SOURCE: “Game Theory in the Third Pentagon: A Study in Strategy and Rationality,” in Critique, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 303–30.

In the following essay, Swirski applies game theory analysis to Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub in order to describe the insanity and paranoia that conditions military strategy, political ideology, and group rationality.

1. Introduction

Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub was published in 1961, only a year before the Cuban missile crisis, when the world faced the spectre of a superpower nuclear confrontation.¹ It would be reductive to propose a straightforward connection between these horrific events and the literary genesis of Memoirs. As Lem remarked to me during a recent interview, he is not a writer oriented par excellence politically; his works “have never been meant as pasquils or pamphlets aimed at any particular political system.”² On the other hand, Memoirs is without doubt a contemporary work, with...