new weapons. I stumbled in there by mistake. I'd accomplished my mission, had outsmarted those unliving creatures, and was on my way back to the LEM when I had to urinate. There are no urinals on the moon. They wouldn't work anyway in a vacuum. You have a little container in your suit, just like Armstrong and Aldrin, so you can relieve yourself anytime, anywhere, but somehow I couldn't, not there in the full sun in the middle of the Sea of Serenity. Not far from me was a solitary boulder. I went over to its shadow. How was I to know there was an ultrasound-inducing field there? While I'm urinating, I feel this little snap. Like a crack in the neck, only higher, in the middle of the skull. It was a remote callotomy. It didn't hurt. I felt funny but the feeling passed and I continued on my way. The strangeness I attributed to an understandable excitement, considering all I had been through. The right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. That's why I said I was writing only partly. My right hemisphere obviously doesn't approve of what I'm writing. And I can't say "I'm writing"-it's my left hemisphere that's writing. I'll have to reach some compromise with the opposition because I can't sit forever with my hand tied. I've tried to appease it but nothing works. It's arrogant, aggressive, vulgar. Fortunately it can read only certain parts of speech, nouns mainly. I know this because I've been reading up on the subject. It doesn't understand verbs or adjectives, so while it's watching I have to express myself carefully. Will this work? I don't know. And why is it that all the civilized behavior is in the left hemisphere?

 

Translated by Michael Kandel, Harcourt Brace

 Polish Editions:
 

• Wydawnictwo Literackie 1987
• Gebethner i  S-ka 1992
• Wydawnictwo Literackie, seria Dzieła 1999

 

 English Editions: 

• Harcourt Brace, New York, San Diego, 1994
• Andre Deutsch, London, 1995
• Harcourt Brace, 1996