1Eye wrote to mention that well-known SF author Stanislaw Lem passed away today. The Polish author was 84, and was probably best known for the novel 'Solaris'. From the AP article: "Solaris, published in 1961 and set on an isolated space stations, was made into a film epic 10 years later by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and into a 2002 Hollywood remake shot by Steven Sodebergh and starring
George Clooney."
I'll remember him for his stories of Ijon Tichy [wikipedia.org] and the satire he would write about regarding anything from governments to advertisements.
One of the first science fiction authors to truly show us that science fiction is more than just a genre of space novels, it's a way to place one's self outside of reality so that it can be safely analyzed and commented on from a distance.
Rest in peace. I eagerly await the day you raise to the ranks of Asimov & Tolkien when the world will remember you as more than "that guy who wrote a story for a George Clooney movie."
One of the first science fiction authors to truly show us that science fiction is more than just a genre of space novels, it's a way to place one's self outside of reality so that it can be safely analyzed and commented on from a distance.
Yeah, I really enjoyed a lot of the Sci-Fi series that did this, too. Too bad Hollywood hasn't caught onto this.
Take a wonderful book with an underlying subtext about politics and military mentality and turn it into a teen flick full of guts and gore.
Who ever wrote that screen play needs to apologize. Not like I'm saying anything new about the Starship Troopers movie.
This is highly subjective, but a lot of people think that movie is a brilliantly campy satire of the book... which was itself quite possibly meant as something of a satire of a fascist military mentality. I'd agree with this, myself.
I saw the movie first and thought it was unnecessarily cheesy and wasn't a big fan. A couple of years later I read the book. I was pretty blown away by a) ho
which was itself quite possibly meant as something of a satire of a fascist military mentality.
Um, not really. There's not a scrap of irony in the whole book. If you want some irony and satire, try The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which is also his best book), or Job, A Comedy of Justice. Starship Troopers was written as a polemic in response the ending of nuclear testing by the U.S., and it's meant 100% seriously; it also has nothing at all to do with fascism. Check out the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] if you want to
I can't understand why he is "best known for Solaris" when it is far from his best work. "The Cyberiad", for example, was a collection of much better stories. Lem had an understanding of people, politics, and satire that made almost everything he wrote delightful to read. Plus, I could never beleive The Cyberiad was originally written in Polish then translated, so props go out to his translators also.
The answer is one word - Tarkovski. It is the same as with the Strugacki brothers. They have around 30 books better and better over the years and the only thing they are know for in the West is one Chapter from "Picnic by the Road". The chapter which was used as a storyline for Tarkovski's "Stalker".
All those who read Solaris in English lost a lot of the original's literary quality. While most English translations of Lem are good, and those by Michael Kandel are brilliant, Solaris is a sad exception. It was translated into English not from the original, but from a French translation, that was poor to begin with. It's more like a Cliff's Notes, than an original. Kandel wanted to do another translation, but was denied because the copyright is somehow legally tied to the distribution rights to the movie.
I can't understand why he is "best known for Solaris" when it is far from his best work
well, there was that movie (and I mean the original, not the remake). I saw it back in college and loved it...got it at home but haven't gotten around to watching it yet. (I also have the clooney film, was a $5 xmas gift, just for completness' sake).
Anyway, could part of the problem with Solaris be that the translation isn't as good as his others? As far as I know, the only English translation of Solaris was based on a
I can't understand why he is "best known for Solaris" when it is far from his best work. "The Cyberiad", for example, was a collection of much better stories.
Well, having read both in the splendid Spanish translation, direct from the Polish (Minotauro, Argentina), I respectfully disagree. "The Ciberyad" is, as you said, delightful, but "Solaris" is deep.
It looks like the (in)famous English translation was horrible indeed, because "Solaris" is appreciated very differently by English and non-English speaking
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
What really blows my mind is that Lem presumably wrote that poem in Polish, and Michael Kandel translated it (and other poems and stories) to English.
It's astounding how well Kandel translated the poetry, so it still rhymes, scans well, and makes perfect sense (unlike most other poetry). Kandel also translated a lot of Lem's other stuff ABOUT words and language, in Cyberiad and other books.
I was just reading a Lem interview somewhere on the web today, he talks about Michael Kandel's translation. Lem said Kandel took a lot of liberties, rewriting passages and changing a lot of things beyond what was in the original text, but remained true to the intent of the book. Lem said he learned a lot from Kandel, that there was more to translation than a literal translation of the words. And it's true, Kandel's work was brilliant. There are whole chapters of The Cyberiad that are almost entirely poetry, like the tale of that THING that wouldn't go away. And I'll never forget the wonderful wordplay about dragonslaying with Quantum Draconics.
"Have it compose a poem--a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism and in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"
"And why not throw in a full exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata while you're at it?" growled Trurl. "You can't give it such idiotic--"
But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:
I would highly recommend Solaris [amazon.com] to lovers of science fiction, who surely abound on a "News for Nerds" site like Slashdot. Don't expect hard SF with the focus on technology like Vernor Vinge, but rather a more psychological and mysterious style of storytelling somewhat like Gene Wolfe. The movie by
The book is one of the great works of scifi. The movies really miss the point. About a week ago, in a discussion about PlaneScape:Torment I wrote:
"I mean, what better quest can there be, than a Quest to learn who you are? A chance to discover yourself and, just maybe, make amends for past sins and save your own soul and prevent the suffering of others. Beautifully written, IMO it is the high-water mark of videogames.
P.S. For those who enjoyed PST, I highly recommend Stanislaw Lem's novel, Solaris. The centr
I've never read the book, but the George Clooney Solaris movie is one of the best films ever made. I'm quite sure of this since everyone seems to hate it.
Although he spent most of his productive years behind the Iron Curtain, Lem was quite influential and was known (and read) by many of the Golden Age and Next Wave/Dangerous Visions authors--particularly the latter.
He had very little respect for the Golden Age writers, calling their works "kitsch." Most of his attitude toward the gigantic American SF oeuvre was no doubt attributable to the fact that, writing in the Soviet bloc, he had to use great care in expressing his ideas lest he be subject to government censorship, and thus thought the "frivolous" nature of American writers was wasteful of time and print.
He was greatly admired by writers such as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Harlan Ellison, however, and his works are widely available in good English translations today.
On September 2, 1974 Philip K. Dick sent the following letter to the FBI (Please keep in mind Mr. Dick was most probably suffering from schizophrenia):
That kind of paranoid conspiracy crap sounds like a Philip K Dick novel. Oh wait, we ARE discussing Philip K Dick's writings -- to the FBI! Not a novel exactly, but certainly one of his more interesting short stories.
The ranting anonymous cowards seems to have a few good points about The Party running things here in the United States... Until he gets to the part about blaming Michael Moore for the fact that we're losing our constitutionally protected freedoms and going to war based on lies...
A sad day -- I would have to say Solaris has always stuck with me from when I first read it over 30 years ago in my teens -- it was the first time I really thought about questions like what it means to be alive and human, what is thought, and what is free will. Neither film really did it justice, though at least the Soviet version didn't "Hollywoodize" it. I just didn't get the reason for the minutes and minutes of nothing but travel on Japanese tunnel roadway systems as the protagonist travels to the lau
>>I just didn't get the reason for the minutes and minutes of nothing but travel on Japanese tunnel roadway systems as the protagonist travels to the launch site in the Soviet version. A Russian friend told me it just looked very High Tech to Russians at the time.
There's a story behind this. Tarkovsky was allowed to leave Russian to attend the World's Fair in Japan (a *remarkable* achievement for that period of Iron Curtain history!). He had hoped to film futuristic scenes from the fair, but due to delays with passports and importing their film equipment, they arrived too late, missing the event! Rather than go home from this hugely expensive (both in terms of money and political capitol spent) trip empty-handed, they filmed highway scenes with a hand-held and added sound effects. Your friend is correct. To the average Russian, the "modern" Japanese highway system (not to mention it's automobiles) would have seemed very futuristic. In the same way that the Modified Ford Taurus police cruisers from 1984's Terminator now seem dated, so does this scene.
He was one of my favorite authors, up there with Gene Wolfe and Borges. Solaris, although popular, was not his best work in my opinion. Check out Tales of Pirx the Pilot for lighter weight stuff, and Fiasco for some great hard science fiction. He will be missed!
Lem was the bastion of old-school eastern european sci-fi. His sci-fi wasn't about huge robots carrying large breasted women, or random-monster-of-the-week attacking the hapless but plucky space pioneers or even George Clooney's naked ass. Sci-fi for Lem was a way to take a clear look at everything that people took for granted in technology and progress. In both Solaris and His Master's Voice he he tackled space exploration not as an soap opera but as an examination of what it means to be human and what humans see in technological progress. He took our limitations seriously and showed how incredibly alien it will be for humans to seriously venture out into space and even make first contact. And even in talking about all the limitations on scientific and technological progress he never stopped believing in the possibility of human progress through these tools. He was not only a great author but also a great man. RIP Stan.
...His sci-fi wasn't about huge robots carrying large breasted women,...
Well, actually neither is most American SF. True, this was a staple of a great deal of American film SciFi (read "sciffy") of the 50s and early 60s, but then most B-movies were corny and cliche' no matter WHAT the genre.
For all the Euro-elitism, American SF has always been of uniform high quality, if only because there was so much of it.
FWIW, can you name ANOTHER well-regarded Polish SF writer?
Sapkowski is a great Polish fantasy (okay not a sci-fi) author to name one. In my opinion equals to Zelazny.
From the search on Amazon it seems like english speaking world don't have a chance to read anything of his yet. ('The Hexer' based on his stories may have english subs but it is one really bad movie)
Who said there was no good quality American SF? Asimov, Dick, Gibson...the list can go on and on. The point is not Europe vs. America but good sci-fi vs. the crap that goes by the name of sci-fi. There are great sci-fi writers all over the world but it's important to recognize the subject and style differences. You also have to realize that most great sci-fi from Europe is prolly from the 50s-70s when it as much about communism criticism as it was about technology. Nowadays, it's the same type of stuff as a
We just don't read much of that stuff any more. Even "Star Wars" was purposefully evocative of the old "Space Opera" era of the 1930s. Just fun, not to be taken seriously (ignore all those Star Wars character costumes at the myriad SW conventions...)
Well-regarded Polish author? Well, being a Pole I can share some thoughts about interesting authors past and present. Most of them haven't been translated to English, yet some of them surely will be.
If we talk about Iron Courtain authors, Janusz Zajdel (died in 1985) is a must. He's novels like Limes Inferior or Paradyzja show great deal about falsehoods of governments, absurdities of total crontrol, etc. Much like Aldus Huxley's Brave New World, yet written from within iron courtain. A must. Translated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_A._Zajdel>
From current authors I would recommend Jacek Dukaj. His all books are original and different from eachother, he combines Gaiman's atmosphere with Dick's imagination and Zelazny's plot making... Yhh, well, highly original author, each and every book is a delight. A definite must read. Don't know if he's been translated (and the translation would be hard, as he, for example, uses special grammar for post-human beings (think: Brinn's uplift saga, only it's not vocabulary but grammar). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukaj>
And finally, Edmund Wnuk-Lipiski with his Apostezjon trilogy. One of the best things I have read. It moved me deeply, as it brought deep insight on religion (among other things), given from the sci-fi perspective... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Wnuk-Lipi%C5%8 4ski>
Oh, and it's also worth to mention that Andrzej Sapkowski is one of the most known world-wide Polish authors, though it is not a sci-fi, but a fantasy and as such it has a bit different ideas and features to work on. It is good, but in my opinion if you are looking for something which does The Thing like Stanisaw Lem's work did, you should rather look for the former three authors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapkowski>
Return from the Strars was the first book of his I discovered (very interesting), later the Cyberiad (fun). I finally saw Solaris - the 2000ish remake, I hope the book is better than the movie adaptation.
He certainly could tell a good tale, I'm sure he'll be missed.
I can't watch any news about the western world's increasingly paranoid and delusional wars any more without being reminded that, in warfare, the biggest danger is of becoming indistinguishable from your enemy.
Oh, and Eric Blair. Not a science fiction author, but wrote a certain book which is still a brilliant work of science fiction in my eyes. Of the Ballard-style observation of a civilisation readjusted in some horrifically plausible manner...;-)
SimCity was inspired by one of the stories in Cyberiad (about the despot for whom the constructors made a si mulated kingdom for him to rule over, that broke out of the box and took over). Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least. In memory of Stanislaw Lem, here are some of my favorite poems composed by the Electronic Bard from Cyberiad:
Klapaucius [art.net] witnessed the first trial run of Trurl's [art.net] poetry machine, the Elecronic Bard. Here are the some of the wonderful poems it instantly composed to Klapaucius's specifications:
This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:
The Petty and the Small
Are overcome with gall
When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
Klapaucius too, I ween,
Will turn the deepest green
To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.
This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!
A poem all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the Headless... (the description and the poem are unfinished, thanks to the quick intervention of Trurl.)
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!
While the English translations are trully brilliant, Lem should be read in a Slavic language [wikipedia.org] to be fully appreciated. He constantly plays with words and makes up new ones, which IMHO are not translatable to English.
It is difficult to explain - a language expert would do it much better than me. In English Lem is still interesting and funny, but something subtle is missing. It bugs me that there is no way for English readers to ever fully enjoy it.
In all honesty I don't speak Polish, although I can understand some, but I have read Lem in Bulgarian, Russian and English.
This is the beginning of Lem's short story "Automatthew's Friend," 1977, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel.
A certain robot, planning to go on a long and dangerous voyage, heard of a most useful device which its inventor called an electric friend. He would feel better, he thought, if he had a companion, even a companion that was only a machine, so he went to the inventor and asked to be shown an artificial friend.
"Sure," replied the inventor. (As you know, in fairy tales no one says "sir" or "ma'am" to anyone else, not even to dragons, it's only with the kinds that you have to stand on ceremony.) With this he pulled from his pocket a handful of metal granules, that looked like fine shot.
"What is what?" said the robot in surprise.
"Tell me your name, for I forgot to ask it in the proper place of this fairy tale," said the inventor.
"My name is Automatthew."
"That's too long for me, I'll call you Autom."
"Autom's from Automaton, but have it your way," replied the other.
"Well then, Autommy my lad, you have here before you a batch of electrofriends. You ought to know that by vocation and specialization I am a miniaturizer. Which means I make large and heavy mechanisms small and portable. Each one of these granules is a concenntrate of electrical thought, highly versatile and intelligent. I won't say a genius, for that would be an exaggeration if not false advertising. True, my intention is precisely to create electrical geniuses and I shall not rest until I have made them so very tiny that it will be possible to carry thousands of them around in your vest pocket; the day I can pour them into sacks and sell them by weight, like said, I will have achieved my most cherished goal. But enough now of my plans for the future..."
Memoirs is essentially a satire about a society with too many self-deceptions, and how reality has a way of unraveling even though society refuses to notice or acknowledge any problem. Vacuum is a collection of book reviews -- reviews of books that never existed; in fact some could not possibly exist. These brief descriptions don't do Lem's books credit. Read them yourself; they're devilishly clever.
The Futurological Congress is not only terribly entertaining, but also quite twisted, and I recommend it very much. One has to think that The Matrix and even P.K. Dick owe a lot to Lem, his way of thinking, and some of the dark scenarios it leads to.
FYI, Solaris was never properly translated into English. The English version is a translation from the French, and misses a lot compared to the Polish original. (Not sure if the "data loss" occurred in the move from Polish to French or from French to English.)
Chronocurrent exformatics is based on the existence of ISOTHEMES (q.v.). An ISOTHEME is a line in SEMANTIC SPACE (q.v.) passing through all thematically identical publications...
Lem predicted Wikipedia (an encyclopedia so up-to-date, it can predict the future):
In an extreme instance, in which there is a Propervirt of less than 0.9%, the TEXT OF THE PRESENT PROSPECTUS may likewise undergo an ABRUPT change. If, while you are reading these sentences, the words begin to jump about, and the letters quiver and blur, please interrupt your reading for ten or twenty seconds to wipe your glasses, adjust your clothing, or the like, and then start reading AGAIN from the beginning, and NOT JUST from the place where your reading was interrupted, since such a TRANSFORMATION indicates that a correction of DEFICIENCIES is now taking place.
but for 'The Cyberiad' "tales of the cybernetic age" which at age 11 was the first exposure to not only humorous SF, but truely 'intelligent' SF. Rest in peace Stan.
Lem is one of the few SF authors I've read who truly have a sense of the utter alienness of the alien. Other cultures aren't just furry/scaly/tall/short humans with funny names, but things entirely incomprehensible to the humans who interact with them.
I always loved that about his stories. I'm sad he's gone.
A lot of people are mentioning Lem's translator Michael Kandel as an amazing guy. Someone who translated the essence of Lem's work, not just the words.
Hey Editors, let's interview him!
(To be honest, the translations are so good that I always kind of thought Lem just wrote in English... even though the Kandel's name is right there in the book)
Huh? You mean "Trurl's Prescription," the story of the Steelypips and the THING that wouldn't go away? Don't be ridiculous, that's a universal human experience, not an exclusively Polish one.
I wish to draw the slashdot crowd's attention to what is one of S. Lem's most incredible short stories from the collection "Imaginary Magnitude". Picking up on a particularly insightful comment made by another post that S. Lem had a real sense of the "alienness" of aliens (ex. FIASCO); in the story "Golem XIV" he takes this further by depicting a superintelligent machine far beyond our reasoning ability that gives lectures to mankind. S. Lem manages to convincingly PUT HIMSELF IN THE POSITION OF A SUPERINTELLIGENT BEING talkiing down to us mere humans and examines ideas such as the subjugation of the sense of self to pure intellect as well as the next steps in Man's cognitive evolution. He then discusses the possibility that this may be but a few small steps in the climb to cosmic intelligences...
An extremely thought provoking story it reminds me of the comment in Time magazine that S. Lem "is the best writer, in any language, of science fiction in the 20th century".
The level of his discourse is so far above that of other writers that I hardly consider them in the same breath. He never considered science fiction as being just adventure stories set in the future but rather as an avenue to explore new worlds of thought.
Did you know that Philip K. Dick thought that Lem was a communist conspiracy directed against PKD, and that Lems prose was in fact written by a commitee? Well, you can almost understand that, I'll tell you why.
Being Polish, I grew up with Lem's prose. A lot has been said on that already here, so I'll make it short. Lem's prose was unbelievably diverse, ranging from "classic" SF stories in the archetypic SF setup (rockets, pilots, robots etc. in the Pirx series) through grotesque and postmodern, humorous and twisted stories about the Ijon Tichy, to the utterly fantastic Cyberiade, the XX century version of the Grimm tales; don't forget the critiques on non-existing books, which remind me so much of Jorge Luis Borges.
However, not only the forms were diverse; Lem pondered upon a whole lot of subjects. Just to name a few examples: he envisioned VR technology in the early sixties, and analysed its impact both, seriously and in a very hillarious manner. He belonged to the first who recognized how our society relies on information storage, and the motive of a civilisation collapse due to the destruction of the information storages (paper, in his early works, and computers / networks later on). His thoughts on the possibilities on communications with aliens (or, lack of such possibilities) are unique and very intelligent.
His last book, printed in 1989, is called "Fiasco". The story follows the lines of one of the first books by Lem, called "The Magellans Cloud" -- an optimistic, communist utopy, which ends in the first contact between humans and aliens. However, "Fiasco" (the title says it all) is utterly pesimistic, and its bottom line is that we cannot really communicate not only with the aliens, but even with each other. The book contains several plays on earlier prose of Lem, including fragments of his early stories; moreover, the bold Pilot Pirx is killed in the first chapter.
Lem never went back to writing prose. Personally, I think that with "Fiasco" he conveys the message that everything he had to tell he told us; but the communication with us, the readers, the aliens, was a Fiasco after all.
This communication gap is a theme in many of Lem's books, not just Fiasco. I'd argue that its the central theme in Solaris as well. Its also present in The Invincible (implacably hostile nanobots), Return from the Stars (astronaut doesn't fit in the society of the future), His Master's Voice (humans fail to decipher the alien message), and others. Its a theme that Lem returned to again and again, the inevitable failure of communication and comprehension, the ultimate unfriendliness and inhumanness of the
Trained to be a physician, and "brought up with the scientific outlook" by his father who was also a physician, he subsequently "spent many hours over coffee arguing about God" with his friend Karol Wojtyla who taught theology in Cracow and who is now better known as Pope John-Paul II. In an interview, Lem indicated his thinking on religion: "for moral reasons I am an atheist -- for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally" (L. W. Michaelson, "A Conversation with Stanislaw Lem": Amazing (Jan. 1981): 116-19. Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, 7, 2 (1984): 218-37. Also see Raymond Federman, "An Interview with Stanislaw Lem," Science-Fiction Studies, 10 (1983): 2-14).
I was also saddened by Octavia Butler's death and think highly of her work, but I don't think she (or anyone living) compares in impact to Lem. IIRC, he is (was) the most read SF author in the world.
And I'm a known feminist, not shy about pointing out discrimination that I see.
Except that he has moved to Poland once Ukraine was no longer Polish. Mickiewicz wrote "Lithuana, my fatherland", making it doubtful. Sklodowska-Curie after marrying Curie wasn't so much Polish. Chopin could be considered french with a bit of stretching. Copernicus being Prussian was Polish just the same as Texan is American. (Poland is a country binding several regions)
But no matter how much you try to twist facts, Lem was Polish, considering himself Polish, being born in a Polish family, spending great most o
More than Solaris (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the first science fiction authors to truly show us that science fiction is more than just a genre of space novels, it's a way to place one's self outside of reality so that it can be safely analyzed and commented on from a distance.
Rest in peace. I eagerly await the day you raise to the ranks of Asimov & Tolkien when the world will remember you as more than "that guy who wrote a story for a George Clooney movie."
I know it will happen.
Re:More than Solaris (Score:2)
Yeah, I really enjoyed a lot of the Sci-Fi series that did this, too. Too bad Hollywood hasn't caught onto this.
Take a wonderful book with an underlying subtext about politics and military mentality and turn it into a teen flick full of guts and gore.
Who ever wrote that s
Re:More than Solaris (Score:2)
This is highly subjective, but a lot of people think that movie is a brilliantly campy satire of the book... which was itself quite possibly meant as something of a satire of a fascist military mentality. I'd agree with this, myself.
I saw the movie first and thought it was unnecessarily cheesy and wasn't a big fan. A couple of years later I read the book. I was pretty blown away by a) ho
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, not really. There's not a scrap of irony in the whole book. If you want some irony and satire, try The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which is also his best book), or Job, A Comedy of Justice. Starship Troopers was written as a polemic in response the ending of nuclear testing by the U.S., and it's meant 100% seriously; it also has nothing at all to do with fascism. Check out the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] if you want to
Re:More than Solaris (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More than Solaris (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Insightful)
well, there was that movie (and I mean the original, not the remake). I saw it back in college and loved it...got it at home but haven't gotten around to watching it yet. (I also have the clooney film, was a $5 xmas gift, just for completness' sake).
Anyway, could part of the problem with Solaris be that the translation isn't as good as his others? As far as I know, the only English translation of Solaris was based on a
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, having read both in the splendid Spanish translation, direct from the Polish (Minotauro, Argentina), I respectfully disagree.
"The Ciberyad" is, as you said, delightful, but "Solaris" is deep.
It looks like the (in)famous English translation was horrible indeed, because "Solaris" is appreciated very differently by English and non-English speaking
My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:5, Interesting)
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:5, Interesting)
What really blows my mind is that Lem presumably wrote that poem in Polish, and Michael Kandel translated it (and other poems and stories) to English.
It's astounding how well Kandel translated the poetry, so it still rhymes, scans well, and makes perfect sense (unlike most other poetry). Kandel also translated a lot of Lem's other stuff ABOUT words and language, in Cyberiad and other books.
Parent
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:3, Interesting)
Solaris is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
I've never read the book, but the George Clooney Solaris movie is one of the best films ever made. I'm quite sure of this since everyone seems to hate it.
The old guard passes away... (Score:5, Interesting)
He had very little respect for the Golden Age writers, calling their works "kitsch." Most of his attitude toward the gigantic American SF oeuvre was no doubt attributable to the fact that, writing in the Soviet bloc, he had to use great care in expressing his ideas lest he be subject to government censorship, and thus thought the "frivolous" nature of American writers was wasteful of time and print.
He was greatly admired by writers such as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Harlan Ellison, however, and his works are widely available in good English translations today.
Re:The old guard passes away... (Score:3, Interesting)
If by "greatly admired" you mean "reported to the FBI"...
"Speed: It will turn you into your parents." -Frank Zappa
And the admiration was mutual: read "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case - with Exceptions" and "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans [depauw.edu]", from Microworlds [art.net].
From Stanislaw Lem's [www.lem.pl] web site:
On September 2, 1974 Philip K. Dick sent the following letter to the FBI (Please keep in mind Mr. Dick was most probably suffering from schizophrenia):
Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2,
Re:The old guard passes away... (Score:3, Funny)
That kind of paranoid conspiracy crap sounds like a Philip K Dick novel. Oh wait, we ARE discussing Philip K Dick's writings -- to the FBI! Not a novel exactly, but certainly one of his more interesting short stories.
The ranting anonymous cowards seems to have a few good points about The Party running things here in the United States... Until he gets to the part about blaming Michael Moore for the fact that we're losing our constitutionally protected freedoms and going to war based on lies...
Iraq is
A Very Impactful Author (Score:2)
Re:A Very Impactful Author (Score:5, Informative)
There's a story behind this. Tarkovsky was allowed to leave Russian to attend the World's Fair in Japan (a *remarkable* achievement for that period of Iron Curtain history!). He had hoped to film futuristic scenes from the fair, but due to delays with passports and importing their film equipment, they arrived too late, missing the event! Rather than go home from this hugely expensive (both in terms of money and political capitol spent) trip empty-handed, they filmed highway scenes with a hand-held and added sound effects. Your friend is correct. To the average Russian, the "modern" Japanese highway system (not to mention it's automobiles) would have seemed very futuristic. In the same way that the Modified Ford Taurus police cruisers from 1984's Terminator now seem dated, so does this scene.
Parent
He will be missed! (Score:3, Informative)
Great author (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great author (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, actually neither is most American SF. True, this was a staple of a great deal of American film SciFi (read "sciffy") of the 50s and early 60s, but then most B-movies were corny and cliche' no matter WHAT the genre.
For all the Euro-elitism, American SF has always been of uniform high quality, if only because there was so much of it.
FWIW, can you name ANOTHER well-regarded Polish SF writer?
Re:Great author (Score:2)
From the search on Amazon it seems like english speaking world don't have a chance to read anything of his yet. ('The Hexer' based on his stories may have english subs but it is one really bad movie)
Re:Great author (Score:2)
Princesses in Space? (Score:2)
Re:Great author (Score:4, Insightful)
about interesting authors past and present. Most of them haven't been translated
to English, yet some of them surely will be.
If we talk about Iron Courtain authors, Janusz Zajdel (died in 1985) is a must.
He's novels like Limes Inferior or Paradyzja show great deal about falsehoods of
governments, absurdities of total crontrol, etc. Much like Aldus Huxley's Brave
New World, yet written from within iron courtain. A must. Translated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_A._Zajdel>
From current authors I would recommend Jacek Dukaj. His all books are original and
different from eachother, he combines Gaiman's atmosphere with Dick's imagination
and Zelazny's plot making... Yhh, well, highly original author, each and every
book is a delight. A definite must read. Don't know if he's been translated (and
the translation would be hard, as he, for example, uses special grammar for post-human
beings (think: Brinn's uplift saga, only it's not vocabulary but grammar).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukaj>
And finally, Edmund Wnuk-Lipiski with his Apostezjon trilogy. One of the best things
I have read. It moved me deeply, as it brought deep insight on religion (among other
things), given from the sci-fi perspective...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Wnuk-Lipi%C5%
Oh, and it's also worth to mention that Andrzej Sapkowski is one of the most known
world-wide Polish authors, though it is not a sci-fi, but a fantasy and as such it
has a bit different ideas and features to work on. It is good, but in my opinion
if you are looking for something which does The Thing like Stanisaw Lem's work did,
you should rather look for the former three authors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapkowski>
Parent
Return from the Stars (Score:2)
He certainly could tell a good tale, I'm sure he'll be missed.
Re:Return from the Stars (Score:2)
Which SF writers changed the way you view things? (Score:5, Interesting)
John Brunner (the internet, in the mid 70s, with privacy concerns for all. OMG)
Philip K Dick (mad as a bag of hammers)
Ray Bradbury (mostly for his non-SF short stories, funnily enough, but for Farenheit 451)
Robert Heinlein (just for the idea that when you don't know what to do, keep the readers on their toes by saying "the door dilates". Got to love that)
Fredric Brown (short stories about time travel that work)
Neal Stephenson (real geeks, real simple (lousy endings though... ))
there are many more, these are the few I can think of off the top of my head.
Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing (Score:2)
I can't watch any news about the western world's increasingly paranoid and delusional wars any more without being reminded that, in warfare, the biggest danger is of becoming indistinguishable from your enemy.
Oh, and Eric Blair. Not a science fiction author, but wrote a certain book which is still a brilliant work of science fiction in my eyes. Of the Ballard-style observation of a civilisation readjusted in some horrifically plausible manner...
Lem was a truly amazing writer (Score:5, Interesting)
Lem was my favorite writer [art.net], and I'm sad to hear he's gone.
SimCity was inspired by one of the stories in Cyberiad (about the despot for whom the constructors made a si mulated kingdom for him to rule over, that broke out of the box and took over). Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least. In memory of Stanislaw Lem, here are some of my favorite poems composed by the Electronic Bard from Cyberiad:
Klapaucius [art.net] witnessed the first trial run of Trurl's [art.net] poetry machine, the Elecronic Bard. Here are the some of the wonderful poems it instantly composed to Klapaucius's specifications:
This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:
This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!
A poem all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the Headless ... (the description and the poem are unfinished, thanks to the quick intervention of Trurl.)
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
Femfatalatron 1.0 Product
Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer (Score:4, Informative)
While the English translations are trully brilliant, Lem should be read in a Slavic language [wikipedia.org] to be fully appreciated. He constantly plays with words and makes up new ones, which IMHO are not translatable to English.
It is difficult to explain - a language expert would do it much better than me. In English Lem is still interesting and funny, but something subtle is missing. It bugs me that there is no way for English readers to ever fully enjoy it.
In all honesty I don't speak Polish, although I can understand some, but I have read Lem in Bulgarian, Russian and English.
Parent
Automatthew's Friend (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the beginning of Lem's short story "Automatthew's Friend," 1977, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel.
Farewell to a great thinker and writer (Score:2)
Memoirs is essentially a satire about a society with too many self-deceptions, and how reality has a way of unraveling even though society refuses to notice or acknowledge any problem. Vacuum is a collection of book reviews -- reviews of books that never existed; in fact some could not possibly exist. These brief descriptions don't do Lem's books credit. Read them yourself; they're devilishly clever.
The Matrix owes a lot to Lem (Score:2, Interesting)
Solaris in English (Score:3, Insightful)
Lem on Isothemes and Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
Lem defined Isothemes:
Lem predicted Wikipedia (an encyclopedia so up-to-date, it can predict the future):
I'll remember him not for 'Solaris' (Score:4, Interesting)
The Alienness of the Alien (Score:3, Insightful)
I always loved that about his stories. I'm sad he's gone.
Let's interview Michael Kandel (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey Editors, let's interview him!
(To be honest, the translations are so good that I always kind of thought Lem just wrote in English... even though the Kandel's name is right there in the book)
Re:Let's interview Michael Kandel (Score:3, Insightful)
most incredible short story by S. Lem (Score:3, Interesting)
An extremely thought provoking story it reminds me of the comment in Time magazine that S. Lem "is the best writer, in any language, of science fiction in the 20th century".
The level of his discourse is so far above that of other writers that I hardly consider them in the same breath. He never considered science fiction as being just adventure stories set in the future but rather as an avenue to explore new worlds of thought.
May he rest in peace.
Stanislaw Lem: a communist conspiracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Being Polish, I grew up with Lem's prose. A lot has been said on that already here, so I'll make it short. Lem's prose was unbelievably diverse, ranging from "classic" SF stories in the archetypic SF setup (rockets, pilots, robots etc. in the Pirx series) through grotesque and postmodern, humorous and twisted stories about the Ijon Tichy, to the utterly fantastic Cyberiade, the XX century version of the Grimm tales; don't forget the critiques on non-existing books, which remind me so much of Jorge Luis Borges.
However, not only the forms were diverse; Lem pondered upon a whole lot of subjects. Just to name a few examples: he envisioned VR technology in the early sixties, and analysed its impact both, seriously and in a very hillarious manner. He belonged to the first who recognized how our society relies on information storage, and the motive of a civilisation collapse due to the destruction of the information storages (paper, in his early works, and computers / networks later on). His thoughts on the possibilities on communications with aliens (or, lack of such possibilities) are unique and very intelligent.
His last book, printed in 1989, is called "Fiasco". The story follows the lines of one of the first books by Lem, called "The Magellans Cloud" -- an optimistic, communist utopy, which ends in the first contact between humans and aliens. However, "Fiasco" (the title says it all) is utterly pesimistic, and its bottom line is that we cannot really communicate not only with the aliens, but even with each other. The book contains several plays on earlier prose of Lem, including fragments of his early stories; moreover, the bold Pilot Pirx is killed in the first chapter.
Lem never went back to writing prose. Personally, I think that with "Fiasco" he conveys the message that everything he had to tell he told us; but the communication with us, the readers, the aliens, was a Fiasco after all.
Cheers,
January
Theme of the insurmountable communication gap (Score:3, Interesting)
POPE JOHN PAUL II (Score:3, Interesting)
Odd how different paths inetersect...
From: "Stanislaw Lem" page on "Celebrity Atheists" website, last modified 19 Jun 2005 (http://www.celebatheists.com/wiki/index.php?title =Stanislaw_Lem [celebatheists.com]; viewed 24 August 2005):
Trained to be a physician, and "brought up with the scientific outlook" by his father who was also a physician, he subsequently "spent many hours over coffee arguing about God" with his friend Karol Wojtyla who taught theology in Cracow and who is now better known as Pope John-Paul II. In an interview, Lem indicated his thinking on religion: "for moral reasons I am an atheist -- for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally" (L. W. Michaelson, "A Conversation with Stanislaw Lem": Amazing (Jan. 1981): 116-19. Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, 7, 2 (1984): 218-37. Also see Raymond Federman, "An Interview with Stanislaw Lem," Science-Fiction Studies, 10 (1983): 2-14).
Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago (Score:3)
Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mickiewicz wrote "Lithuana, my fatherland", making it doubtful.
Sklodowska-Curie after marrying Curie wasn't so much Polish.
Chopin could be considered french with a bit of stretching.
Copernicus being Prussian was Polish just the same as Texan is American. (Poland is a country binding several regions)
But no matter how much you try to twist facts, Lem was Polish, considering himself Polish, being born in a Polish family, spending great most o