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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.
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); }
"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
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.
Not Prix, altho it's a common mistake, I guess because so many pilots are.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
Yes, it is the same author. "Solaris" is generally thought of as his best novel. I was always particularly fond of "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub;" it was one of the first I'd read, and I was pleased to see it reviewed here.
Other notable Lem works (IMHO of course) are "Fiasco" (a novel) and "The Star Diaries" (series of short stories). Lem would also write other fascinating truly future-science works of fiction, such as reviews of books that don't exist (e.g. "One Human Minute").
One note of caution is that many of his oldest works are coming out in recent translations, and they're not as good.
Vitrifax is a very good website dedicated to his work.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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
Yes, that's him.
/. sigs.
:-)
If you've never read Lem before, a real good place to start -- complete mindless fun -- is "Cyberiad". It's a series of fables set in a distant past/future concerning a society of robots... in particular, two inventors who constantly try to outdo each other.
You will no doubt come across snippets that you have seen before in
MFiaB, tho, is one of my all-time favorites.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
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.
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?
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.
I have not read this particular Lem book, but am surprised at how obviously stoled from Kafkas "The Trial" (not "The Castle!") many parts of this story seems (i.e. the protagonist is never called by his name (although Josef K. is once in the first sentence of "The Trial"), it is set in an overly bureaucratic society, and, most of all, whereas K. stumbles throughout the book to find out what he is accused of, the main character in MFiaB does the same, only he has to find out what his mission is.
If you ask me, Lem has always been highly overrated anyway.
And speaking of PKD and dubbel, triple and quadruple agents, check out his "A Scanner Darkly" where the protagonist is an agent spying on himself, making him an infinitle agent. Beat that!
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
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!
One of his best books is also "The Futurological Congress".
There are many more:
Stanislaw Lem
The writing of Stanislaw Lem
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!
From the following summary:
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 sounds like every software project I have worked on. Especially since most software projects are "a comedy, a tragedy, a farce, and a cautionary tale". That should be enough to make it relevent.
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!
I'll stand by my comparison of MFiaB to The Castle, especially because I read them back to back (I had read The Castle years ago, and after reading MFiaB I picked it up again). There are certainly similarities to The Trial, too; thanks for the impetus to read that one again. I'll pick it up and report back to this thread in a week or two. I'll also grab "A Scanner Darkly"; I've been re-reading a bunch of PKD recently but have't ever read that one.
As far as MFiaB and The Castle, there are numerous parallels in plot setup, sylistic devices, and plot advancement, especially (sort of spoilerish) the ironic breakthrough that finally allows the protagonist to get out of the trap (or, to at least change the nature of the trap).
If you've read the more recent (1998, I think) english translation of The Castle, you'll know what I mean. The older "translation" included all sorts of edits by Kafka's original posthumous agent, Max Brod, including the criminal truncation of the book before the actual end. It's possible that the parallels between MFiaB and The Castle weren't as clear in the botched english version which was all we had until 1998.
I don't think Lem or anyone ever claimed that MFiaB was completely original with no reference intended to Kafka's work. I saw it as clearly a homage and intentional adaptation of a great work to a different time. Nothing wrong with that, in my book.
Anyways, I can completely sympathize with thinking Lem is overrated, though I can't imagine feeling that way myself. However, I do feel that way about Joyce and a few other writers people consider classic, which gets me into all sorts of trouble with Lit. types. To each their own.
Cheers
-b
(* 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 must protest, Cyberiad is a quite sophisticated tale, not mindless fun at all. It's not like His Master's Voice, but it does deal with sophisticated allegories. And it is a work of poetry, even the translatied version keeps the amazing wordplay intact.
I'm personally more fond of some of Lem's experiments with the writing format. One Human Minute is a review of nonexistent books, it's hilarious. Imaginary Magnitude is a book containing prefaces of nonexistent books. Of course, it has a prefix itself. I will never forget the first line of the preface, "I have often thought the art of writing prefaces deserved more attention."
Anyway, the SF world to me divides into two poles, represented by Lem and Phil Dick. In fact there was a widely known dispute between Lem and Dick. Lem lashed out at Dick because he thought Dick was dragging SF ideals through the mud. He thought Dick was too lowbrow, too much drugs and puke and mental illness and dystopianism. A lot of writers came to Dick's defense and finally convinced Lem that he was more like Dick than he cared to admit. Someone once called Lem the most intelligent man that ever lived, and that's diametrically opposed to the speed-freak paranoid California PKD we all know and love. To me, they're just two different routes that brought about cyberpunk. Couldn't have done it if either Lem or PKD weren't there first.
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").
Lem is the guy that coined the term robot.
Nope. The term "robot" was coined by the Czech writer Josef Capek, and popularized in his brother Karel's play, titled "Rossum's Universal Robots." It's derived from the Czech word robota, which means "drudgery" or "servitude."
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
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 ___________________________________
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 ___________________________________
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 ___________________________________
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
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 ...
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
Furthermore, there's really no point in trying to keep score. Think of Alice's Wonderland -- there's a steady tone of giddy whimsy underlying the whole affair. Nothing quite adds up add the end, nor is it meant to. It's a send-up of an espionage mystery but one which never gets solved.
To my recollection, the best bit in the novel is Lem's parody of the canonical "spy seduced by spy babe" scene. It's a little cheesy but a great deal of fun.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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...
Good idea. It's by many considered his best. I'm not sure I agree with them completely, but it's no doubt PKD at his finest.
If you've read the more recent (1998, I think) english translation of The Castle, you'll know what I mean. The older "translation" included all sorts of edits by Kafka's original posthumous agent, Max Brod, including the criminal truncation of the book before the actual end. It's possible that the parallels between MFiaB and The Castle weren't as clear in the botched english version which was all we had until 1998.
I have never read Kafka in English, mind you, but thanks anyway. However, given the fact that "The Castle" was largely unfinished at the time of Kafkas death, I think it unfair to blame Brod for "botchering" it. Rather, I think one should acknowledge that the more recent translation is of superior quality and let that be the end of it.
I don't think Lem or anyone ever claimed that MFiaB was completely original with no reference intended to Kafka's work. I saw it as clearly a homage and intentional adaptation of a great work to a different time. Nothing wrong with that, in my book.
Neither do I. My problem with this book, which I once again should admit I have not read, is that it does not appear to adapt it to different conditions at all. Whereas Joyce, speaking of him, takes a greek epic, squeezes it down to a days length, and puts it, of all places, in Dublin, Lem seems to take a story about a little man in a modern overly bureaucratic society and put him in a... modern overly bureaucratic society? And keep most of the story, on top of that. I'll be the first to admit that the difference between plagiarism and homage is a subtle one, but I am sure my point comes across nonetheless.
Anyways, I can completely sympathize with thinking Lem is overrated, though I can't imagine feeling that way myself. However, I do feel that way about Joyce and a few other writers people consider classic, which gets me into all sorts of trouble with Lit. types.
With Joyce people might be able to agree with you that reading him is a less than pleasant experience, but there's no denying his impact on Western litterature, even his staunchest critics will grant him that. With Lem that is not the case, which is why the comparison is a little unfair. Getting into trouble with Lit. types is not something to be ashamed of, however. My experience is that they like what they're told to like.
To each their own.
This summarizes nicely. I can't agree with you more here.
Theo
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok