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Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
I have some history with Lem's work. Years back, I went on a serious Stanislaw Lem bender. I read and loved pretty much all of his stuff. So it came as a surprise to me to run across Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (hereafter MFiaB). It was published in 1971, so it was certainly out and available when I was reading Lem left and right; I must have just missed it somehow.
And in a way I'm happy that I left accidentally left my future self this treat. MFiaB is a fantastic piece of work. I won't give away any spoilers that happen after the first ten pages or so. The setup alone, though, is pretty representative of what you're in for if you pick up this book.
MFiaB is perhaps the most overtly political thing I've read from Lem, which is saying a lot: Lem specializes in parables and satire that expose the absurdity of modern life in general and politics in particular. MFiaB tells the first-person story of a man who lives in "the Building." The Building is an entirely self-contained society that the book explains was built when the United States and Russia both relocated their critical governmental functions to isolated bunkers after the appearance of a paper-eating bacteria destroyed civilization as we know it.
It seems that the Building is at war with the Anti-Building, and it's a fierce war between two incredible bureaucracies. Everyone is a potential spy, most people could be double agents, triple agents aren't uncommon, and the recent appearance of quadruple, quintuple, sextuple and even septuple agents has really increased the confusion and paranoia level. Of course, agents aren't just working for the Building or anti-Building -- the various departments and fiefdoms within the Building itself spy on each other and attempt to unmask each others' agents.
The story is told in the first-person by a cadet of some sort in the Building. His name is never mentioned in the book, a parallel to Kafka's The Castle where the protagonist is referred to only as "K." As with The Castle, our protagonist is sometimes very sympathetic and sometimes very frustrating; it's clear who we're following, but I was never quite clear what to think of the fellow.
In marked contrast to The Castle, though, our protagonist in MFiaB starts out by receiving a Mission. A Secret Mission, from the Commander in Chief himself. Or maybe it was the Chief Commander - or maybe someone else entirely. Problem is, his superiors won't tell him what the mission is, let alone the proper chain of command to clarify it. Through accidental subterfuge and persistence, he finally corners someone into providing his mission briefing, however some part of the officialdom steals it back before he can read more than the first somewhat disturbing page. (According to the one page he has time to read, phase one of his mission involves cornering his superiors and forcing them to provide the mission briefing.) However, it's possible that pursuing the ambiguity of the mission is his mission, so he's duty-bound to get on about it. Besides, he really doesn't know what else to do.
It goes on from there. A serious reflection of cold-war paranoia and partisanship, MFiaB is an exploration of how a closed, bureaucratic, paranoid society can become dependent on its own closed, bureaucratic, paranoid ways to the point where any attempt to introduce sanity is an act of treason.
While the book centers on the claustrophobic / claustrophilic society in the Building, it's not at all abstract and detached -- there are several fairly violent scenes, and at least one suicide. Not to mention numerous arrests, betrayals which might actually be assistance, and other more ambiguous but just as disturbing events. MFiaB really succeeds in bringing home the mental-health effects of constant vigilance and its inevitable descent into paranoia. Again like Catch-22 or The Castle, MFiaB succeeds as a comedy, a tragedy, a farce, and a cautionary tale. I found myself reading some sentences a couple of times and getting completely different feelings from them each time.
If you haven't read Lem before, this may or may not be a good place to start. MFiaB is dense, and dizzying. If you've got a penchant for traditional literature, MFiaB is probably an excellent introduction to Lem. The use of language, neologisms, and wordplay is amazing, the more so because the book is translated from Lem's native Polish.
If you're looking for a lighter and quicker read that is still representative of Lem at his best, I'd probably recommend the also-excellent Futurological Congress. For short story fans, Tales of Prix the Pilot is an good choice. If you're willing to put some energy into it, though, MFiaB is certainly well worth the investment of time and energy, and really puts all of Lem's formidable skills to use in service of a great story. Highly recommended.
You can purchase Memoirs Found in a Bathtub from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit yours, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Like I've always said, if it isn't a dystopian work that exposes the inherent absurdity of authoritarian bureaucracies, it isn't worth reading.
amazing!!!! after I realized he didn't post the review of it, i bothered reading it!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Finally, a decent slashdot book review.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Is this the same Stanislaw Lem that wrote Solaris, that Steven Soderburgh is about to/in the process of remaking?
I must find out more about this Lem fellow. Does he have many other noteworthy pieces?
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
to Lem's work was thru reading Hofstadter & Dennett's Mind's I. Obviously SciFi worthy of leading edge philosophical musings.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
the recent appearance of quadruple, quintuple, sextuple and even septuple agents has really increased the confusion and paranoia level
/w me at all times just trying to keep track of which side the secret agents were really on!
I think this is excellent proof of the following statement...
If you haven't read Lem before, this may or may not be a good place to start. MFiaB is dense, and dizzying.
I'm not sure if I would pick up this book. I prefer my reading to be casual and entertaining if not intriguing. I wouldn't want to have to keep scrap paper
dmarien
"It is as if Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Orwell got together to write a sci-fi novel..."
Now, call me old fashioned, but I'm more of a RH/Pohl/Asimov/Smith fan.
If Borges, Kafka, Vonnegut and Orwell got together to write a scifi novel, we'd have a surrealist oppressive society trying to decide how paranoid to be about it's own growing internal facism.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
I wonder if the RPG was inspired by this book?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Around the same time I read a Phillip K Dick book whose title I cannot recall but whose premise sounds similar, with a couple mind-bending twists. In it the two forces are going forward and backwards in time, reading (and maybe changing) a history book about the war they're fighting. Anyone remember this?
for uncovering the absurdity of bureauocracies and the marketplace. Try reading Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis, or Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. You get the benefit of learning something about reality.
Don't get me wrong, nothing brightens my day more than an Orwellian dystopia where people are reduced to robotic flesh and emotions have been run through an authoraritarian meat grinder--I just like my gloom and doom with a dose of reality.
Funny, This inteview with Tom Cruise was found in a Bathtub too.
tcd004
It seems as if the book would appeal to some, but I prefer the feeble mindedness of MAD magazine and whatever else. Like another poster said, I prefer to enjoy my reading, not be plauged by it.
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
See Amazon
/. poster spell his name wrong or did Amazon?
Did the
Either way, someone fucked up bad!
dmarien
Hmm... why isn't there a computer game version of Paranoia?
Greg Costikyan I'm talking to you...
While nearly everything Lem writes is worthy, the one I keep going back to is The Cyberiad (with obligatory Amazon pointer).
It is like an Odyssey (either Homer's or James Joyce's) for the cybernetic age.
"The Cyberiad," Will Wright's favorite book, is amazingly great, and the translation from Polish preserves (or reconstructs) a huge number of puns. However, "Solaris" is double-translated from Polish to French to English, so I hestitate to read the thing. I wonder if they'll release a new translation to go with the movie.
I tried to read this book, but the pages were too soggy.
Perhaps some would argue that this is not necessarily "News for Nerds," but it's certainly stuff that matters.
When one thinks of the ways that the world has changed since World War II, how many of the changes that occurred came about through reasons of war and political machinery, it is staggering to realize that we really are in a "new world," where the new military-industrial complex is cloaked by bureaucracy and the old, corrupt political machines are replaced by the new, corrupt rhetoricians and wordsmiths. If Politicians, Priests, and Poets are the only real leaders, then the paradigm that separates them has changed.
Remembering Kafka's writings from college was really disturbing and revealing--nearly illuminating. Franz Kafka was one of the few brave souls of his period to declare through his writings that humankind had lost its rightful place in the world, and as a result, humans would become increasingly isolated, alienated, and cynical. I believe that the world is increasingly cynical and apathetic, and in many ways, our own private and public attitudes feed the modern conspiracy theorists and doomsayers. I don't think that the world is "All Doom and Gloom," but I shudder to think of being conquered by ideas rather than by guns. That's real bondage.
Not Prix, altho it's a common mistake, I guess because so many pilots are.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Who the f$ck is Brooks Talley. No e-mail address
and no Slashdot UserID suggests he is FAKE like
most of the submitted stories in the last few days.
Thanks. Enjoying some superb Amerikan grown
marijuana.
Stanislaw Lem has a homepage here. He's 80 years old, but he is still writing. During WW II he lived through the Soviet and German occupations. His bio is here.
From Dictionary.com:
Dystopian adj. Of or relating to an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.
First off - Lem is one of the greatest science-fiction authors in our time. I often refer to his works as "serious science-fiction", the reason being that most of his novels come absolutely realistic. (I am not talking about Pirx here ... :-)
...
MFiaB however was the first of Lem's books I didn't finish - and I have read nearly all of them. The unlogical behavior of the characters sometimes made me scream - "How could ANYONE be so STUUPID?!?"
But anyways - if your looking for decent science-fiction (far away from Star Trek and sorts that is) - read Lem. And Lem. And Lem.
"Fiasko" might be a little hard at first, but boy, just too incredible
In the green header of the book review the Author's name is spelled: Stainislaw, whereas the rest of the review refers to Stanislaw.
Amazon spells his name, Stanislaw.
dmarien
Let's not forget Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy. Kafa was the cartographer of the post industrial, paranoid, alienated, disenfranchised; and, Stanislaw Lem and Gold are latecomers, fun to read but just picking up the thread where the master left off. Strange Kafka wanted all his works burnt because he felt them deficient.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
STANISLAW as in STAN not STAIN
For those who are interested in the author, Vitrifax is a very good website dedicated to Lem.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" is a brilliant movie that proves that Kubrick's work slowly went downhill with subsequent project, as finally witnessed in "Eyes Wide Shut", where a man investigates fidelity, gets interested in a common whore, and beats a dead horse with a sledghammer..... but that's another matter.
The comic brilliance of this movie can be summed up with this scene, when Mandrake needed to place a call from an army base that could save the world but can't find anything but a payphone:
------------------
Mandrake: Colonel...that Coca Cola machine. I want you to shoot the lock off it. There may be some change in there.
Guano: That's private property.
Mandrake: Colonel! Can you possibly imagine what is going to happen to you, your frame outlook way of life and everything, when they learn that you have obstructed a telephone call to the President of the United States? Can you imagine?! Shoot it off! Shoot! With a gun! That's what the bullets are for you twit!!
Guano: Okay. I'm gonna get your money for ya. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what's gonna happen to you?
Mandrake: What?!
Guano: You're gonna have to answer to the Coca Cola company.
----------------
Ahhhhh. I love that scene.
2000 billion thumbs up.
I find Lem's writings to shine when he focuses on human interactions within closed enviroments (Hospitial of the Transfiguration, Solaris). Don't get me wrong, I like the Tales of Pirx the Pirate, but then not quite as engrossing as stories of people 'trapped'.
The government's moral compass is controlled by GPS.
In times of crises, they alter it to suit their needs.
Hey, this sounds great, I must have missed that one as well. Stanislaw Lem fans might be interested to note that they're coming out with a movie based on Solaris, another book of his. It's being directed by the guy who did Erin Brockavitch though, so don't get too excited.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I think...
How this book review relevant to anything normally discussed on Slashdot?
There already is a movie based on solaris it is russian, by tcharkovsky(sp?) and i have always menat to see it when i have 4 hours free.
anyway it is quite amazing sodenbourgh (sp?) decided to do a remake on that, it doesnt look like hollywood type novel.
But of course one thing typical of hollywood is to remake foreign classics.
anyway i hope its good and not as melodramatic as erin brochovitch.
REWRITE:
Our protagonist in MS starts out by receiving a Mission to update some code...Problem is, his superiors won't show him the rest of the code, let alone the proper chain of command to clarify it. Through accidental subterfuge and persistence, he finally corners someone into providing him with the code, however some part of the officialdom steals it back before he can read more than the first somewhat disturbing line./B)
Can I bum a sig?
Great, I'm as happy as a puppy with 2 peters.
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
Neologism \Ne*ol"o*gism\, n. [Cf. F. n['e]ologisme.]
1. The introduction of new words, or the use of old words in a new sense.
--Mrs. Browning.
[1913 Webster]
2. A new word, phrase, or expression.
[1913 Webster]
3. A new doctrine; specifically, rationalism.
[1913 Webster]
That's my new word for the day.
Check IMDB further, and you'll find that Steven Soderbergh also did a movie called Kafka. And, one of his early shorter films was apparently a rather disturbing Kafkaesque film (I haven't seen it).
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
with this post.
freebsd would have been a better sol'n. Instead you ruined everything with LiNUX.
Check out his movie Kafka.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
It sure sounds like it to me. Fantastic game, although after playing "The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues", all other adventures seemed bland and lifeless by comparison.
The Computer Is Your Friend!
We review Stranger in a Strange Land, followed by The Book of Kells, then the Res Gestae, then The Rosetta Stone.... Come on! This book bored me to near-death 21 years ago. It was a long grinding-down of the soul, like Catcher in the Rye. /.(literate, intelligent, older than 12 years) should have already been exposed to it.
I appreciate the effort of the review, and all, but by now, anybody likely to be on
This book review provides a perfect example of why my friends, family, and wife would never be interested in reading science fiction. "Paper-eating bacteria?" "Quadruple agents?" Not only does the plot lack believability, it sounds ridiculous to boot. It's really no wonder why this sort of fiction has no mass appeal: it's pure, unadulterated tripe, thrown together by some hack who could never make it as a real writer. Fans will say that it is "insightful" or some such nonsense, but at the end of the day, every minute you spend reading a book like "Memiors Found in a Bathtub" is a minute wasted.
There is this that eats CD layers!
Get your Unix fortune now!
Fans should also know that there already was a movie made based on his book solaris.
One of his best books is also "The Futurological Congress".
There are many more:
Stanislaw Lem
The writing of Stanislaw Lem
I just finished the Cyberiad -- Loved it!
But it's not "complete mindless fun" as each fun story is full of commentary about modern life in cold war poland (some are more overt than others). I don't have a lot of time to read and had to go a few days in between chapters -- I found that the stories have a definite aftertaste, in other words they take on different flavors as you think about the events Lem creates.
Um, no. You can email me at brooks at ipolis dot net if you want to. Dunno why it didn't get linked.
Cheers
-b
Interesting, yes.
News... not after 3 decades.
So is "Stuff that matters" a seperate category of Slashdot?(I always thought that it was just a phase amplifing "News for Nerds.")
Which book of his has a character whose brain has been cut in half, and the narrator is the left side of that brain? I remember that the guy has control of his speech and the right side of his body, and eventually communicates with the other side of his brain through tapping Morse code on his left hand.
Now I remember..."Peace on Earth". Interesting read. The Cyberiad is also excellent.
I really can't recommend this [...] book highly enough.
rating: 9
Whoa, talk about Kafkaesque!
Where do you people keep coming from? ANYTHING the editors [sic] feel is remotely interesting is fair game for slashdot. As it happens, Sci-fi book reviews are TOTALLY normal.
piece of paper wouldn't help you at all; no figure in the book knows it's own side...
seriously, i read about 20 books by lem (probably many more than published in the us?); he greatly shaped my sense for irony and positive sarcasm. his style is for me on one side connected with the strugazki brothers (sci-fi), on the other side there are duerrenmatt and kafka (paranoia, institutions, labyrinth).
in general, the comments in this thread by people who have read some of his books are in line with some of my experiences.
CmdrTaco: "Help him. Help him."
CowboyNeal: "Help who?."
CmdrTaco: "Help the bombadier."
CowboyNeal: "I'm the bombadier."
CmdrTaco: "Then help HIM."
CowboyNeal crawls back to find JonKatz lying injured on the floor. He's dying(or irrelevant) but he doesn't know it yet.
JonKatz: "I'm cold."
CowboyNeal, holding his innards in place: "You're gonna be okay kid."
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
this is my press release and i am standing by it, so when all the uproar subsides you can then BLOW ME.
(* dystopian works that expose the inherent absurdity of authoritarian bureaucracies *)
The last thing geeks need to hear is complaints about how stupid bureaucracies and PHB's are. Many of us are already aware and frustrated by such.
What we really need is either a practical book on how to *fix* those problems, or a book on how to *tolerate* and live comfortably with bureaucracies and PHB mentality so that we don't keep having urges to rage against the machine and end up getting fired or demoted.
Table-ized A.I.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the circumstances ounder which this book has been written. At the time, the Soviet Union was still intact and very much influential in Poland. A huge body of Lem's work is thinly veiled satire critisizing totalitarian givernments in general and USSR in particular (USA also got a fair beating at his hands). When you compare Lem to Orwell, keep in mind that Lem was writing in the face of potential immediate persecution. He walked a fine line, balancing satire, obscuring his ideas from censors but not general public and using his popularity with readers as a deterrent to his arrest. That takes guts.
MFIAB is fabulous, and so is everything else Lem has written. Pick it up, you won't regret it.
... that reflects the typical goverment employee-for-life is the fat man who decrypted the message - "There is no answer".
The Cyberiad is also very good - sort of a cybernetic Grimm's fairy tales. I think it was the second sally where the two constructors built the multimortal polypolice beast with laser eyes that was used to kidnap King Korodulan. Along with a green gig with a lantern on the left side for a diversion.
The translation of that book was outstanding - all the terms, rhymes, puns, and alliterations came through very well.
Chip H.
You're perfectly right. I mean, it's not like the United States would ever hold one of her own citizens in captivity without formally charging said citizen with a crime or allowing said citizen to speak to a lawyer. And even were such a thing to happen the government would surely at least guarantee that said citizen would eventually get a trial by jury.
Oh, wait . . .
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
That would be like a tyranical theocracy.
And authoritarian bureaucracy is like the EPA, the IRS or your local town planning board.
KFG
Cyberiad is one of his funniest books. It is the story (mainly) of two robot constructors (robots who construct all sorts of amazing things). It's rather like an Arabian Night for Robots. The translation, by Michael Kandel (despite the shared initials, no relation) is superb. When browsing Lem on the shelves, pay attention to the translator, if the translator is Kandel (who now writes his own SF) pay special attention. Unfortunately, the translation for Solaris (which was not made directly from the Polish original, but from a French or German translation) is deadly.
MEK
Credo quia impossibilis -- Tertullian
It used to be installed as part of the bsd-games package on Red Hat and other Linux distros. I'm very disappointed to find out and report that it was removed from the package in 1998 with version 2.2 because of a lack of a clear license. As far as I can tell, it was freely published the Jan/Feb 1997 edition of "SpaceGamer/FantasyGamer." It was probably meant to be public domain. It was simple, but a lot of fun.
If you want to find it, get it from the Debian archives here.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
http://www.cyberiad.info/english/dziela/cyberiada/ cyberiadapl.htm
After this short story, you will want to read everything he wrote.
I do think that MFiaB is a great book, but I would definitely not recommend it as an introduction to Lem. It's really quite a trip and takes a lot of patience to get through. The paper-eating blight history and archeological view is a great quick start but it gets somewhat hard to follow after that.
As others have said the Cyberiad may be the place to start, although I think the Chain of Chance is especially good to introduce people that aren't normally inclined to SF.
Another thing that's great about Lem is how easy it is to find used copies for cheap. Used Book Central has MFiaB for $2!.
Unlike the holy trinity usually espoused (Heinlein, Asimov,Clarke), the real ruling triumverate of scifi is Lem, PKD and Cordwainer Smith.
There have been plenty of posts on the first two so I'll just expound on the latter. CS was the man who wrote the Army's Psychological Warfare book (real name Col. Paul Linebarger). He already had a career as a Chinese studies professor, and was given a Chinese name by Sun Yat Sen. Obviously he had a full career outside of scifi but chose to write it as a hobby.
His stories revolved around a future government called the Instrumentality. No one messes with the Instrumentality- they are so way more dangerous then any other scifi government it's not funny.
The Instrumentality has been so successful at making people 'happy', using a slave race of bio-engineered ehanced humanoids from animal stock for economic activity and defending humanity that everyone is stagnating. So a lot of the main timeline stories have to do with the Rebirth, in which disease, accidental death, and misery is intentionally reintroduced and the slave races are treated right.
He also had non-Instrumentality stories, including two bizarre communist science stories, and War No. 81-Q in which wars are settled by fighting robotic zeppelins on TV (this was written in 1928!).
Most of his stuff was short stories, but he did write a novel called Norstrilia, about a boy from a superwealthy planet selling a crucial drug found on no other planet, who buys Earth. All of it.
Norstrilia and Dune came out the same year. Norstrilia is better.
Vance, LeGuin and Silverberg come close, but everyone else is an acne-pocked teenager compared to these folks.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Agreed. I think it is definitely not a "typical Lem" book. I would recommend "Solaris", "Eden", "Cyberiad" or "Pirx..." for a more typical Lem start.
Back in 1980s in Russia I was stunned by "Eden" - how did the authorities let this book out when it so obviously denounces the Soviet-style total information control? Great book indeed...
VKh
Thanks so much for reviewing this, I've been thinking of rereading Lem's work...as well as looking into Phillip K. Dick again.
I recently reread Lem's "The Futurological Congress" and was struck with how horrifyingly funny it is when read in the context the post Sept. 11 world. Lem's description of standard hotel emergency (anti-terrorism) gear is a hoot.
"Some of the hotel furnishings puzzled me---the ten-foot crowbar propped up in a corner of the jade and jasper bathroom, for example, or the khaki camouflage cape in the closet, or the sack of hardtack under the bed. Over the tub, next to the towels, hung an enormous spool of standard Alpine rope, and on the door was a card I first noticed when I went to triple-lock the super-yale. It read: "This Room Guaranteed BOMB-FREE. From the Management."
The thing that is most striking to me about Lem is how incredibly creative the man is. He tosses off more ideas per chapter (or short story) than one finds in most trilogies (or dare I say it...in the entire life's output of many science fiction writers). Miraculous stuff.
Vince
chente@attbi.com
While Solaris is great stuff and the Cyberiad is the funniest scifi novel in existence, I think the masterwork is The Star Diaries, a collection of very loosely connected stories (called Voyages) about humanity's arrogance, stupidity, and how these are universal attributes.
Lem's hero, Ijon Tichy (kind of an interstellar Candide), gets farther and farther from Earth and runs into more and more bizarre planets. On one voyage he is Earth's representative to being admitted to the galactic UN, but humanity is barred because we evolved from garbage and a germ-laden cough, and another planet takes bioengineering to it's illogical extreme.
Any one of these stories could have been a novel in a moneygrubber's hands, but Lem keeps the ideas flowing thickly and densely (in Rucker's sense of the word). The Star Diaries is an intense read.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
laughing...
Then please, by all means...DO NOT READ SCIENCE FICTION! And please...comment on what you have not and will never read with authority and conviciton. That always impresses people.
:-)
Vince
chente@attbi.com
Personally I can't stand PKD. Some of his ideas are interesting, but I don't like the style of writing. I think he might be medically insane.
Heinlein is competent, but all his books seem to follow more or less the same patterns (the hero is usually filthy rich, there's always some battle in court, etc.). Somewhat like Hollywood cinema, they're always extraordinary stories about extraordinary people. Personally I prefer extraordinary stories about ordinary people.
Silverberg has one good book (The Labyrinth) and the rest (the ones I've read, at least) are painfully bad.
Another author I like is John Varley. He usually has interesting, original ideas, and writes quite well. But in some of his books I have a feeling he just got lost and couldn't come up with an ending that made any sense.
Lem is definitely one of my favourite authors, and I'd recommend him to anyone who likes SF (and most people who don't as well). Memoirs is not a good place to start, though. Most of his books are much "lighter" and easier to read. I wouldn't recommend Memoirs (or His Master's Voice, or even Solaris) to someone who doesn't know any of his work.
Fiasco is a more or less conventional novel, where Lem's usual cynicism is woven into the story in a way that won't put off the casual readers.
Futurological Congress, Star Diaries and Memoirs of a Space Traveler are very funny books, and a good introduction to Lem's habit of creating new words to give a shape to new concepts. The same applies to a lot of his short stories. The Invasion from Aldebaran is brilliant.
Return from the Stars is (like Solaris) more about people than it is about the world, and will probably appeal to people who don't like SF, as well as to those who do.
Here are links to a couple of sites dedicated to Lem's work:
http://www.k26.com/solaris
http://www.cyberiad.info/english/main.htm
RMN
~~~
don't reply to my comments like that!
i never wrote that drivel
:)
hava niceday
Get your Unix fortune now!
Many people dismiss scifi as fantasy or power trips or sterile egghead thought games, which certainly it can be. But scifi is really more political then anything else. That facet is built into the very nature of the beast, as scifi is all about What Are The Consequences of This Technology/ Colonization/ Biochanges, etc. etc.
Lem wrote Memoirs and used the US CIA as backdrop, but really he was talking about the communist police state, and tweaked it right under their noses. Plenty of Lem's other works are political, but more about smashing the humanocentric world view then anything else.
Lem's spiritual scifi predecessor Karel Capek (the man who adapted the Czech word robot to it's current meaning) had a savagely funny book called War With The Newts that was a scathing indictment of the pre-WWII environment.
Asimov's Foundation series is very very political.
Star Trek has been political from day one.
The Dune series is nothing but politics- it may be CHOAM instead of GE/Microsoft, but the people are the same.
In general well-written histories can do the job better then scifi, but scifi can get you out of a mental rut and open your mind to other possible consequences that history just cannot deal with. A history book cannot tell you about what the DMCA or Homeland Defense can turn into like Fairenheit 451 or 1984 can.
In fact, speaking of 1984, scifi dystopias might even deter such evils from occuring and create history (or at least terminate them from happening). The reverse can be true though, a lot of British paranoia about the German WWI fleet was frothed up by the 1900s functional equivalent of a scifi/Clancy novel.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Ok, this has to be a troll. I mean, a homepage on geocities?
;)
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
This is one of my favorite books. On the surface, it's a parody of spys and "military intelligence". Deeper down, it's really about the meaning of life. Replace "what is the mission" with "what is the meaning of life" and you see the parallels.
In another level, it's a great book for programmers. It often has the kind of problems programmers love to solve. You're looking to find out what is going on, and you have a certain number of clues. But every conclusion you draw from those clues violates a subset of them. There is seemingly nothing you can think of that would explain all of them. But are all of the clues important, perhaps some are mere coincidence? These are thoughts that every programmer has had while debugging a particularly nasty problem. It's fun in a way, and maddening in the way. It's what makes this book so special.
If you like that sort of thing, you might want to also checkout Lem's "The Investigation" and also "The Chain of Chance" for some deep mysteries.
Kafka's The Trial. I haven't read The Castle tho.
Reading Philip K Dick's letter to the FBI about Lem says legions about Philip K Dick, the FBI and the level of intelligence in the intelligence community.
In invisible ink! :D
For those who like Lems work, let me suggest also two less-known but very good and very similar in their writings sci-fi novelists. Arkadi & Boris Strugatski. .I think that their novel "Definitely Maybe" are in many ways similar to the "Memoirs Found..." novel. The same questioning about the validity of the known social systems, the same claustrophobic feeling plus an excellent plot, to good to be described in a few worlds.
-- Where is the start button in this Linux thingy? --
It's kind of interesting that you mention Lem and Dick, their opposing viewpoints and their being on "opposite poles" as they're my two favorite SF writers. It may be something a lot like the radical right and the radical left moving so far to the extremes that they meet. A good case can be made for Lem being the most intelligent SF writer - but I wouldn't call Dick unintelligent by contrast. I would call him perhaps the most empathic SF writer - there's a deep sense of existential compassion in much of his work. It's true that he was a screwed up human being, but I don't know how he could have avoided being so, having seen the reality that he saw. And as much as I like Gibson and Sterling and Stephenson, I've yet to read anything from them that was as brilliant or compassionate as Lem and Dick. People who haven't read these two aren't really familiar with the best that SF has to offer. I just wish there were people to follow them, although William Vollman's mainstream work is similar, in a much more disturbing way ...
Umm, Kafka's K does have a mission: he is the new surveyor, his functions are best known to himself. That is the hilarity of the situation.
BTW, the movie is very well done,check it out
if you can find it.
Let the shit hit the fan.
Glad you mentioned "The Futurological Congress" because, if one disregards the bland title, it's not only one of the funniest and most incisive things Lem wrote, it's also a blueprint for "The Matrix", except Lem based the concept on psychoactives, not rebel computers. (And published the novel around 1973.)
This does spoil The Matrix for me, because while the jumpin' and kickin' is cool, the conceptual content of the movie is just Lem - severely watered down.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Here is a short review of one of these books I wrote last year:
I don't agree with his opinions on the Net, but I think his predictions on biotech are more on the money. In fact he compares evolution to a large, massively parallel computation.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I would like to comment on this review, but I am too busy writing my own reviews of a couple of other new book releases, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Art of War.
Catch-22 was first published in 1964. Memoirs was first published in 1961.
Though I rather doubt that Heller reads Polish, so he would have had to wait until 1971, which was when the first English version was published. 8-).
-- Terry
dibona is a bona.
Forget categories like "Stanislaw Lem" or "Science Fiction": The Cyberiad is unquestionably one of the all-time great works of literature.
...you may also like the fantasy-role-playing game Paranoia: a classic with a somewhat similar setting and feel. The well-written rulebook begins this way...
This sounds an AWFUL lot like West End Games' PARANOIA game. (Or considering publishing dates, the other way around.)
Thank you very much! Now I'm browsing at level 0, and I'll never read about goatse, sex with farm animals, dolphins or geese or any interesting troll article again!
YUO = LAMER
I strongly recommend to anyone who feels out-of-sync with the world they live in (or with the "Homeland Security State") to read Lem's _Return From The Stars_.