VOYAGE TO FAREMIDO (4)
By:
April 22, 2026
Frigyes Karinthy’s Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver’s Fifth Voyage was published in 1916, in Hungarian. Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver signs on as a surgeon on a British ship, only to be torpedoed, then picked up by a UFO and transported to Faremido, a planet ruled by intelligent, utterly benevolent machine-folk. In this excerpt, Gulliver accepts an injection of their own brain-matter — quicksilver and minerals — into his head. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Earth as solasi — The sick world — Midore’s anxiety about the survival of the Earth — Consciousness and instinct, the two-headed monster
The assurance and superiority with which Midore spoke about the history of Mankind, startled me only during his first few words. I soon realized that the solasis knew the story from its exterior phenomena just as well as I di — even better, it seemed. I would like to give a brief summary of the dazzling prospect which Midore’s explanation opened to my reeling brain.
As I mentioned before, the solasis had constructed magnifying telescopes of such range that these enabled them to examine the life of my planet, Earth, for tens of thousands of years in its smallest details — just as we examine a drop of water through our microscopes. Midore’s words disclosed the astounding fact that they considered the Earth as nothing more than a primitive and regressed, rudimentary and diseased solasi; an inorganic living being, resembling themselves, that could have developed into the same kind of solasi if, some sixty thousand years ago, it had not been attacked by the ailment called dosifera. This was caused by the parasites, the dosires, whom I called human beings and animals. Such dosires occurred occasionally and sporadically in Faremido, too. But the poor solasi called Earth was so badly infected with them that it was completely crippled, and its recovery might still take a long time. He, Midore, who had lived in his present constitution for sixty thousand years in Faremido, had watched the whole process from its beginnings. He had seen both the onset of the disease and its development. As he realized that I was interested in the case, and my words indicated that I had some faint idea of the past events, he would be glad to tell me of his own experiences. The fact that I was myself a simple dosire did not exclude the possibility of my understanding these things to a certain extent. For the solasis had succeeded in placing certain inorganic substances in my brain during the first months — an operation that had almost healed it. This was, by the way, an experimental matter which I would understand later.
Then Midore related that he had been investigating the solasi called Earth for about sixty thousand years because its case interested him, and he suspected that there was some trouble. For a while the Earth’s organs: mountains, fires, waters, developed well. But at a certain time he was grieved to notice that in one of the folds a large number of very tiny dosires appeared. (When I questioned him, Midore defined the spot exactly, and from his description I recognized the neighbourhood of the Ganges and the Euphrates.) Probably there was a lack of heat and electricity on that spot. (Later I was to learn that heat and electricity, light and sound were to the solasis as blood to human beings.) The infection spread rapidly and gradually covered the whole territory which I called Asia and Midore the ‘stomach’ of Lasomi, the Earth. At that time the solasi called Earth was still well enough to communicate musically. He complained of his illness, and he, Midore, advised him to emit a little heat at the seat of the infection; for both of them quickly realized that the dosire was a very miserable and helpless parasite, and a few degrees’ increase in heat — maybe eighty or a hundred — would kill and exterminate it.
But Lasomi neglected the trouble, and the disease I called Life spread ever wider. It was interesting that at one stage he, Midore, had attempted to help and had transmitted some rays from an apparatus constructed for this purpose, focussing them upon the body of the Earth in order to cure it. The rays produced eruptions of hot water in the ailing body, and in these the dosire germs perished in millions. It seemed that they would be completely exterminated, and the poor fellow-solasi healed. At that time Midore devoted much time and care to the problem, observing the nature, behaviour and life conditions of the dosires with the help of certain lenses. This was the only way finally to eradicate the whole pathogenic brood. When the hot water began to well up, the dosires fled in terror, rushing about upon the surface of the Earth. They must have been then at the evolutionary stage I called Primitive Man or Ancestral Ape, in other words, a Creature of Instinct. Now then, said Midore sarcastically, these Primitive Men behaved most curiously under the upsurging hot water. Those who did not perish at once rushed into the fields — he could still remember them clearly — where they milled around, wailing and terrified. The whole picture as he observed it through the microscope was still vivid in his mind. From the jostling, panting crowd of the dosires a well-developed individual emerged, rushed to the side, then suddenly lifted its antennae or arms and pointed upwards — towards Midore who was sending the destructive rays down upon them and was watching them through his tele-microscope. Yes, this ridiculous, tiny animal pointed straight at his, Midore’s eyes. Whereupon the others also turned in the same direction, then collapsed on the ground, raised their arms, knelt down and shouted something at him. At this moment the hot water erupted under them, and they all perished. Since then he often observed this peculiarity of the dosires — sometimes, a few minutes before their extermination, they suddenly turn their faces in the direction of the solasis‘ dwelling-places as if they expected help from the very source of their destruction.
Midore remarked that later he gave up this curative method. He realized that there was no need for it. The dosire, he repeated, was a sick sickness which destroyed itself with the aid of the organ usually seated in the upper part or head of the animal, and which I called instinct. It was best to await the automatic course of the illness; to wait until the dosires spread over the whole Earth and developed completely in the physical sense. At this stage, as experience showed, the organ of instinct did the rest. The dosires attacked each other, that is, themselves; their destruction began, and the death of the disease became imminent. It was established that the dosires wished to support their lives by eating one another in a hundred different forms; this made it evident that the whole business could not last long — just as any mechanism was doomed to perish that did not take and transform for its purposes the materials necessary for its survival, from a dissimilar world outside, but consumed its inner resources again and again. A rowboat, for instance, could not be propelled from inside — only from the outside, with the help of oars, finding support in the water; the rowboat of life also came to a standstill if it lacked oars that could be dipped into real existence. In other words: Midore’s anxiety that the parasite dosires would destroy poor Lasomi, would consume its substance and thus triumph over him proved to be exaggerated. The dosires simply used the Earth to germinate and then, thanks to the organ of instinct, exterminated each other.
Thus Midore was no longer perturbed about the fate of Earth, his ailing fellow-solasi. He knew in advance that the dosires, however badly they infested the planet’s body for a while, would certainly annihilate each other, and finally the Earth would be cured. True, Midore had to admit: there was a time when he was seriously alarmed and afraid that the disease might take a serious, even a fatal turn. It must have been about the time when, in my description, a new organ suddenly began to develop in the skull of the dosire I called Man; the organ I had referred to as consciousness. This could certainly have been dangerous for Lasomi — because with its help the dosire called Man realized that the way of survival was not to let life destroy itself but using all his strength, will-power and ability, to extract the materials needed for life from the inorganic Earth and to create perfection from it. This organ started to develop inside the brain, within the organ of instinct; and Midore feared that it would reach maturity, repress, replace and make superfluous the organ of instinct. In this event Man would discover the essence of being and understand at long last the imperfection and corruptibility of the organic body. He would replace this body with the inorganic, enduring, imperishable elements of the solasis, with gold and minerals — and would finally conquer death. In other words, Man would cease to be a disease, that is, an ephemeral phenomenon.
This was a serious threat. With the help of consciousness human work began. They started to shape and to exploit the Earth, utilizing its blood (heat and electricity), and the dosire grew stronger and stronger. He was now able to shape wings for himself out of solid materials. So that finally this tiny little worm began dangerously to resemble the immortal solasis themselves. “As I said before,” Midore added, “I was seriously worried for a while that with the help of consciousness the dosire would triumph over matter and death. But once I subjected the dosire‘s tiny body to a thorough examination, I dissected the menacing little brain with scalpels and analyzed it closely through magnifying glasses, I was reassured. My assumption that the organ of consciousness had exterminated that of instinct proved wrong. In the imperfect mind of the miniature being there is a blemish; an incurable organic disease. This race cannot survive. It must perish, suffering from a deadly, organic ailment that must sooner or later put an end to the whole species. Do you know what happened? The organ of consciousness which burgeoned from instinct, and which was destined to develop and take its place, this organ, through some stupid accident, became divorced from the organ of instinct. It began to grow independently in the frontal part — while in the posterior hemisphere of the brain instinct continued to develop undisturbed and unhampered. Do you know what this is? The doctors call it extrauterine pregnancy which is fatal both for the mother and the child. Two organs, serving utterly opposed aims, one seeking life, the other, death. Because of this blemish all men are two-headed monsters. They must perish as soon as the two hemispheres, that of instinct and that of consciousness, are pressed together at a certain stage of evolution, and they smother one another like two seeds in the same furrow. Or like two hands, one building, the other tearing down; one holding fast, to escape being swept off by the storm, the other cutting the anchor-chain; one covering his body, to save himself from freezing, the other uncovering it!”
As he ended, Midore placed a strange, oval-shaped object in front of me. Greenish violet lights flashed under glass. Through it I first saw only a clouded dimness, then a wide, deep meadow at an infinite distance, but clear and detailed. It took me some minutes before I recognized that it was the Baltic whence I had set out a year ago in the seaplane. I saw British and German warships in a running battle. From the great height I was able to see to the bottom of the ocean. One of our battleships was sinking, hit by a torpedo. It disappeared slowly beneath the green carpet and descended, swaying and silent like some heavy bubble — until it settled on the gleaming sand of the bottom.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.