The Investigation is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

/mystery

Mystery fiction

Mystery fiction is a loosely-defined term.1.It is often used as a synonym for detective fiction or crime fiction— in other words a novel or short story in which a detective investigates and solves a crime mystery. Sometimes mystery books are nonfiction...

 novel by the Polish

Polish literature

Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages, used in Poland over the centuries, have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Yiddish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, German and...

 writer Stanisław Lem, published in 1959.

The novel is set in a typically foggy London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. A young Scotland Yard

Scotland Yard

Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...

 lieutenant is charged to investigate the mysterious disappearance of corpses from London morgues. The only "explanation" is an abstruse statistical theory that correlates the body-snatching with local cancer rates. The detective, however, since the very beginning suspects the same statistician being the perpetrator. Reality, however, proves less mundane and certainly less comprehensible than he had hoped.

In The Investigation the classic procedural police mystery is turned into a metaphysical puzzle, in which Kafkaesque themes, although updated, are not missing. As in almost all Lem's production, philosophical and epistemological questions are presented under the simple surface of the plot: what is the role of scientific inquiry? What does the existence of competing explanations mean for that goal? The novel also introduces a theme that will later be present in Lem's works: that observations are formed by the properties of the observer's mind, rather than by any properties of the observed.