Stanislaw Lem Dies in Krakow

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."

Comments

More than Solaris

[eldavojohn]

I'll remember him for his stories of Ijon Tichy 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."

I know it will happen.

Re:More than Solaris

[Krach42]

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.

Re:More than Solaris

[Locke2005]

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.

Re:More than Solaris

[tumbaumba]

I'll remember him for his stories of Ijon Tichy and the satire he would write about regarding anything from governments to advertisements.

It is truly a sad day for all SF readers. Lem was a greates SF writer of all and it is a shame so few of his works are translated to English. Ijon Tichy is a example I read it in Russian and wanted my coworkers to read it as well but did not find it in English. Rest in peace.

Re:More than Solaris

[John_Booty]

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) how good the book was on its own merits and b) how the movie was fairly brilliant when viewed as an intentionally campy satire.

I can see how people would be disappointed if they were expecting the movie to be anything like the book. It sure isn't.

Re:More than Solaris

[brwski]

And don't forget Fiasco --- a superb first-contact crash-and-burn. Pretty much everything by him is worth a read. Lem, however, is not the only highly-regarded yet little-read Sci Fi / conceptual writer worth picking up. Give Italo Calvino a chance --- fun and literate.

Re:More than Solaris

[bcrowell]

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 if you want to learn more about the book.

Re:More than Solaris

[solitas]

Even worse: having an obit that says george clooney performed in a movie based upon an idea from one of SJL's works. THAT'S baaad!

Re:More than Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of the movie.

No, not the dung-heap from Hollywood but the original movie which is can't label in any other way than a masterpiece. Tarkovskij was the real genius.

Re:More than Solaris

[smithmc]

  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."

You mean, like how most of the world probably thinks Asimov is that guy who wrote a story for that Will Smith movie?

Re:More than Solaris

[xigxag]

I've always felt that The Futurological Congress would make an excellent feature film, although its vision of a doped-up society, enthralled by the external appearance of a shiny future while things turn to rot within, is no longer a prophecy, but simply the way things are.

Re:More than Solaris

[mochan_s]

You mean, like how most of the world probably thinks Asimov is that guy who wrote a story for that Will Smith movie?

Though you may think that's bad, had that movie not been made, it would have been, "the guy who wrote the story for Bincentennial man".

Robots that want to feel and screw girls. Human emotions = special is the worst kind of science fiction.

Re:More than Solaris

[domanova]

Well, some of that is due to Tarkovsky. The header made me think of Stalker; then I got me head on again.
I bet more people saw Solaris the movie than read Solaris the novel

Re:More than Solaris

[Maserati]

I'm partial to this page on SST: Heinlein vs Verhoeven. Good discussion of the book, and a nice debunking of some of the BS and misunderstandings about the book.

Re:More than Solaris

[Wolfrider]

"Tales of Pirx the Pilot" is also a good read.

Re:More than Solaris

[crossmr]

"best known for" and "best" work aren't necessarily the same thing. Often in fact they're not. Many people do their best work when the public eye isn't on them and the public remembers them solely for what got their attention.

Re:More than Solaris

[arivanov]

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".

Re:More than Solaris

[pgolik]

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.

Re:More than Solaris

[b00le]

I'd like to put in a plug for Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker , while we're on the subjectof SF literary masterpieces. It's interesting that the literary establishment, which tends to scorn SF (not without reason - most of it really is rubbish), will still take to heart a 'serious' writer who strays into the genre. Even Nabokov wrote SF, but while detective stories can get reviewed in the heavyweight papers, SF is still routinely ignored.

Re:More than Solaris

[M0b1u5]

"Pirx the Pilot" held me spellbound.

A+ No.1 Supar SF. 3 thumbs up.

Re:More than Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because anything from Hollywood is automatically shit and everything from a country other than the US is automatically pure gold.

Re:More than Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

What language have you read Solaris in? The English translation is horrible, being a double-translation via the French.

Re:More than Solaris

[1u3hr]

I can't understand why he is "best known for Solaris",

As the summary says, because that was the one George Clooney (re)made as a movie. At least the Rueters' story (not "AP" as the submitter wrote) didn't mention that till paragraph 3.

It gets a bit wearing that every news article that can be linked to a movie star makes that its focus in the headline.

Re:More than Solaris

[dschuetz]

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 an intermediate French translation.

Has Michael Kandal translated Solaris, and if so, is it available (maybe) in europe or somewhere?

Re:More than Solaris

[grub]

If you can't find the original Russian Solyaris (w/ subtitles ;)) in your favourite video store, it's available all over eDonkey/eMule. It puts the Clooney re-hash to shame.

Re:More than Solaris

[alexo]

> 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".

With all due respect to Tarkovski, I have read most of the Strugatsky brother's novels and, in my humble opinion, "Roadside picnic" is one of their best (if not the best).

The English translation really does not make it justice but, if you're curious, you can read it here.

Re:More than Solaris

[quetzalco]

In fact, it's not written that Solaris is the best piece of art from him. It's written that Solaris is the most famous ... because of the famous movie.

Re:More than Solaris

[poot_rootbeer]

I can't understand why he is "best known for Solaris" when it is far from his best work.

Basically it's because "best known" and "best" don't always coincide.

Also, as far as I know "Cyberiad" never got turned into an Atari 2600 game.

Re:More than Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously... The american solaris IS crap. The original IS a masterpiece. Why did you go all patriotic on us? :D

Re:More than Solaris

[ccp]

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 readers.

Note to myself: find the English version, just to see.

Cheers,
CC

Re:More than Solaris

[Abreu]

(Starship Troopers) ...it's meant 100% seriously

...and thats exactly what scared me about the book, the fact that it is actually serious about this ideology.

Re:More than Solaris

[boa13]

from a French translation, that was poor to begin with

Care to argue that? I may not have the best of litterary taste, but the French translation (which I read this past week-end, just before Mr. Lem died) seemed fine to me. Clearly better than many other translations I've read.

Any links to texts explaining why the French translation is poor are welcomed.

My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[khasim]

In memory, the best poem he ever wrote:

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"

[SimHacker]

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.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[aztec rain god]

If ever a mathematician had a chance to get laid, this might do the trick.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[NeutronCowboy]

I first read the story in German, and there as well, the poems he wrote were translated perfectly. I don't know what it was about Lem that brought out the best translators to do their greatest work, but I'm glad that it was so.

Rest in Peace. Trurl and Klapauzius, Ijon and the machine that could build everything starting with n, you'll be his voice for ages for to come. May you continue to enlighten us.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what it was about Lem that brought out the best translators to do their greatest work, but I'm glad that it was so.

Yeah, you see the same attribute in the translators of Nabokov and Eco. I guess it's a prestige thing -- if you're a translator, what better chance will you ever have to show off your chops?

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[good soldier svejk]

I always like this one too.

"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:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

Someday I plan to learn Polish so I can read the Cyberiad as written. I knew a guy who read it in Polish, German and English and said it was different but equally brilliant in all three.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[elronxenu]

Absolutely; I was pretty astounded when I found out that Umberto Eco wrote his books in Italian. I can only assume that the original works are at least as good as the English translations, which are, in a word, awesome.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nabokov was actually friends with his english translator and over several! years they translated most of his works. The translator(can't remember his name) would actually get tips from Nabokov on what to emphasize grammatically and thematically.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[ivano]

add let us not forget the English translators of the Asterix books.

(Seriously)

Ciao

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[sakusha]

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.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[richieb]

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.

He did. In the same story there is a sonet written about a haircut, in which every word starts with the letter "S". It was written in Polish and then translated. It involves Sampson....

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[M. Baranczak]

It's astounding how well Kandel translated the poetry, so it still rhymes, scans well, and makes perfect sense

Not to take away from Kandel's truly impressive work, but you're making it sound like he was the first guy in the world to successfully translate rhyming verse into another language. People have been working on these types of problems for thousands of years.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[M. Baranczak]

What's interesting is that the original is a completely different poem. If I recall correctly, the assignment requires a six-line poem about "royalty, seduction, betrayal, incest, Negroes, music, and every word has to start with the letter 'c'". (I actually think doing something like this in English is harder, since Polish has no articles, and its grammar makes it easier to avoid using conjunctions and pronouns.) The meaning of the actual poem is irrelevant in this case; the point is to present a puzzle that can't POSSIBLY be solved, and then show the solution.

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[richieb]

In the Polish version it's the same subject and same letter. I will double check when I get home...

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[M. Baranczak]

Here's the full Polish text of the story. The poem in question is about halfway though, and begins with "Cyprian".

Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad"

[richieb]

I guess it's been a while since I read the polish version.

Not to be ignorant but...

[jollyroger1210]

"set on an isolated space stations" sorry for being a grammar nazi....

Re:Not to be ignorant but...

[iocat]

Don't blame Slashdot. For once, the error is in TFA (nice job, Reuters).

Futurlogical Congress

[Anonymous Coward]

My fav. Actually it was the only book I read by him. It was fascinating.

Re:Futurlogical Congress

[Orrin Bloquy]

"Trashmos." TFC should be required reading.

Solaris is a masterpiece of fiction

[CRCulver]

I would highly recommend Solaris 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

Re:Solaris is a masterpiece of fiction

[arivanov]

With all due respect "Return from the Stars" is better. If you are new to Lem start with it.

Re:Solaris is a masterpiece of fiction

[Blakey Rat]

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

Whoever wrote this post is a master of suspense!

But seriously, I greatly enjoyed both movie versions (I think the Clooney one was better,) but I have to admit that I've never read the book myself. Still, even if the movies are entirely 180 degrees away from the novel, they're still great movies in their own right.

The old guard passes away...

[Illbay]

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.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, you might want to get a clue. Philip K. Dick thought Lem was an evil communist.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[SimHacker]

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", from Microworlds.

From Stanislaw Lem's 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, 1974

I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.

What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.

Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).

It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[Foobar of Borg]

Uhm, you might want to get a clue. Philip K. Dick thought Lem was an evil communist.

So, I guess he was just a Philip K. Dickhead.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[genka]

Philip K. Dick actually reported to FBI that S.Lem is a fromt for a group of writers controlled by KGB. Mr. Dick, a brilliant author himself, had mental problems later in his life.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[Anonymous Coward]

This man gave me an idea when I was 9 years old, and here I am much later, fundamentally sworn to thoughtfulness in the development of humanity into natures beyond imagination and currently studying Heim theory. I lost a godfather. "Was greatly admired" does not do him justice in my eyes. I greatly admired him myself, and I don't need anyone else's admiration to comment on my grief.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, pwned!

Re:The old guard passes away...

[dancallaghan]

... except _Solaris_ itself (!), which is only available translated via French. RIP Lem

Re:The old guard passes away...

[Anonymous Coward]

The FBI gave up on the investigation once they discovered that there was no such thing as a "fromt".

Re:The old guard passes away...

[SimHacker]

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 degererating into a civil war, more and more Republicans are being prosecuted for corruption, Bush's approval numbers are at 34%, and you're still blaming Michael Moore??! This is exactly what Frank Zappa was talking about when he said "Speed turns you into your parents." So does Fox News's brand of political pornography.

This anonymous coward has been beating off to Ann Coulter for too long. I have news for you sucker: She's a man, baby! Just look at that bobbing Adam's apple! And her attitude and argumentation style -- DEFINITELY a DUDE. And yes, beating off to Ann Coulter DOES make you a GAY REPUBLICAN.

-Don

Re:The old guard passes away...

[SimHacker]

PKD must have had confused Stanislaw Lem with the collective communist conspiracy that is AntiORP.

-Don

Re:The old guard passes away...

[PCM2]

Your information is out of date.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[dancallaghan]

I don't think so. Have a look at the copyright page on Amazon, it is the 1970 Kilmartin and Cox translation (and although it's not explicit in that edition, earlier ones like the one at my university's library do make it clear that that translation is from the French).

Re:The old guard passes away...

[ConceptJunkie]

I couldn't decide whether to mod your post down as a troll or mod it up as a great piece of schizophrenic conspiracy ranting.

My sarcasm meter and BS detectors both blew their circuit breakers.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[Thud457]

I think that letter just shows the sheer innovative genius of Philip K Dick. Who else but a brain-addled speed-freak would create a whole new literary genre around writing insane letters to the FBI?!! This is nothing less than a thinly-veiled and scathing review of Lem's work. Much like how Lem wrote the introductions to books that he knew he would never get around to wrting for one reason or another.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[Syberghost]

This anonymous coward has been beating off to Ann Coulter for too long. I have news for you sucker: She's a man, baby! Just look at that bobbing Adam's apple!

Congratulations. You just advertised to the entire Internet that you don't know the difference between the thyroid cartilage and the laryngeal prominence. One presumes because you don't have the latter.

Re:The old guard passes away...

[SimHacker]

It's Coulter's 5 O'Clock Shadow, and talking and thinking like no self respecting woman would, that gives him away. It's ironic that so many gay hating Republicans just love Ann Coulter and Matt Drudge, who are both great buddies and hang out together.

-Don

Re:The old guard passes away...

[PCM2]

Oh, OK, I didn't understand what you were saying. I thought you meant that you couldn't get it except in French.

A Very Impactful Author

[DumbSwede]

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 launch site in the Soviet version. A Russian friend told me it just looked very High Tech to Russians at the time.

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[JonTurner]

>>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.

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[mortram]

Seems like a slight underestimation of Tarkovsky. I interpreted that scene as part of his [Tarkovsky's] metaphor for Kelvin's journey from earth, from where his mind was grounded in a familiar reality. The highway scene follows the scenes of Kelvin at his property, walking slowly, watching the rain and landscape. The long stretches of freeway depict his initial departure from that nature, ultimately to the space station where reality becomes tenuous, grounded in nothing but what the mind can and can't rationalize.

Yes, it looks dated now, but I think there was more to the purpose of the scene than to widen the eyes of his fellow comrades with high-techery.

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[Flyboy Connor]

Hear hear.

Soljaris (Tarkovsky's Solaris) is a movie that exists in the mind of the viewer. It purposefully provides the viewer with an experience of travel, to strengthen the impact of the loneliness of the space station.

Incidentally, the US version of the movie is certainly far from bad and probably one of the least Hollywoodized movies of recent years. It is no Tarkovsky, but what would be the point of making a second Tarkovsky version? As it is, most people will regard Soljaris as boring, mainly because they are not used to slow movies with few camera changes. So there is definately a role here for the US version.

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[msormune]

Hmmm... If you have watched the original uncutted Solaris by Tarkowsky, there is a very long (10 minutes?) scene where the main character just sits in a car going to his office (If I remember correctly) and the camera displays a futuristic city around his car as he travels the highway. The scene has a very "documentary" kind of feel.

Maybe Tarkowsky used the footage he shot in Japan in his film, he just didn't tell anyone about it :)

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a slight underestimation of Tarkovsky.
Absolutely. I saw an interview with Tarkovsky where he said one of the things he wanted to show was how the journey through space was no more of a big deal than the journey to the spaceport.

How cool is that for great film making? Three different people with 3 different stories about a scene we all remember (and I haven't seen Solaris for over a decade).

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Tarkovsky didn't have a point, according to Wikipedia...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_( movie)

We see Burton later on, in a long sequence, involving busy car traffic in Japan. Many people feel this sequence to be too long, and appearing early on in the film alienates some viewers. On direct question from the Soviet censor overseeing the production, Tarkovsky said he made this sequence boring on purpose: "so that the idiots leave before the actual movie starts". Stanisaw Lem, the novelist, disliked the film precisely because of the director's snobbery.

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[vudufixit]

Actually, you meant to say "Robocop's modified Ford Taurus police cruisers."

  The Taurus didn't debut until 1985 in real life, and Terminator was most definitely set in present day - except for the "future flashbacks" - Cameron definitely didn't modify any vehicles to alter their appearance.

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[nester]

I saw the 2002 version, and i almost fell asleep. If wasn't so tired, i would've walked out. It was the most boring film i've ever seen, and to add insult to that, cluney(too lazy to look up the spelling) flashes his ass to the camera.

Re:A Very Impactful Author

[JonTurner]

You are exactly right, it was Robocop not Terminator. Thanks.

He will be missed!

[Ansible42]

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!

Re:He will be missed!

[inertiatic]

The book Solaris was also the inspiration for the band Failure's final album, Fantastic Planet. It's worth a listen.

Sore Loser Post

[ewhac]

2006-03-27 19:40:30 Stanislaw Lem: 1921 - 2006 (Index,Sci-Fi) (rejected)

BTW, here's Stanislaw Lem's Web Site.

Schwab

Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[JonTurner]

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 central character (Kelvin) asks many of the same questions. If you've seen the Russian film version or the pathetic watered-down Hollywood adaptation but not read the novel, then you're cheating yourself. Go read the book -- it is rich, emotionally moving, haunting and you will never forget it."

Seriously, go read this book. You will find yourself thinking about the characters years from now.

Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[Monkelectric]

The movies really miss the point

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.

Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[lav-chan]

I haven't seen the George Clooney one, or read the book, but the Russian film version is one of the longest and most boring movies of all time.

Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[Coryoth]

The Tarkovsky film version was fantastic. Sure it focussed on different aspects than the book, but in many ways it picked some of the more interesting points that were only peripherally explored in the book. Besides, film is a different medium, so the detailed wordy technical discussions must necessarily become limited. Instead we are treated to visual subtlety and mystery and the absolutely glorious cinematography that is par for the course with Tarkovsky. I rate Tarkovsky's two ventures into science fiction, Solaris and Stalker, as two of the greatest science fiction films ever made - science fiction films that are honestly interested about exploring ideas and giving the audience the space to fully appreciate the depth and subtelty of those ideas. They are films where you are fully expected to spend your time thinkin carefully about everything that is going on.

The Soderbergh film was comparatively truncated and necessarily lost a lot of the material. It was also, in practice, working more from tarkovsky's vision than from Lem's. Still, it managed to create much of the atmosphere and explore many of the ideas of the Tarkovsky film in the reduced time frame. Certainly a great film - though I agree, beginning to be quite divergent from the book.

Jedidiah.

Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[BewireNomali]

I hope you're not being sarcastic, because I agree.

Solaris, the George Clooney version, is an amazing movie. It was suffocating, caustrophobic, intense.

I remember in the end, when he thinks about the reincarnation of his wife on the space station, and he makes mention to, "remembering her wrong". It was this harrowing idea of living in our own heads, utterly unaware of the truths, the realities of those even closest to us. This woman, whom he professed to love above all, and he didn't even remember her as she was. It was such an amazing climax to that movie.

If this is the movie you all think is mediocre, then I'm humbled doubly, in the hopes that someone posts a list of superlativefilms for me to see.

Second, the source material must be amazing.

Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[Monkelectric]

No, I wasn't being sarcastic, I think the film is one of the best films ever made. Im glad soeone else likes it as nobody I know seems to.

Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[Sique]

The book is one of the great works of scifi. The movies really miss the point.

Or, as Stanislaw Lem himself put it in an interview: I didn't write a novel about the sexual problems of humans in zero gravity.

Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[dunkelfalke]

to be honest i found the book boring (and i never watched the movies).
the only works of lem i really like are about pilot pirx. and maybe futurological congress

Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction

[Sique]

(If someone is interested in the acutal interview, here is a (german) link: Die erotischen Probleme der Menschen im Weltall sind nicht das Thema)

Great author

[Bytal]

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.

Re:Great author

[Illbay]

...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?

Re:Great author

[frakir]

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)

Re:Great author

[Bytal]

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 any American sci-fluff novel about princesses in space. Good American sci-fi had a different mode of inquiry, it was about technology changing our lives on a more personal level with a lot less of "grand soul searching"m and moralizing. Each one is as important as other, if, at least, to contrast the societies and times it was written in.

Re:Great author

[Anonymous Coward]

Zelazny is polish for steely.

Re:Great author

[Txiasaeia]

The Last Wish, one of his short story collections, is due out next year.

Re:Great author

[CRCulver]

Well, actually neither is most American SF.

I disagree. The science fiction and fantasy section even of large bookstores such as Borders overwhelmingly consists of cheap pulp-rate material, with literary science fiction in the clear minority. Writers such as Gene Wolfe, Samuel R. Delaney, and Philip K. Dick--whose books are actually worth something and are often published in fine hardbound and trade paperback--must be sought out among a plethora of crappy titles (which the publishers put in paperback because they are to be read once and thrown away). While the robots-carrying-big-breasted-women trope has faded away, it's been replaced by Generic Sword-Swinging Vaguely-Tolkienish Fantasy #447.

Re:Great author

[kjs3]

His sci-fi wasn't about huge robots carrying large breasted women

You say that like it's a bad thing...

Re:Great author

[shutdown -p now]

Lem did write some pretty hardcore "classic" sci-fi stories though. "Tales of Pirx the Pilot", for one, is a very interesting read.

Re:Great author

[gavri]

American SF has always been of uniform high quality, if only because there was so much of it

How could the quality have been uniformly high when you claim that the high quality stuff exists because the sample is so big?

Re:Great author

[wlodek_j]

Jacek Dukaj. Try his stories. Very good "sci" and very interesting "fi".

Re:Great author

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Janusz Zajdel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_A._Zajdel

Re:Great author

[QNeX]

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>

Re:Great author

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, can you name ANOTHER well-regarded Polish SF writer?
John Paul II ?

Re:Great author

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you have against paperbacks? Better than those stupid huge, heavy hardbacks that are too big to comfortably read. Pay twice as much for the same text... yeah, thanks.

And don't give me that durability shit, I have plenty of 50 year old paperbacks that are completely fine (the paper is yellowed, but whatever... I expect most of them to hit 100 years old in easily readable form). Any longer term archiving is the job of libraries, and nowadays is best done digitally anyway.

p.s. I haven't found it hard to get the good stuff, just look for the "SF Masterworks" series... a handful of questionable inclusions but in the main fantastic.

Re:Great author

[Anonymous Coward]

Marek Oramus, albeit not very prolific.

Re:Great author

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Polish_scien ce_fiction_writers

Just because Lem is the only "well-regarded" Polish sci fi writer you know about doesn't mean there aren't others.

Re:Great author

[ccp]

showed how incredibly alien it will be for humans to seriously venture out into space and even make first contact.

I agree with most of your post, but must take exception at this.

"Solaris" is not about space travel at all, unless you mean inner space.

I've always thought that the "Solaris" metaphor was powerful but rather obvious, and amazing how many people fail to grasp it.

Cheers,

CC

Re:Great author

[Bytal]

I've always seen the "inner space" part of the novel as something that has been analyzed to death. I'm much more interested in the long dialogue about humans not really venturing to space but bringing space down to Earth. Space travel being travel in tiny, encapsulated versions of Earth's atmosphere, gravity, etc. If you look at Lem's other works you can see that he was very much preoccupied with the cavalier attitude of most science fiction with the real difficulties of space travel. So while "inner space" might be a very significat part of the novel, I find the philosophy of space exploration bits a lot more interesting and original.

Return from the Stars

[JoeCommodore]

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.

Re:Return from the Stars

[fbjon]

For a Hollywoodization, I thought it was pretty good. Watered-down, perhaps, but I liked the general mood a lot.

Re:Return from the Stars

[Anonymous Coward]

Try watching the original movie instead. Perhaps not in any way better than the book, but certainly better than the hollywood production.

Re:Return from the Stars

[richieb]

I hope the book is better than the movie adaptation.

Both movies completely miss the point(!!!) of Solaris. The main issue in the book is the question of understandibility of the universe by humans. In the book the ocean convering Solaris has been studied for decades and still the very basic questions are impossible to answer. Is it alive? Is it sentient? Is it trying to communicate with people through the "guests"? The novel asks and explores these questions.

This theme, knowability of the universe and ability understand and communicate with aliens is explored in several others of Lem's books. For an early example read "The Invincible", for a recent one read "Fiasco".

Which SF writers changed the way you view things?

[Audent]

For me it would be:

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.

RIP

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... took slashdot only like 12 hours. Anyways, one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century passed away. RIP.

Lem was a truly amazing writer

[SimHacker]

Lem was my favorite writer, 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 witnessed the first trial run of Trurl's 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"!

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

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.)

Grinding gleeful gears, Gerontogyron grabbed / Giggling
gynecobalt-60 golems, ...

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!

Femfatalatron 1.0 Product

Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer

[Compuser]

This is the first time I see English translation, having read this in
Russian. The Russian version of poem in 'g' made more sense:
Gruzniy Gen'ka generator
grozno gryz goroh gortsyami

In general, the feel is different. My guess is that the beauty of Lem was the fact
that his writing was universal yet allowed for fine tuning to any culture
via translations. I think he was the greatest SF writer ever, but all
the same my hat is off to his translators.

Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer

[grogo]

I first read Lem as a boy growing up in Communist Poland in the 70's, and was blown away by the mastery of language and ideas. Later, when I came to the US, I re-read all of his books in English. While the translations are excellent, esp. Kandel, they still can't touch the cleverness of the original writing, especially in the little verses he wrote, or the stories such as the one about the Machine that could make everything that starts with the letter N in the Cyberiad.

Still, the underlying ideas and vision come through very well even accounting for the language barrier. I hope his books will continue to resonate with young people everywhere.

Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer

[cecom]

While the English translations are trully brilliant, Lem should be read in a Slavic language 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.

Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer

[SiliconEntity]

Thanks for posting those excerpts. Lem was an amazing talent.

One correction for the story about the king and his mechanical kingdom. Trurl encountered a deposed tyrant and built for him this model kingdom to rule over. Only he made it too real. The characters were done so faithfully and realistically that their suffering under the tyrant's rule was no longer simulated but became real. This is why the story is subtitled, "how Trurl's own perfection led to no good". It was one of the first explorations of this concept, whether a simulation of consciousness is in fact conscious.

Does anyone ever worry about this, designing AI for video games? Will we ever look at a game and say, that crossed the line; the simulated suffering has become real?

Automatthew's Friend

[jamie]

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..."

Re:My submission

[isecore]

Most membered works

Sounds like something that might be handed out at the AVN Awards or the Hot d'Or Awards.

Farewell to a great thinker and writer

[elwinc]

Two other Lem books that I'm fond of: The Futurological Congress and A Perfect Vacuum.

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.

Re:Farewell to a great thinker and writer

[jonom]

I haven't read A Perfect Vacuum, but my favourites are The Futurological Congress and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.

Re:Farewell to a great thinker and writer

[biglig2]

I was hoping someone would mention Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, I love that book - rather like Catch-22 but if anything even stranger.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Ford Prefect]

Iain M. Banks.

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... ;-)

Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge

[Anonymous Coward]

The greatest SF authors, ever.

Re:Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge

[kjs3]

Vinge...yes..._Tales of the Dying Earth_ is really very, well, odd...bizarre...in a good way.

The Matrix owes a lot to Lem

[Nicky G]

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.

Princesses in Space?

[Illbay]

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...)

Other Lem books

[kocsonya]

It is sad that only a fraction of his works have been translated
to English. His phylosophical look at evolution, society, technology
and the human kind in general, titled Summa Technologiae, is an astionishing
book. He dumps ideas on you so fast that sometimes it takes half a day just
to digest 2-3 pages of the book.

He was one of those whose books had actual content and were more than mere
entertainment.

Zoltan

Re:Other Lem books

[krajo]

I've read his works in hungarian, one of the many languages they were translated to. I fully agree on "He was one of those whose books had actual content and were more than mere entertainment."

Gyorgy

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

[Anonymous Coward]

Transmutation of water( into wine )?

Antigravity or hyperbuoyancy( to walk on water )?

Reanimation of human tissue( after 3 days )?

These guys were the pioneers and fathers of modern science fiction. I think we all should give these authors their due.

Re:About time!

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest that you watch the 1972 Tarkovsky version, or -- better yet -- actually read the book. There is no comparison.

His Master's Voice

[PaulBunion]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned a very unusual book by Lem (unusual by anyone for that matter) - His Master's Voice. It is on Amazon for the curious. My son, an English major pointed this out to me because of how interesting it is, even though it is not science fiction in the traditional sense. Some have described it as a scathing commentary on science and others have applauded the connection between the title, subject matter, and a dog listening to a gramaphone. Good read. RIP, Stan...

Re:His Master's Voice

[Anonymous Coward]

This was one of the first books I read some 20 years ago as a teenager
and still one of my favs too.

  I can't agree that it is not science fiction "in the traditional sense" - whatever that is. It is not space and robots..true..neither is the adromena strain or . Both are about "1st contact" and involve scientific speculation
as their central plot. They could be thought of as "hard sf" though in
Master's Voice there may be satirical elements(as there often are in Lem)
as well. There are many kinds of science fiction

Re:His Master's Voice

[Thud457]

I still think that pothead Carl Sagan ripped Lem off bigtime when he wrote "Contact", let me count the ways:

• man recieves a tranmission from the stars
• it's teh NAZIs!
• the message is a palimpsest
• two seperate teams are set up to work on decoding the message, one in secret
• in the end, man doesn't really learn anything much from the experience

Bork, bork, bork...

[Anonymous Coward]

Itski Soderbergh, notski Sodebergh... I knowski thatski youski havski problemski with Svedski soundski namski, butski, it shouldski notski be hardski to kopski and pastski itski... bork bork bork...

Requiescat In Pace, Stanislaw Jerzy Lem

[solitas]

A good bibliography: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/l/stanislaw-lem/

Solaris in English

[Tal Cohen]

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.)

Re:Solaris in English

[Scrameustache]

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.)

I'm guessig both: Polish Solaris > French Solaris > English Solaris;

Fan sub, anyone?

Re:Solaris in English

[Haeleth]

Fan sub, anyone?

What, so we can have a version that's not just of questionable accuracy, but also ruined by poor writing, faulty grammar, and a perplexing refusal to translate basic terms for family relations? :P

Re:Solaris in English

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessig both: Polish Solaris > French Solaris > English Solaris;

More like Sparc Solaris > Solaris x86 > Solaris Itanic.

About the English translation of Solaris...

[Anonymous Coward]

The English translation of Solaris was made from a French translation of Solaris. Lem described the French translation as being a poor one, but then again Lem was typically harsh about this sort of thing.

Sad that there is no better translation of Solaris available for us English readers... I wonder what we are missing!

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Coryoth]

Iain Banks for a remarkably positive view of the future with the culture novels, and a remarkably bleak view of the future with his non-culture novels.

Jedidiah.

Lem on Isothemes and Wikipedia

[SimHacker]

Lem defined Isothemes:

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.

Re:Lem on Isothemes and Wikipedia

[julesh]

Lem predicted Wikipedia (an encyclopedia so up-to-date, it can predict the future):

Wikipedia is not a crystal ball.

Re:Lem on Isothemes and Wikipedia

[SimHacker]

Of COURSE they tell you NEVER to put aluminum foil in the microwave -- that's how THEY get their POWER!

-Don

Stainslaw Was The Best

[tornsaq]

I think I've read every book by "the stain". This is indeed a sad day.

I'll remember him not for 'Solaris'

[Jurrasic]

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.

Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago

[abenamer]

and there's not ONE mention of it on Slashdot. She's easily the better writer than he was. I don't understand why SHE of all the SF writers was not given her props on Slashdot.

Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago

[domanova]

Well, two parts of the reason are 1. I didn't know that she'd died; that's sad news. 2. You did know it and a. didn't post it or b. got ignored Her work is considerable. 'easily the better writer' is a bit of a stretcher. I'm not sure you can add up the points. Lem was, surely, more influential. If nothing else, he rattled some cages 30 years before

Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago

[NeutronCowboy]

Uh.... I'll stay polite and simply say that your opinion seems to be a minority opinion. Not having read Butler, I can't compare the two, but I doubt that I would find her better. Lem's writing wasn't so much about science or even fiction as it was about the human mind. I have not found an author anywhere yet who had his command of language and his insights into human nature. Or his caliber of translators, but that's a different story.

Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago

[Ellen Spertus]

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.

Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago

[kjs3]

I don't understand why SHE of all the SF writers was not given her props on Slashdot.

Because you were to lazy to post?

Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I would not even mention Butler in the same breath as Asimov, much less a genius like Lem.

Some great books

[mattr]

I read over and over again The Cyberiad which IIRC was a tale of a fierce competition between human inventors in the far future building absolutely monstrous robots to outdo each other. Also Tales of Pix the Pilot was great. The Infocom text adventure (Zork-like z engine) version of Solaris was cool though unsolvable I think. There was another one resembling Kafkaesque movie Berlin I think entitled memoirs in a bathtub. I'd like to find these again in ascii, The Cyberiad filled my head with dreams and had a big effect on me.. great story!

Re:Some great books

[Vo0k]

Except the constructor weren't human. At least not physically :)
The whole space was dominated by various robotic species and the two Great Constructors were no exception. Only some forgotten corners still contained mostly forgotten and despised (and very rarely mentioned) protein-based 'wet and splashy' lifeforms.

Personetics

[SimHacker]

From Stanislaw Lem's "Non-Serviam" (1971):

(Personetics): A "world" for personoid "inhabitants" can be prepared in a couple of hours... A specific personoid activity serves as a triggering mechanism, setting in motion a production process that will gradually augment and define itself; in other words, the world surrounding these beings takes on an unequivocalness only in accordance with their own behavior... From four to seven personoids are optimal, at least for the development of speech and typical exploratory activity, and also for 'culturization'... It is possible to 'accommodate' up to one thousand personoids... Many different philosophies (ontologies and epistemologies) have arisen among them... I can enlarge their world or reduce it, speed up its time or slow it down, alter the mode and means of their perception; I can liquidate them, divide them, multiply them, transform the very ontological foundation of their existence...

On the lighter side of personetics... I'm developing an open source "Personetics" system called "SimFaux", which I've applied to parody Fox News, so it currently includes simulations of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Frank Zappa, Arianna Huffington, Al Franken and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

I've published the SimFaux source code and content as Free Open Source, so you can make your own characters, experiment with the existing ones, transform the very ontological foundation of their existence, see how the keyword based simulation works, extend it with your own rules and content, learn how to build interactive interfaces and simulations with streaming video in OpenLaszlo, etc.

-Don

The Alienness of the Alien

[qning]

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.

Re:The Alienness of the Alien

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I always thought of Lem more as having a sense of the utter alienness of the human.

Only Frank Herbert approaches Lem in that regard, and Herbert was striving for humans who by today's standards ARE aliens.

But unlike Herbert, Lem shares with Dick the realization of the utter absurdity of humans.

Re:The Alienness of the Alien

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

And I wish reading Lem was compulsory for anyone wishing to write scripts for Sci-Fi films.

Sadlhy I find most "TV Sci-Fi" to be something of a joke as being an Alien consists solely of having a pastie of some sort glued to your head but exhibiting the same human thought patterns/political systems/reproductive habits/desires etc. as all other characters.

And for anyone not familiar with the term "pastie" it's a variety of pie that looks a bit like the forehead of Aliens in most TV Sci-Fi :)

MOD Parent flamebait/troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but... no. Emphatically and objectively, hell no.

This fact in no diminishes the efforts of Ms. Butler; just as a campfire is nowhere near as hot as the sun, yet will still burn you.

They will both be missed.

Odd

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea he was still alive

Re:HELLO

[Anonymous Coward]

iawtc

who?

[penguin-collective]

For all the Euro-elitism, American SF has always been of uniform high quality, if only because there was so much of it.

You're contradicting yourself. "Of uniform[ly] high quality" means "there hasn't been any bad American SF". But you just said that there has been (and there obviously has been).

What you probably meant is that there is a lot of good American SciFi, which is true. Nevertheless, I can't think of a US author that I would rate more highly than Lem: Lem combined technical insight with humor and good storytelling.

Which US SciFi author would you put up there with Lem?

Re:who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which US SciFi author would you put up there with Lem?

Philip K. Dick.

Re:who?

[tolendante]

Let's see. I'm a huge Lem fan, but I would put the following US writers ahead of him on the list of great speculative fiction writers: Harlan Ellison (enormous body of great short stories) Philip K. Dick (Man in the High Castle, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Valis) Gene Wolfe (New Sun, Fifth Head of Cerberus) Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Cat's Cradle) Richard Matheson (I am Legend) Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos)

Re:who?

[Whiteox]

Kurt Vonnegut Jr - Venus on The Half Shell
That deals with humanity and humbleness.
I know he's not US, but Harry Harrison has got to be up there with Lem, Heinlein, Asimov and for that matter Dick.

Re:who?

[urbazewski]

Kurt Vonnegut Jr - Venus on The Half Shell

Although conceived of by Kurt Vonnegut as a novel written by mythical SF writer Kilgore Trout, the novel published under the title "Venus on the Half-Shell" was actually written by Philip Jose Farmer.

Re:who?

[supersnail]

Warning - Phillip K. Dick considered frustrating!
Phillip K. Dick is brilliant at character development, and, probably better at the "vision thing" than any SF writer.
But storytelling, plots, endings and other stuff condsidered essential by most novelists was considered optional by Phill.
I gave up on him after too books in a row (one was the "Simalcrum") which just suddenly ended with all plot lines dangling and all issues unresolved, as in, the major characters got taken to an asylum and thats it.

Now this was very much like real life as far as PKD was concerned but it doesnt make for an artisticly satisfying book.

         

Re:who?

[Illbay]

I stand corrected.

I could name quite a few, but I'll go with Larry Niven and Vernor Vinge. Both deal with the effects of advanced technology on human society, just as Lem did.

Their works ARE "of uniformly good quality," by the way.

Re:who?

[Whiteox]

Hey I knew that! ...but I forgot....
But "Breakfast of Champions" was written by Kurt Vonnegut I think.
I suppose that's what drew me to Venus on The Half Shell.

Re:who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never read any Vinge, but Niven's works became tedious after the 380th gratuitous explicit sex scene. Yes, Mr Niven, people do often fuck. That doesn't mean I want my reading to be continually interrupted for it.

Plus, Ringworld is just a total ripoff of Halo. Copying video games? Man, did he ever jump the shark!

Re:who?

[Thud457]

As much as I admire PKD's work, he had only one main theme "reality is slippery". You're lucky to find a Lem story where he only explores one unusual idea.

Re:who?

[Anonymous Coward]

um... Ray Bradbury.

Re:who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, PKD's short stories are a lot better than his novels, as far as closure and tidy plots are concerned.

Rest in peace

[Z0mb1eman]

Stanislaw Lem was easily of my favourite writers, regardless of genre or language. His short stories are nothing short of brilliant (no pun intended) - it's the caliber of writing that subtly changes the way you think of the world.

A couple of links to bibliographies and excerpts:

http://www.lem.pl/cyberiadinfo/english/dziela/dzie la.htm (his official site)
http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/lem/lem.html

Some of my favourite works are The Cyberiad, The Futurological Congress, and of course The Star Diaries. I have a lot of his work left to read...

May he rest in peace. Douglas Adams had nothing on Stanislaw Lem.

Re:Rest in peace

[gnork]

R.I.P. He and his books had a great influence on my life. gnork

Was that passage suppossed to be good?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because far from being entertaining that passage is the epitome of what is wrong with sci-fi.

Re:Was that passage suppossed to be good?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it would help if you told us what did you see in that passage that so offended your sensibilities? I'm especially baffled by your comment since in my experience Lem's style is very far from mainstream sci-fi.

sad day

[ahmetaa]

i was lucky that i started reading Lem with "The invincible" from the Turkish translation. i loved the book. then i read many more, each book has a distictive character. He had a unique stlye that i still cannot see in today's aouthors. My brothers are also a huge fan of him, a sad day for us.

Let's interview Michael Kandel

[sukotto]

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)

Re:Let's interview Michael Kandel

[Nanoda]

That's a great idea. I was stunned to find out while reading The Cyberiad that it was translated, as it seems impossible that the subtle wit, intricate prose and puns on astro/nuclear/quantum physics that pervede the book came from another language.
He must be a highly talented man.

Re:Let's interview Michael Kandel

[Vo0k]

Lem himself knew several foreign languages and translated quite a few of his own works. Quite possibly the translation was made in close consultation with Lem.

No matter what, if you won't catch the meanings behind "Trurl's consultation" (one of the humorous travels of Trurl and Klapaucjusz) if you're not a Pole who lived in Eastern Bloc. Just impossible.

Re:Let's interview Michael Kandel

[sakusha]

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.

Re:Let's interview Michael Kandel

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly his translation are a work of art. I was not really surprised to find that he wrote a few books too...

http://www.locusmag.com/1997/Issues/03/Kandel.html
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/bio.php?transla tor=Michael+Kandel

Kudos for him on this sad day for SF fans.

Pete

It is hard to believe something like that

[Anonymous Coward]

That a book that has been so popular for so long has not gotten a truer translation from the original Polish into English.

The best damn sci-fi writer ever!

[RouterSlayer]

Lem was (and still is) the best damn sci-fi writer ever I think!
Still all my favorite books.

I remember buying a first edition copy of "memoirs found in a bathtub" cost me all of $14 at a used bookstore way back when.
Now, these days, you can't find a lem book in a used book store if your life depended on it. At least not where I live,
and not for probably more than a decade or more.

Cyberiad was one of my favorites, and futurological congress was actually the first book I read, really loved that stuff.
and pirx too, and everything about Tichy.

And one of his "lesser" books (if any were truly lesser) was "One Human Minute" a very odd book to say the least.

I wrote a letter to him once. Thanking him for all he had done with all his work. I may never know if he got it, or whether it was read to him (translated). But at least, in some way he has touched all our lives.

I don't think we'll ever see stories like this again from anyone. the wonderous imagination, creativity and freedom. a certain spark that isn't really there with anyone else. It allowed your mind to go to places there are impossible.

Will we ever shell molecules with our hands? I doubt it. So something truly magical has been lost today.
Rest well Mr. Lem, rest well.

most incredible short story by S. Lem

[wisebabo]

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.

May he rest in peace.

Re:most incredible short story by S. Lem

[sakusha]

Good catch. I always thought that the Golem XIV story was the sort of story that the Slashdot audience should appreciate (and more so than the usual lame crap that people here worship, like Ender's Game). But it is probably above the heads of most readers, it is one of his most abstract works, probably surpassed in sheer abstraction only by "His Master's Voice."

Go read Golem XIV. Read it NOW.

Anyway, that is what was so great about Lem, his best works were philosophical essays only wrapped in the superficial trappings of science fiction because those were the topics of the modern age. Lem even gave up SF writing because he refused to be associated with such rubbish as was being published lately. When Lem was active, up until the early 1980s, SF was still subversive and was the literary genre of ideas. But then it turned into Space Opera rubbish at the hands of morons like George Lucas who popularized it and turned it into mass-media pablum. There was no more room for thinkers like Lem, so he gave up on the genre entirely. And the world was a poorer place for it. Shame on everyone for buying tickets to Star Wars and not buying more Lem books.

Re:most incredible short story by S. Lem

[ccp]

Great, great post.

Direct to friends list!

Cheers,

Carlos Cesar

One of the very best

[glwtta]

I'm not sure if Lem's work was the first SF I've read, but it's definitely the first I remember reading (still on the other side of the Iron Curtain at the time), which probably says something in itself.

He was definitely one of the few authors with whom you had to constantly explain to people: "I know it's SF, but it's also 'real' literature!"

Perhaps more influential than Lem is Tarkovsky

[Incognitius]

Solaris is distinctively different from most science fiction films with their emphasis on special effects and whiz bang action. Instead, its focus on introspective characters and the use of unconventional techniques to tell its story give it an edge over other art films of the period. Desson Howe of The Washington Post wrote: "the third feature in Tarkovsky's brief, shining career will deliver you from the mundane to the sublime...His pictures, and his sounds....tell more than just the immediate story; they rejuvenate the mind." Other renown critics also praised Solaris like Jonathan Rosenbaum who said, "Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.

SOLARIS

[roman_mir]

SOLARIS, it is not just a book, not just an operating system, it is also my license plate (some strange ideas come into people's minds sometimes. Once a lady called me Mr. Solaris, another guy thought that I owned Sun Microsystems :)

Lem was one of my most favorite authors, it is too bad that he never saw a movie made from SOLARIS that he liked. Tarkovskii was too family oriented, Hollywood was completely off base. The point of the book was quite simple, really, we cannot expect to be able to really communicate and understand every possible intelligent life form that there can in principle exist in the universe. We may not even realize that we are looking at life, even at intelligent life and in some cases at intelligent life that is way beyond our levels of technology and understanding. Space is gigantic, and all things are possible. This is really the idea that carries through all Lem's work.

Rest in Peace, you became a friend even though we have never met.

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[MSBob]

Lvov was a part of Poland then (many Poles still consider the city as being stolen from them by the Yalta deal) and he wrote in Polish and Polish only. Not in Ukranian, not in Russian. So he was as Polish as anyone born and raised in Warsaw. Case settled.

You're also trying to take Mickiewicz from them knowing that he's considered Poland's foremost writer and poet who helped maintain the spirit of the nation during some very trying times (Russia/Prussia/Austria 19th century annexion). FYI Lithuenia was in a union with Poland for several centuries and many, many people then considered themselves being both Polish and Lithuenian the same way that Scots consider themselves Scottish as well as British.

Your qualification that you're "not a Polish basher" sounds hollow given given that antipolonism has strong roots in America, stronger perhaps even than antisemitism.

Re:About time!

[kjs3]

Just because you were aroused by giant Clooney ass, it does not mean you're gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Jay Carlson]

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)

You left out the guy who pointed that out and analyzed that.

Samuel R. Delany; bear with the introduction.

From Triton (now apparently called Trouble on Triton), Bantam, 1976 (1976!) page 333:

Text and textus? Text, of course, comes from the Latin textus, which means "web". In modern printing, the "web" is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of graphemes upon the "web", rendering it as text. All the uses of the words "web", "weave", "net", "matrix" and more, by this circular 'etymology' become entrance points into a textus, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.

Skipping up to page 336:

Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo)---that is to say the "science"---are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence "The door dilated." from Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it---in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size iris apertures, and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture---is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the textus? All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the textus of anyone who can read that sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.

Since I'm a glutton for RSI punishment, I'll finish with something from p. 337:

In science fiction, "science"---i.e., sentences displaying verbal emblems of scientific discourses---is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as "His world exploded", or "She turned on her left side", as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and through the labyrinth of technological possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel textus into text.

And now, since my wrists hurt, I'll just quote myself:

No, the book we're going to be talking about [in 20 years] is Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. Published in '85, it posits a society where an organization called the Web provides books, papers, general information, background, and context to the conscious and preconscious (through implants, to be sure). I don't know anything out there in fiction that describes so well where we're heading, with cellphone Google and cellphone Wikipedia.

The next time I run into TimBL, my third question is going to be "Hey, did you read Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand when it came out?"

Card...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Orson Scott Card would have been nice...

Norman Spinrad

[DrEasy]

Spinrad's books show a very cynical view of international diplomacy that is unfortunately supported by the state of the world we live in now.

Arthouse movie, Hollywood budget

[Michael Woodhams]

I really don't understand why the 2002 Solaris movie was made (or, at least, why it was made with such a big budget). It is an arthouse movie with a Hollywood budget. While I appreciate it, I can't see how they ever thought they'd make their money back on this one.

Here's some box office data from IMDB. While it isn't too easy to interpret, it looks to me like it grossed well under its production cost (perhaps about 1/2 to 2/3.) The return to the movie makers will be a fraction of that.

Re:Arthouse movie, Hollywood budget

[Vo0k]

Primarily, it was a horrible movie made from a decent novel. The novel was a good, mysterious space horror, keeping the suspense, giving unexpected answers, coming to surprising conclusion. The movie was a hollywood romance saga, with the horror elements duct-taped on top in completely awkward manner. While not so terrible as a romance saga it didn't catch the least bit of mood of original Solaris. It didn't cater to people who like romances because they expected it's a space horror, it didn't cater to sci-fi and horror fans because they hated romance sagas.
It was to Solaris about what the theatrical musical version of LOTR is going to be to original Trilogy.

Damn, people, Lem made so many wonderful works, why do you keep reminding this failure of a movie that was made loosely relating to his works?

Re:Arthouse movie, Hollywood budget

[Kvasio]

While it isn't too easy to interpret, it looks to me like it grossed well under its production cost

?????
Budget is estimated at $47,000,000 (estimated)
and from December to February every week generated some $14 million.
Seems that it made a(n in)decent profit to the makers.

Re:Arthouse movie, Hollywood budget

[Michael Woodhams]

Just from looking at the numbers, I'm pretty sure that $14 million is cumulative, not per-week. I.e. *total* US box office take was about $15 million.

Re:Arthouse movie, Hollywood budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, its's cumulative. It grossed about $30 million worldwide. Before DVD sales and other revenue like TV rights and such it is/was deeply in the red.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=solaris.ht m

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

[goldstei]

Rest in peace, Mr. Lem.
I started with Futurological Congress, loved the Cyberiad and Fiasco,
but Memoirs Found in a Bathtub stuck with me most. Creepy and twisted,
but when life gets to be creepy and twisted you will recall this one...

Also - don't forget One Human Minute. Probably a good first Lem book...

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[keeboo]

I think the only thing we probably agree is that Stanislaw Lem was a great writer.

he wrote in Polish and Polish only

You forget that Polish was the lingua franca in that region for a long time, spoken and written by non-poles. Much like Belarusian was during Old Lithuania times (before the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, which was followed by Polish annexation of Western Old Lithuania, which was basically divided like a cake between Poland and Russia).
The fact I do speak in English language doesn't make me English myself.
So what now... Is Copernicus Italian or Prussian now?
Or even Chopin is now officially French? He made himself in France anyway.

Your qualification that you're "not a Polish basher" sounds hollow given given that antipolonism has strong roots in America

Now that's completely ridiculous from your part. Persecution hysteria doesn't help a thing.
Firstly I don't even live/was_born/ate_in_Macdonalds in North America.

Second, I DO remember when once talking with poles in Poland (yeah, I've been there for a while), while mentioning that my family was Polish (Polish citizens with paper and all, mind you) but from Western Belarus... well, that I was more than once refuted and being told something like "ah, they're not Polish then, they're Belarusian".
Funny thing is that you need to be famous in order to be Polish then.

Sturgeon's Law

[DragonHawk]

"The science fiction and fantasy section even of large bookstores such as Borders overwhelmingly consists of cheap pulp-rate material, with literary science fiction in the clear minority."

"Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud. That's because ninety percent of everything is crud." -- Theodore Sturgeon

with apologies, a quote from Calvin

[mekkab]

Krakow! Krakow! Two direct Hits!!

/goodnight, funny-man

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Jay Carlson]

The problem with Banks is that somehow the energy is gone. My nethack-flavored review of Look To Windward was: "A cheap plastic imitation of a Culture novel." Well, it worked, since I bought it in hardcover.

I bought The Algebraist in Paris during US embargo, and it did ruin some of my trip by keeping me up all night reading it. But it seemed too long per plot twist delivered. Don't get me wrong, I live for books that surprise me. But a lot of that was unreliable narrator, and the cosmology seemed directly ripped off from Orion's Arm, and Banks didn't even get into the truly fascinating issue of Empire Time, and what it would mean for competing civilizations. Probably our Linux buddy Strosser nailed it in one of his books I haven't read yet.

Still, it's hard for me to type a message that would denegrate Against A Dark Background (for one line 2/3rds of the way through the book), The Player Of Games, or Feersum Enjinn (after learning to read again). They've all been sucked up deep into my mind.

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[Vo0k]

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 of his life in Poland (no matter how much Poland was wandering over the map in the meantime, torn by wars and pacts between powers) and the fact that he was born in a city which by pact Ribentrop-Molotov doesn't belong to Poland anymore doesn't change a thing.
AFAIK he never had Ukrainian citizenship too.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[elronxenu]

Also Isaac Asimov, Cyril M Kornbluth, Fred Pohl, Frank Herbert and Algis Budrys.

Stanislaw Lem: a communist conspiracy

[january]

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.

Cheers,
January

Re:Stanislaw Lem: a communist conspiracy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yepp, he was a communist. So? If you browse through his creations (especially some of the early one's), not just "The Magellans Cloud" it is clear.

His last book, printed in 1989, is called "Fiasco".

That finishes his story. He always wanted to hint us at the very source of our problems. We do not understand each other, we won't understand AI if we able to create, and we will never understand aliens if lucky to encounter them. No chance. That was his conclusion.

RIP Stanislaw! Thank you for your brilliant creations.

Re:Stanislaw Lem: a communist conspiracy

[ccp]

don't forget the critiques on non-existing books, which remind me so much of Jorge Luis Borges.

Thanks for pointing to it. As an Argentinian, I was wondering why nobody was aware of the connection.

Let's remember once more that Lem wasn't just a great SF writer, but a great writer who happened to write SF.

Cheers,
Carlos Cesar

SLOWLARIS

[SimHacker]

I think you may have confused Lem's book "Solaris" with an operating system named "Slowlaris". They are totally different.

-Don

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poles were distinguished from Ukrainians as Roman Catholics speaking at home (as apposed to Ukrainians who are Greek Catholics and speek Ukrainian. Stanislaw Lem meets both criteria.

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[keeboo]

Well, I was going to sleep so I'm going to be quick...
You've made a good argumentation here.
In the case of Lem I may have targetted him wrong. I'll think about it.

Theme of the insurmountable communication gap

[Ansible42]

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 universe, and the futility of our attempt to grasp its nature. I wonder where this pessimism sprang from? Was it the result of a lifetime living under a monolithic communist bureaucracy? I'd have to think that it was at least influenced by the political climate, although it may have been an expression of more personal feelings.

Re:Theme of the insurmountable communication gap

[ccp]

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.

I'd argue that the central theme in "Solaris" is the impossibility of communicating with ourselves .

Cheers,

Carlos Cesar

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[Zdzicho00]

My family roots are from Lwów. My grandfather has been born in small village near this city. He was a Pole, my father is a Pole, I'm a Pole and I'm proud of that.

damn...

[toQDuj]

I grew up with "Pirx in the cosmos", which, for some strange reason, was the only Lem book in our house... (before I went to the library of course). He imagined some great contraptions for torture in it, such as the bath at body temperature while wearing a mask through which you could only breathe, devoid of senses...

The Invincible

[Zdzicho00]

I grow up reading "The Invincible" ("Niezwyciezony" in polish) novel again and again.
It's so marvelous!
http://www.lem.pl/english/dziela/niezwycie/niezwyc ie.htm/
I even prefer it to "Solaris".

/Z

Re:The Invincible

[jpietrzak]

Yes! I too loved The Invincible. It was one of the first Lem stories I read, and drew me into collecting everything I could find of his works. I love how it has the outward appearance of a classic space opera, yet hints at the deep philosopical and social ideas that he would explore more fully in his later works.

Another thing I've realized -- reading Lem's works all the way up to Fiasco, you can tell how he matured as a writer, but he also seemed to become more pessimistic as time went by. His stories are uniformly brilliant, but I find that it's the earlier stories (like "The Invincible") that I go back to and reread, simply because they are more optimistic in tone.

And if any of his stories were appropriate for a Hollywood-style movie, it would be The Invincible, not Solaris. :)

Ah well. Rest in peace, Mr. Lem.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[DNS-and-BIND]

Ray Bradbury didn't write that, Micheal Moore did. Or have you been in a closet for the last few years?

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Flyboy Connor]

John Brunner (the internet, in the mid 70s, with privacy concerns for all. OMG)

Brunner managed to mix brilliance up with utter boredom. I have read several of his heavy volumes, but I will read each of them only once.

Philip K Dick (mad as a bag of hammers)

Wonderful, wonderful. After reading SF for fifteen years, after which I started to appreciate other literature too, Dick is the ONLY writer I still think is really good. Sure, I still read SF for entertainment now and again, but most of it is simply trash, and almost none of it has any real depth. Dick, on the other hand, remains great.

Ray Bradbury (mostly for his non-SF short stories, funnily enough, but for Farenheit 451)

OK, Bradbury has his great moments too.

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)

For me, Heinlein went from cheap but fun entertainment immediately to pretentious psychobabble. The borderline here was "Stranger in a Strange Land" -- already quite pretentious, but entertaining nonetheless.

Fredric Brown (short stories about time travel that work)

For a looooong time, Brown was my favorite author. I recently acquired his collected novels and collected short stories, and read them all again. Yes, he is still fun, but there is no depth at all.

The one author I would like to add is Damon Knight. Yes, he is of the likes of Fredric Brown, and provides little depth, but his bundles "Off Centre", "Far Out", and "In Deep" provide some of the most original SF I have ever read. There are stories here which have such a weird premise, that it is a surprise that one author could fill a whole bundle of with this kind of stories. While Knight has not changed my philosophy of life, he showed me that weird ideas can actually work.

Memoirs from a bathtub

[EuropeUnited]

Back in seventh grade, when I still lived with my parents, I slipped into the world of Stanislaw Lem by accident. An old copy of Memoirs found in a Bathtub was hidden away in the small sci-fi section of our rural village-library. I found the title funny, so I borrowed it. I hadn't read 1984, nor any Kafka or such dystopic material so this was my entry into a whole new genre, and it made a huge impression.

If I must choose a favorite, I think it would be the Adventures of captain Prix. But they're all mostly excellent.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[iainl]

Actually, I _really_ liked The Algebraist; I thought it's the best thing he's done in years. Yes, it's not quite as twisty or downright nasty as some of his earlier work, but it's just so much fun.

Also, on a supremely shallow note, the UK hardback (at least; I've not seen the others) is just a gorgeous thing with a really nice typeface that I found a lot easier on the eyes than his early books. There have been new covers for all the old books as well; I keep meaning to see if they've been given it - I had to give up on Walking On Glass because the text was so dense it gave me a headache.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Scarblac]

Vernor Vinge, for his attempts at describing really superior intelligence and hive minds in A Fire Upon the Deep, and a bunch of different really hard to write about stuff like Focus and how it is to view a really different alien society through the eyes of really good translators, in A Deepness in the Sky.

Greg Egan, for blowing my mind with ideas like his "dust theory" (in Permutation City), and the extreme consequences of virtual life in Diaspora, to trying to write the impossible in Schild's Ladder (life in a universe with utterly different quantum mechanics). His stories and characters may not be the best ever (according to reviews), I never noticed because I was trying to keep up with the ideas. Far ahead of everybody else.

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[QNeX]

Well back then Lviv (Lwów) was a Polish city. In Yalta, that part of Poland
was taken from Poland (and "in return", borders were moved to the west). Many
a person was forced to move from Lwów back then...

Personally I find your supposition amusing -- Lem thought about himself as
Polish citizen, spoke Polish, wrote in Polish, lived in Poland. Both died
and was born in Poland.

This reminds me of a joke, which went something like this:
  -- Tell me, are there any famous Polish people?
  -- For instance, Nicolaus Copernicus.
  -- He was German!
  -- No, no, he was Polish! Another one: Fryderyk Chopin, the famous musician.
  -- He was French!
  -- No, no, he was Polish! Say, another one: pope John Paul II!
  -- He was Italian!!
  -- No, no, he was Polish! ... and so on.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Threni]

What do you Sci-Fi buffs make of Stephen Baxter? Just curious...

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow keeboo,

you are another person in long line which brain was replaced by the wiki page, google serch engine and daily lecture of slashod.com.

The false reality you are living must have made you to say such complete bullshit, but I have good prescription for you, go and read some Lem and with some effort maybe there is also a hope for you.

Cheers

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[meringuoid]

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.

Like a lot of near-future SF, Blair got the politics and the technology pretty well, but was hopelessly wrong with the date. 22 years on and we're only now beginning to get there...

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[sznupi]

Don't you think it's better to rely on what them thought about themselves? Both Mickiewicz and Lem considered themselves Polish.

Sturgeon's REVELATION

[Illbay]

...literary science fiction in the clear minority.

Okay, so Sturgeon's Revelation pertains. Recall that Sturgeon was responding to the statement that "90% of SF is crap."

He rightly stated that "90% of EVERYTHING is crap."

Pointing out that there's a lot of "crap" on bookshelves is redundant in the extreme. But you can also point to about 10% of the stuff, that is very good SF or Fantasy.

(Also redundant, but at least satisfying).

I suspect that if you look at the combined output of all student and faculty at any given school of journalism today, the 90% mark might be exceeded.

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[sznupi]

And perhaps I'll clarify about Mickiewicz before it leads to confusion...

Current "international" name of PL is "Republic of Poland"...however this is a bit unprecise translation. We have a word for "republic": "republika", but isn't used in the name of the country: "Rzeczpospolita Polska"

Also, both Poland and Lithuania were closely tied parts of _one_ country - but it wasn't called Poland at all! It was..."Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodow". Best translation of it is probably "Commonwealth of Both Nations", often simply shortened to "Rzeczpospolita" ("Commonwealth"). And this is true also for current name of Poland, which means something close to "Commonwealth of Poland"/"Polish Commonwealth", but is often shortened to "Commonwealth".
Also, most importantly...current Poland considers itself, quite rightfully so, direct descendant of "Commonwealth of Both Nations". Lithuania doesn't.

It's been available in English for a while.

[Naruki]

I bought all of his books while living in Japan 15 years ago. I learned a few English words, despite that being my native language. He is bloody awesome.

Eden

[CaptnMArk]

One of the first SF books I read, a long time ago.

Peace On Earth

[tynanism]

I'd recommend the above-named for any new reader looking for an accessible, humorous, but (I think) entirely characteristic and worthwhile intro to Lem.

"The Cyberiad" (polish version)

[motyl]

http://free.of.pl/a/adamsykut/literatura/Wyprawa_1 _A.html

starts with "Cyprian cyberotoman"

Re:"The Cyberiad" (polish version)

[good soldier svejk]

I guess that is as good a place as any to start. Thanks. My mother spoke Polish. But she spoke it like a five year old, since she was five when she left.

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[Helish]

You are forgetting one thing, when the borders were rewriten in history classes under comunism the schools were teaching that the current borders are the true polish borders. So just ignore the thing that you are not polish. Right now there's a big movment of helping out polish communities in the former soviet union countries.

That's talking as a Pole with a Lithuanian surname. Pretty much at that time if you wanted to stay in a country and not be relocated you had to become Lithuanian, change surname etc. My family did that and then moved to poland.

Lem hated the Hollywood 'Solaris' remake

[Sigi]

In one of the last interviews given by Stanislaw Lem before his death he made it quite clear that he's not fond at all of the "Solaris" version made by Steven Soderbergh.

I do not have the text ready to quote it here, but he said that his book was about the relation of the humans to that oceanic intelligence and not a silly love story. He also added "well, at least they've paid me a nice compensation". :-)

--Sigi

Re:Lem hated the Hollywood 'Solaris' remake

[anvilmark]

before his death he made it quite clear that he's not fond at all of the "Solaris" version made by Steven Soderbergh.

Well that makes at least two of us. However "not fond" is too bland of an expression. Solaris is the family benchmark for bad movies. I stayed on until the end out of morbid curiosity but afterwards I wanted those 99 minutes back.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Ford Prefect]

What do you Sci-Fi buffs make of Stephen Baxter? Just curious...

I really liked some of his earlier stuff (Raft and Flux were great, and his collected short stories were good fun), but the last book of his I read (I forget the name, 'Manifold Time', or something) seemed ... derivative. Recycling ideas from his previous work, and from films - there seemed to be whole chunks lifted from the Andromeda Strain.

Still, I highly recommend Flux - I don't recall anyone else writing a book about humans living inside a neutron star, swimming freely in the superfluid below its crust... ;-)

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Ford Prefect]

Still, it's hard for me to type a message that would denegrate Against A Dark Background (for one line 2/3rds of the way through the book) ...

Which line would that be? I have a suspicion I know what it might be, anyhow. Something to do with ... the night sky?

I liked The Algebraist - I don't think it was my favourite book of his (that's between Use of Weapons, Inversions and Feersum Endjinn), but I did think it had a bit more weight than Look To Windward, which had some great ideas (dirigible behemothaurs!) but kind of ran flat at the end.

Back to the Algebraist, for some obscure reason it really reminded me of the Crow Road, albeit set in a giant EU-style galactic empire. I wasn't convinced by the Dwellers, though - I'd been expecting something more genuinely inscrutable like the aforementioned behemothaurs. But if a sequel ever appears, I'll definitely go off to buy it as soon as it's available!

For regaining that missing ... energy, I reckon he should write some more short stories. Get down on to paper some of those ideas I'm sure will be furtively scurrying around in darkened corners of that messed up brain of his... ;-)

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Copernicus being Prussian was Polish ...

But he wasn't Prussian. Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Torun but he was a son of a wealthy businessman, copper trader that come from Krakow - capital of Kingdom of Poland. The family moved to Torun when East Prussia become Polish fief.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Xiaran]

The one author I would like to add is Damon Knight.

My god. I thought I was the only one. A very rarely mentioned author these days I find. My only downer abotu Knight is that I dont think he wrote nearly enough in my opinion. He pasted away in 2002... alas. Hes also responsible for a SF cliche in that he wrote a short story that the Twilight Zone "To Serve Man" is based on.

What are you reading

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you reading into that passage and my reply to it?

That passage did not offend me. It is just dull and boring. Personally when I read, say Dune, the thing draws me is not the description of ornithopters and how they function but the highly complex multi-dimensional plot. The passage you brought forth is too overburdened with plot exposition. The book as a whole might be entertaining though.

Re:What are you reading

[jamie]

It's called humor...

His famous words

[aLEczapKA]

He had many, but I liked especially these:

All gods were immortal

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Threni]

Thanks for that. Someone lent me `The Time Ships` (authorized follow up to Wells' "Time Machine"), Time and the short story collection "Phase Space" and I'm weighing up the possibility of taking one (possibly the latter) on holiday with me next week. Sounds like you've just voted for it!

Also interestingly, I've been looking for a book I read about maybe 10 or more years ago in New Scientist (I believe), which featured people living inside a sun. Perhaps Flux is that book? I've been told Baxter is a `hard sci-fi` author, which I think the review mentioned; I'd never heard that phrase before then.

Cheers.

Solaris

[edxwelch]

Solaris was a great film, but I wouldn't classify it as science fiction, it was a romance/mystical movie that happened to be in a science fiction setting.

welcome to Plato's dungeon, er I mean CAVE

[Thud457]

Hollyweird likes stories that play with what is real and what isn't. It makes them feel what they do is special. Just look at movies like "Vanilla Sky", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", "The Truman Show" and "Brazil". They particularly enjoy half-heartedly raping the oeuvre of Philip K Dick for this reason.

Re:welcome to Plato's dungeon, er I mean CAVE

[mink]

"Vanilla Sky"

I perfer it in the original Spanish version "Abre los Ojos" (open your eyes).

Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanislaw Lem

[Anonymous Coward]

The Russian film director who wrote the first film adaptation of Lem's Solaris also directed a movie called Stalker. Many of the gamers here on /. will instantly recognize the theme of Stalker.

Stalker was adapted from Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's novel Roadside Picnic.

"Roadside Picnic is the novel on which Tarkovsky's film Stalker was based. Aliens have visited the Earth, leaving behind the Zones, places of immense danger where incomprehensible technological wonders can be found. A frontier culture has developed around these areas, where "stalkers" risk their lives in illegal expeditions to extract items. The result is a powerful but understated portrayal of mankind facing the unknown."

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl game borrows/steals liberally from this story...

I know..it has almost nothing to do with Lem...but it's always bugged me.

you kids these days, don't cite your source materi

[Thud457]

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

Stranger in Strange Land; Dune

[peter303]

Stranger in a Strange Land was my introduction to the now discredited claim of Eric Hoffer that language strongly shapes reality. This book was also a spoof of corrupt American revival religion. The commune and expanded consciousness portions were influencial to the hippee generation by not to me.

I liked the various explorations of immortality in Dune from saved memories to cloning. Again Dune explored religious fanaticism and ecology.

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Polish annexation of Western Old Lithuania???

Try reading a history book before opening that ignorant mouth of yours.

POPE JOHN PAUL II

[sssmashy]

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; 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:POPE JOHN PAUL II

[radtea]

Lem's (anti-)religious thought was as deep and humane as the rest of his work. Non Serviam, in A Perfect Vaucuum is a profound examination of the proper relationship between a created being and its manifestly imperfect creator. The title means "I will not serve", which should give an indication of the conclusion he reached.

Lem's greatest intellectual theme was the problem of scale, and the possibility that certain types of event were simply inaccessible to humans because of the differences in scale. He explored this theme in Solaris, obviously, where the simple size of the planetary ocean posed an insuperable barrier to communication. Both The Investigation and Chain of Chance look at the problem of the highly improbable, as does his essay (I believe in Imaginary Magnitude) on the impossibility of his own existence.

His scope was enormous, from the lighthearted stories of Ijon Tichy to deep investigations of the human condition. If I were recommending a small selection of his works, I'd say:

His Master's Voice: This is the only book about the scientific process that I think really captures the essential nature of the enterprise, right down to the pscyhological states of the individual scientist. Hogarth's description of how he comes to know he has the solution to a problem--that he is going to solve it--even before he knows exactly what the solution is, is a perfect description of my own experience as a scientist.

Return From The Stars: I think about this as the most human of Lem's stories, dealing with the problems of a man who has come back from a long space voyage to a world he no longer belongs in. I get the urge to re-read it every time I visit my far-distant family, from whom I've grown apart.

Fiasco: The last tale of Pirx the Pilot, who so far as I am concerned must be the man from Burnam Wood. Excellent story-telling and profound mystery, along with Lem's solution to the problem of the silent universe.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that, "The best SF being written today has to be translated from the Polish, and will win a Nobel Prize eventually if only no one tells the selection committee that it's science fiction." Nobels can't be awarded posthumously, so Lem has lost that honour, but his works will live on for centuries to come, and one day people will look back at the late 20th century and the dawn of the cybernetic age and look to him as the interpreter of this time, a single clear, humane, inquiring voice, asking questions, exploring answers, cutting paths for the rest of us to follow.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many more, these are the few I can think of off the top of my head.

Um, I can think of one more you missed: Stanislaw Lem!

As a kid

[Ibn al-Hazardous]

As a kid I was sitting with my kid brother beside our father - as he read bedtime stories. The Cyberiad easily made the deepest inpact on us (though The Hobbit also made an impression). I have never read a boring book by Lem! It is tempting to believe, as PKD did, that he was indeed a commitee - such a genious.

Alas, being fed Lem as a kid kinda set us apart from the other kids a bit. ;)

Lem's Pirx tales and The Invincible

[vudufixit]

One of Lem's most "accessible" books was The Invincible. The eponymous ship was "lost" on a distant planet, and the story follows a salvage/investigation team as they try to find out what happened to the predecessor ship. Some striking stuff in there, including an opening scene of a ship and human crew awaking from hypersleep that reads like the opening scenes of the first Alien film. Lem's Pirx tales were also great - Pirx was a slightly goofy stellar flight-school candidate who develops over the course of two short books' worth of stories - growing in rank, experience, and wisdom. Three standout stories: 1. On Patrol - Pirx tries to find out why a patrol ship vanished without apparent cause, and in the process chases a mysterious object with an origin closer to home than anyone would suspect. 2. (Title forgotten) - Pirx travels to a lunar base, and teams up with an engineer to stop a mining robot that's lasering all people and structures in its path. Classic line from Pirx, "Against something insane, insane measures are often best." 3. Terminus - Pirx encounters a recalcitrant service robot and reconstructs its dark and disturbing past. The final paragraph will give you a real chill... I could never understand his book The Investigation. It was completely inscrutable. Anyone here deciper it?

Re:Lem's Pirx tales and The Invincible

[Maljin Jolt]

Anyone here deciper it?

Yes.

Re:Lem's Pirx tales and The Invincible

[vudufixit]

Great! Please elaborate...

Help remembering a Lem short story!

[Great Beyond]

I havent read any of his works in years - a real pity, and I should change that ASAP. But the one I remeber from back in Jr High was a short story - well, I dont remember the name of the short (or the book it was in) - but it was about a starship pilot who enounters these pockets of time distortions and duplicates of himself from diffrent points of time in the week start appearing on the ship. Soon there's like a hundred of himself in this one space - and hell if I can remember how it ended.

I *DO* remember that it was a great story, and I'd love to get my hands on it. Can any of you /.ers better versed in Lem's work point me towards this story?

Re:Help remembering a Lem short story!

[jpietrzak]

I believe that was one of the first Ijon Tichy stories... It should be in The Star Diaries I think.

Re:Help remembering a Lem short story!

[Great Beyond]

Yeah, thanks - that's the one! I found a copy of it online - and yeah, it was as good as I remember from years ago.

Now off to place my order at Amazon.

Old joke....

[ckd]

"What's the difference between Lem's Solaris and Sun's Solaris?"

"One's an alien presence that drives all who encounter it mad, and the other one's been made into a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky." (or, in newer versions, "has been made into a movie with George Clooney's butt.")

Re:Old joke....

[Anonymous Coward]

...and both are slow and incomprehensible.

That's a pretty wide net.

[Grendel Drago]

That's a bit broad to consider a theme. You might as well say SF has only one main theme "what if things were different".

That is not much of a debunking

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Heinlein's Starship Trooper's society is pretty much every conferderate-flag-waving, assault-rifle-sporting rednecks' from Texas dream. A society where societal merit is based on how many things you have murdered and how ruthless and immune to suffering you've become as a result. A way to finally kick down and put a boot on the face of all those peacenick "liberals", and keep it there, forcibly, permanently. And all those born crippled or sick. Permanent underclasses galore.

I was firmly rooting for the "bugs" as soon as I got far enough into the book to understand what he was peddling.

And then of course are the disguisting appologists. Where are the insectoid aliens when one needs them?

Sony should take a page from LEM's book

[SimHacker]

Sony should take a page from Lem's book, and write movie reviews for movies that don't even exist. That would save them the trouble of making those horrible movies, that they have to forge reviews to get anyone to see. Just cut out the expensive part! Lem was simply being efficient.

-Don

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[RWerp]

Both considered themselves to be Polish. I guess it settles the matter.

Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Antisemitism in Poland (I lived there till I was 26) is much stronger than in America (I've been living in Canada for last 16 years) and many times stronger than antipolonism you claim to see here. There's no more polish jokes here than italian , scottish, german, chinese etc. Shrug. Quit whining.

You all forgot...

[Giddeon Fox]

...That he had a hand in an MST3K favorite, First Spaceship on Venus! Here's a quote from here:

MSTies may recall that he helped convert his 1951 novel "Astronauci" ("The Astronauts") into the 1960 East German film DER SCHWEIGENDE STERN, which, when redubbed in English, became the movie featured in episode 211- FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS. When he saw the final product he (understandably) repudiated the film and attempted (unsuccessfully) to have his name removed from it.

What is remotely funny about that passage

[Anonymous Coward]

Because all I see is plot exposition and techno babble.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[gfreeman]

For a looooong time, Brown was my favorite author. I recently acquired his collected novels and collected short stories, and read them all again. Yes, he is still fun, but there is no depth at all.

Do you have an ISBN? Amazon aint that helpful :(

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[Flyboy Connor]

For the short stories: 1886778183. Title: From These Ashes.

For the novels: 1886778175. Title: Martians and Madness.

Both published by NESFA Press, in 2002.

Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing

[gfreeman]

Superb. Many thanks!!!