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

[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

[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.

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"

[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.

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.

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!

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

[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>

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.