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The Futurological Congress
eldavojohn writes "Stanislaw Lem was arguably the greatest non-English science fiction writer before his death three years ago and left behind many science fiction novels with messages of satire and intrigue. The Futurological Congress is no different. The book has several motifs throughout it but I found the most prominent to be that we are living in an increasingly medicated society whereby the future may be wonderfully dystopian — in that the horrors of our existence are simply hidden by drugs on top of drugs on top of drugs. With a movie due out shortly by director Ari Folman, it seems like a good time to revisit this often overlooked short classic sci-fi work." Read on for the rest of eldavojohn's review
The Futurological Congress
author
Stanislay Lem, Translation by Michael Kandel
pages
156
publisher
American Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company
rating
9/10
reviewer
eldavojohn
ISBN
0156340402
summary
A dark sci-fi comedy lampooning a future of an overmedicated society detached from reality.
Our hero and narrator, Ijon Tichy, should be a familiar name to Lem fans or anyone familiar with Lem's Space Diaries in either English or Polish. Tichy acts as a mechanism of sanity in many of Lem's novels just trying to figure out what the devil is up with a messed up planet he lands on or a particular device/person. By this manner, Lem allows himself much discovery on the reader's behalf and by these means can relay the current state of events to the reader without jarringly interrupting the natural flow of things too much. Through this novel's course of Tichy's discoveries, I was suspended from being disturbed by spoon-fed explanations most of the time, but the word play that occurred in this particular story got to be a bit much and tedious for a sub-150-page paperback hence a missing point in its score.
Tichy is now a member of the Futurological Association and is invited to attend the Eighth Futurological Congress in Nounas, Costa Rica. From the get go, Lem is full of satire with the immediate lampooning of such self-appointed associations (and maybe even academia) by pointing out that there are two kinds of individuals in these associations: the ones that attend every single meeting/conference and those that don't leave their offices, period.
One of the themes throughout the book is a borderline anti-American sentiment about the development of munitions and bombs. I'm familiar with Lem's ability to criticize both sides of the Cold War in a single paragraph although The Futurological Congress seems to focus more heavily on American military and pharmaceutical faults. Lem must have been well aware of kidnappings in Latin America when he wrote this book because that's one aspect he got right about the future of that area. Due to heavy activist presence in Costa Rica trying to capture and ransom Americans, a military attache is accompanying the U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica to speak at the congress but in the middle of his speech an unfortunate delegate from India reaches into his breast pocket to grab a handkerchief to wipe his nose. This delegate standing next to Tichy is immediately dispensed with by the bodyguards of the ambassador and, thanks to 'humanitarian ballistics,' Tichy only gets a spattering of blood on him instead of the bullet passing through the target and injuring more people.
Some background on Lem may help you understand this satire. He was born a Catholic Pole with Jewish ancestry and seemed to run the gauntlet of oppression. He survived World War II with fake papers as a mechanic/welder and due to his "bourgeois origin" could not study at the Polytechnic during Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland after the end of the war. He became an Atheist stating, "for moral reasons ... the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally." Knowing this, his satire and bitter critique of all things may not surprise you. On his way to the conference--aside from meeting an orgy of liberated publishers--he encounters an 'anti-papist' who is a Catholic on his way to kill the Pope with a gun of a massive caliber. The anti-papist's surprising motive is none other than The Holy Bible where Abraham is ordered to kill his son Isaac by God. Except that the anti-papist would be killing a father, the most holiest father. And this would be a great personal sacrifice and the "utmost of martyrdom" as the anti-papist "would suffer terrible torment and his soul eternal damnation." Again, Lem predicts today's world, we have no limit of people eager to misinterpret scriptures of any religion.
Back to the conference--since there's 168 attendees from 64 different countries, each person gets four minutes to present their paper. And everyone is only really interested in their own work and telling everyone else about it in a bit of a narcissistic way. This leads the first member to spend his four minutes thusly: "Stan Hazelton from the U.S. Delegation immediately threw the hall into a frenzy by emphatically repeating: 4, 6, 11, and therefore 22; 5, 9 hence 22; 3, 7, 2, 11, from which it followed that 22 and only 22!! Someone jumped up, saying yes but 5, and what about 6, 18, or 4 for that matter; Hazelton countered this objection with the crushing retort that, either way, 22. I turned to the number key in his paper and discovered that 22 meant the end of the world." The Futurologists in this novel are probably best described as each one being a less optimistic Ray Kurzweil in that they all seem to be spouting their own version of obstacles humanity is soon to face and consequently their ideas to remedy it. For instance the second delegate from Japan unveils a 10,000:1 model of a housing complex some 800 stories tall with self sustaining everything and mobile in the ocean! It's the future! In fact, everything is recycled! Even the food is recycled waste and excrement from the people. The sausage left out in the hall is actually reconstituted human waste (at which point everyone in the audience stops eating and shuffles the food underneath their seats). This sets the tone for a few of the minor themes of the novel and gives you an idea of how Lem takes subtle jabs at everyone. For example another United States delegate takes the floor to talk about population problems that are rapidly developing. He outlines seven solutions: "mass media and mass arrests, compulsory celibacy, full-sale deeroticization, onanization, sodomization, and for repeated offenders--castration." The book makes other references to population control and one character notes that continuing trends of population would eventually result in human beings exploding outward at the speed of light. Nature is addressed in an equally hilarious means as later in the book all animals have been extinct and replaced with what appear to be better controlled robots.
While in his room, Tichy makes the mistake of drinking the water and discovers that the water is spiked with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. He assumes it's the work of the revolutionaries and decides not to tell anyone but as the violence outside escalates and he mentions it to a fellow futurologist, he discovers that it is the rise of chryptochemocracy! With the hotel's staff, he quickly equips a gas mask as it becomes clear that chemical warfare is afoot ... of a psychedelic nature. Planes are called in equipped with LTN bombs. LTN stands for "Love Thy Neighbor" which is pretty indicative of today's munitions and their goals with surgical strikes. Hilariously enough, the very hotel in which the congress is convening is immediately bombed by mistake.
After pages of chemical warfare that affect the crowd's temperament and counter chemicals that affect the crowd's temperament, Tichy and a friend find oxygen tanks and masks and descend to the sewers where the hotel staff is relaxing comfortably with their own oxygen tanks and masks.
Unfortunately, Tichy and his companion do not have enough oxygen to last the night and therefore must take shifts suffering hallucinations. What follows from this point is a series of hallucinations that Tichy has ending in him coming to in the sewer. Tichy has several of these bizarre hallucinations ending in him being shot by revolutionaries in the sewer. He comes to certain that he is still hallucinating and refuses to believe anyone he is not. As a result, they freeze him until they can find a cure for his mental illness and he is unthawed many years later in a reality where 'psychemicals' keep everyone happy. This overmedicated society disgusts and frightens Tichy at times. It has gotten so bad that a company now exists where you can order a psychem that allows you the satisfaction of doing evil upon another person. Murder's no longer a problem, you just get reanimated. The worst possible offense is using psychems on an individual without their consent.
Tichy attempts to adapt and I couldn't help but be reminded of Fry in Futurama with similar humor employed nearly thirty years before it. As Tichy reconnects with his futurologist friend (people stopped dying as technology caught up a la Kurzweil), he discovers something unsettling about the drugs everyone is taking. He discovers that there's mascons that act as blockers to your senses and replace it with a superficial reality. And we start to understand why everything is so mysteriously idyllic while at the same times animals have been extinct for many years and the planet is at an overburdening 26 billion people. Tichy's friend hands him two vials that will unblock the layers of mascons. You see, the 'architects' of this current psychem reality have patched and repatched side effects of psychems and mascons with more psychems and mascons in the air and water supply! I'll leave The Matrix-like vials and harsh transition from utopia to dystopia for people interested in reading the book.
This book was a joy to read and although the very end is a bit dissatisfying to me, the satire and pessimism inherent to Lem's writings have influenced me and continue to influence me heavily. I like to think that Lem borrowed from sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick and that other science fiction authors like Douglas Adams have borrowed from Lem despite the language barrier and difference in culture. While Lem may not be the icon that Lovecraft, Clarke and Asimov have become, I certainly hope that people recognize his large corpus of works for more than just Solaris as I've enjoyed many novels by him. Lem offers a rare dark comedy in science fiction with The Futurological Congress.
You can pick up the English version of The Futurological Congress at Amazon . And catch the Ari Folman movie where the present day will be live action while the unfathomable future will be animated to adapt to the stark impossibilities the book portrays.
Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Tichy is now a member of the Futurological Association and is invited to attend the Eighth Futurological Congress in Nounas, Costa Rica. From the get go, Lem is full of satire with the immediate lampooning of such self-appointed associations (and maybe even academia) by pointing out that there are two kinds of individuals in these associations: the ones that attend every single meeting/conference and those that don't leave their offices, period.
One of the themes throughout the book is a borderline anti-American sentiment about the development of munitions and bombs. I'm familiar with Lem's ability to criticize both sides of the Cold War in a single paragraph although The Futurological Congress seems to focus more heavily on American military and pharmaceutical faults. Lem must have been well aware of kidnappings in Latin America when he wrote this book because that's one aspect he got right about the future of that area. Due to heavy activist presence in Costa Rica trying to capture and ransom Americans, a military attache is accompanying the U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica to speak at the congress but in the middle of his speech an unfortunate delegate from India reaches into his breast pocket to grab a handkerchief to wipe his nose. This delegate standing next to Tichy is immediately dispensed with by the bodyguards of the ambassador and, thanks to 'humanitarian ballistics,' Tichy only gets a spattering of blood on him instead of the bullet passing through the target and injuring more people.
Some background on Lem may help you understand this satire. He was born a Catholic Pole with Jewish ancestry and seemed to run the gauntlet of oppression. He survived World War II with fake papers as a mechanic/welder and due to his "bourgeois origin" could not study at the Polytechnic during Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland after the end of the war. He became an Atheist stating, "for moral reasons ... the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally." Knowing this, his satire and bitter critique of all things may not surprise you. On his way to the conference--aside from meeting an orgy of liberated publishers--he encounters an 'anti-papist' who is a Catholic on his way to kill the Pope with a gun of a massive caliber. The anti-papist's surprising motive is none other than The Holy Bible where Abraham is ordered to kill his son Isaac by God. Except that the anti-papist would be killing a father, the most holiest father. And this would be a great personal sacrifice and the "utmost of martyrdom" as the anti-papist "would suffer terrible torment and his soul eternal damnation." Again, Lem predicts today's world, we have no limit of people eager to misinterpret scriptures of any religion.
Back to the conference--since there's 168 attendees from 64 different countries, each person gets four minutes to present their paper. And everyone is only really interested in their own work and telling everyone else about it in a bit of a narcissistic way. This leads the first member to spend his four minutes thusly: "Stan Hazelton from the U.S. Delegation immediately threw the hall into a frenzy by emphatically repeating: 4, 6, 11, and therefore 22; 5, 9 hence 22; 3, 7, 2, 11, from which it followed that 22 and only 22!! Someone jumped up, saying yes but 5, and what about 6, 18, or 4 for that matter; Hazelton countered this objection with the crushing retort that, either way, 22. I turned to the number key in his paper and discovered that 22 meant the end of the world." The Futurologists in this novel are probably best described as each one being a less optimistic Ray Kurzweil in that they all seem to be spouting their own version of obstacles humanity is soon to face and consequently their ideas to remedy it. For instance the second delegate from Japan unveils a 10,000:1 model of a housing complex some 800 stories tall with self sustaining everything and mobile in the ocean! It's the future! In fact, everything is recycled! Even the food is recycled waste and excrement from the people. The sausage left out in the hall is actually reconstituted human waste (at which point everyone in the audience stops eating and shuffles the food underneath their seats). This sets the tone for a few of the minor themes of the novel and gives you an idea of how Lem takes subtle jabs at everyone. For example another United States delegate takes the floor to talk about population problems that are rapidly developing. He outlines seven solutions: "mass media and mass arrests, compulsory celibacy, full-sale deeroticization, onanization, sodomization, and for repeated offenders--castration." The book makes other references to population control and one character notes that continuing trends of population would eventually result in human beings exploding outward at the speed of light. Nature is addressed in an equally hilarious means as later in the book all animals have been extinct and replaced with what appear to be better controlled robots.
While in his room, Tichy makes the mistake of drinking the water and discovers that the water is spiked with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. He assumes it's the work of the revolutionaries and decides not to tell anyone but as the violence outside escalates and he mentions it to a fellow futurologist, he discovers that it is the rise of chryptochemocracy! With the hotel's staff, he quickly equips a gas mask as it becomes clear that chemical warfare is afoot ... of a psychedelic nature. Planes are called in equipped with LTN bombs. LTN stands for "Love Thy Neighbor" which is pretty indicative of today's munitions and their goals with surgical strikes. Hilariously enough, the very hotel in which the congress is convening is immediately bombed by mistake.
After pages of chemical warfare that affect the crowd's temperament and counter chemicals that affect the crowd's temperament, Tichy and a friend find oxygen tanks and masks and descend to the sewers where the hotel staff is relaxing comfortably with their own oxygen tanks and masks.
Unfortunately, Tichy and his companion do not have enough oxygen to last the night and therefore must take shifts suffering hallucinations. What follows from this point is a series of hallucinations that Tichy has ending in him coming to in the sewer. Tichy has several of these bizarre hallucinations ending in him being shot by revolutionaries in the sewer. He comes to certain that he is still hallucinating and refuses to believe anyone he is not. As a result, they freeze him until they can find a cure for his mental illness and he is unthawed many years later in a reality where 'psychemicals' keep everyone happy. This overmedicated society disgusts and frightens Tichy at times. It has gotten so bad that a company now exists where you can order a psychem that allows you the satisfaction of doing evil upon another person. Murder's no longer a problem, you just get reanimated. The worst possible offense is using psychems on an individual without their consent.
Tichy attempts to adapt and I couldn't help but be reminded of Fry in Futurama with similar humor employed nearly thirty years before it. As Tichy reconnects with his futurologist friend (people stopped dying as technology caught up a la Kurzweil), he discovers something unsettling about the drugs everyone is taking. He discovers that there's mascons that act as blockers to your senses and replace it with a superficial reality. And we start to understand why everything is so mysteriously idyllic while at the same times animals have been extinct for many years and the planet is at an overburdening 26 billion people. Tichy's friend hands him two vials that will unblock the layers of mascons. You see, the 'architects' of this current psychem reality have patched and repatched side effects of psychems and mascons with more psychems and mascons in the air and water supply! I'll leave The Matrix-like vials and harsh transition from utopia to dystopia for people interested in reading the book.
This book was a joy to read and although the very end is a bit dissatisfying to me, the satire and pessimism inherent to Lem's writings have influenced me and continue to influence me heavily. I like to think that Lem borrowed from sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick and that other science fiction authors like Douglas Adams have borrowed from Lem despite the language barrier and difference in culture. While Lem may not be the icon that Lovecraft, Clarke and Asimov have become, I certainly hope that people recognize his large corpus of works for more than just Solaris as I've enjoyed many novels by him. Lem offers a rare dark comedy in science fiction with The Futurological Congress.
You can pick up the English version of The Futurological Congress at Amazon . And catch the Ari Folman movie where the present day will be live action while the unfathomable future will be animated to adapt to the stark impossibilities the book portrays.
Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
boring boring boring
no wonder Tichy made some excursions
Why Stanislaw Lem doesn't get more attention on this News for Nerds site I just don't understand. Maybe it's just a general adversion to works in translation. But look beyond works like Solaris which is a clever book, though not so great, and of the film adaptations one was dull and the other cheesy. But for everyone here I'd recommend strongly the Cyberiad , about capable engineers roaming the galaxy when technology allows them to realize whatever crazy schemes they want. The chapter where they design a computer capable of generating poetry, and its first production is a splendid love poem in the language of tensor algebra will have the mathematically minded folks here falling off their chairs laughing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I get up early when the sleeping pill wakes me
I take a wake up pill and fill with energy
I power on hard and I check my messages
But I don't have any messages
I take a driving pill and head to my car
I drive around a bit cuz work isn't very far
I call my phone and I check my messages
But I don't have any messages
All I know is driving on drugs feels better when they're prescription
All I know is the world looks beautiful, the world looks so damn beautiful
I feel fantastic
And I never felt as good as how I do right now
Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day
When I felt the way that I do right now, right now.
I feel fantastic
And I never felt as good as how I do right now
Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day
When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now.
Work is anything but quiet these days
I try to medicate my concentration haze
I can feel/see the day unfold in front of me
So I take the stairs and hit the gym
The phone is ringing when I get to my desk
What was a stinging's now a sharp pain in my chest
So I take a Calminex and just chill
And then it's time for lunch again
All I know is work is easy when you don't stress out about deadlines
All I know is I take my medicine I always take my medicine.
And I feel fantastic
And I never felt as good as how I do right now
Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day
When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now.
I feel fantastic
And I never felt as good as how I do right now
Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day
When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now. (6 right now's that fade out)
Sometimes I'd like to slow things down
Enjoy the moment
But when I look the moment's gone
Work is over but I can't stay to work late
Got to leave and get ready for my second date
With a pretty girl that I met at the pharmacy
Right in the prescription line
I take a pill for my social anxiety
I get a table and a nice bottle of chablis
Now it's getting late and there's still no sign of her
I have another glass of wine
All I know is the wine lasts longer when you don't gotta share it with someone
All I know is the steak tastes better when I take my steak tastes better pill
And I feel fantastic
And I never felt as good as how I do right now
Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day
When I felt the way that I do right now, right now.
And I feel fantastic
And I never felt as good as how I do right now
Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day
When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now.
(Live) (JoCopedia) (Store)
What a crazy random happenstance!
Oldest book review I can recall on Slashdot. This book was published in 1971.
The continuous medicating of society is a common theme in books such as A Brave New World. It was a common trend in writing of future Utopias which have become numb to emotion and expression. I look forward to this movie, but it you want a movie that has this them I recommend Equilibrium starring Christen Bale. It was only released on DVD in the United States, but was released in the UK in theaters where where it did well.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
I always recommend Cyberiad for new readers of Lem. But for the geeks that are sure to lurk here let me throw out a few more. I've read pretty much everything that's been translated (including a lot of his literaturary criticism), so I know the gems.
Read Memoirs Found In A Bathtub if you liked Futurological Congress. It has the same paranoid glimpses of a distopian, yet familiar, future.
Read Mortal Engines if you liked Cyberiad. Funny stuff.
Read Fiasco for great hard Sci-fi. Greatest density of cool ideas per page.
Read Imaginary Magnitude if you're a geek and want to read about the famous Golem XIV (which has its own wikipedia article).
Read The Chain of Chance and you'll never read another mystery novel again--he pretty much unravels the entire genre with this book.
Read His Master's Voice for dense philosophy presented as a science mystery. This is his masterpiece.
This is just the tip of the iceberg--there's plenty more where that came from.
"While Lem may not be the icon that Lovecraft, Clarke and Asimov have become..."
You must be kidding. I like Lovecraft, but what is that fairy tale writer doing there? Have you read anything besides The FC and Solaris by Lem? How can you compare Lovecraft to Asimov? I just don't get it. Advice: read The Investigation, Eden, Return from the Stars, Fiasco, Peace on Earth, The Cyberiad and then reread Lovecraft.
Stanislaw Lem is a dick. I'd much rather read some Asimov.
So I don't get modded down as flamebait too hard, I'd like to say that I am deadly tired of deconstructionist literature which starts out with the premise that humanity is terrible. I see enough of that in my everyday life. I want to read about hope. I don't care for literature that touts itself as being for 'smart people' or 'better than other literature'. Let the books speak for themselves.
Thanks to the OP and Slashdot for this. As an avid reader of Lem since the 1970s, I remember The Futurological Congress well, and if I were at home, I'd grab my copy and re-read it. For those who need a gentler introduction to Lem, try Tales of Pirx the Pilot and its sequels. However, for pure, all-out trippyness, try Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. And don't forget that Lem wrote Solaris, an SF classic, despite the two attempts at movies from it.
I saw this when it was called EQUILIBRIUM and didn't suck.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238380/
It's funny to note that Lem's humor is reminiscent of that in Futurama. At least one episode ("Fear of a Bot Planet") is based on a short story by Lem (Ijon Tichy's eleventh voyage).
"Found dead" implies that some people unexpectedly discovered his dead body, whereas here he had a heart attack and died in front of the audience, so he can't have been found, he wasn't lost, just died.
I've never enjoyed Lem's novels. They tend to be extremely dull, IMO, and often there's virtually no characterization. What I really enjoyed by Lem was the Cyberiad, which is anthology of satirical fairy tales about two robotic inventors. They're funny, but they also have a lot of interesting intellectual content in them. There's a lot of really funny wordplay; I think his translator must have sold his soul to the devil in order to be able to translate the verbal craziness so well from Polish into English.
Find free books.
Few people i know are medicated, at any level.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was recently asked to do a reading for a wedding which had a strong geek audience in attendance, and I very much considered reading Lem's love poem. This was a book that deeply influenced my decision to spend a life in pursuing hackerdom, and I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Lem by a former Bell Labs employee who also introduced me to a variety of other cool geeky things (telnet, for instance). In the end, I decided not to go with the poem, because it doesn't really fit the couple actually getting married, but my own wedding is at the end of the summer, so you know what I'm going to ask my best man to read!
For those not familiar with the poem-- what is even more astounding about it is that it was original written in Polish! The translation is marvelous. On the subject of Solaris, though-- I think it is a masterpiece of psychologial terror, totally gripping-- but that the film adaptations (Tarkovsky's less so) are somewhat weak. Too bad Kubrick didn't take a stab at it.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the translators, "riding between the post-houses", who've brought Lem to those of us less able to read Polish. I see that translation has been hit a bit about the neck and shoulders in replies to this review. Thanks to Lem and Kandel, I don't have (nor do I want) a security clearance, wince while stirring the contents of styrofoam coffee cups, quote Snow more often than is necessary, and see the Phools everywhere.
On another note: Penguin Classics edition of Calvino's "Complete Cosmicomics"
I first read Lem about twenty years ago and thought he was quite the under appreciated gem. I last read 'The Futurological Congress' quite a while ago, perhaps 8 years or more, so my recollection is a little foggy. However I think I recall wondering if 'The Matrix' had some initial inspiration there.
When you think about it, all future is dystopian. If you can somehow travel back in time and tell your Puritan founding fathers that porn could be accessed with literally a touch of a button, then they will probably freak out. The same way if you told a native nomadic tribesman that in the future, national borders will prevent him from roaming freely. My point here is that what may seem to be dystopian to us now will be the norm or even desired in the future. There is no way that we can reliably predict how people's mores and social psychology will mutate into.
Read Summa Technologiae (non-fiction) if you want to read about futurology forecasts that are very competitive with those of the current thought leaders - Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, de Grey, Vinge, Vita-More, Gibson, Dennett, Hofstadter etc. - only making these in 1963 when the exponential growth and Moore's law (or the transistor!) were not common sense. I would be interested in what topics other readers found interesting in this book.
The Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem : An Anthology of Entertaining Stories by the Modern Master of Science Fiction
This was also translated by Kandel and is a great intro to Lem.
My favourite author. Ever. It might intrest you that about 85% of Futurama's plots are directly inspired by Lem (Star Diaries, mostly), and you will find his Ideas present in many other science-fiction. His more philosophical works are worth a look too, especially "Summa Technologicae" and It'S follow up "The Technology-Trap". There's even a Doctor of Philosophy offering "Lemology" for fun in Bochum, Germany...
As usual, few bi-neural american are still considering the world does not exists outside their frontiers...
May I remind you of some non American (nor English ) sci-fi Writers ? (Okay... my mistake... it was years before Barrack brought intelligence to planet of apes...)
Herbert W. Franke, :-)
Karel ÄOEapek,
Jules Verne,
Pierre Boule (planet of Apes)
Camille Flammarion,
Dino Buzzati,
we may even consider russian born Isaac Asimov
Another shout out from this corner for Lem as arguably the greatest SF author of the 20th century. I fairly recently went back and read Arthur C. Clarke's classic "Childhood's End", and I've got to say that, while it's got some interesting ideas (some of which are a bit dated nowadays, but novel for the time), I found it overly depressing and definitely wanting in comparison to almost everything I've read by Lem, of which the above list given in the parent is a subset. While a lot of Lem's stuff is pretty pessimistic, it's usually leavened with at least a touch of mordant humour, even if it is often at the expense of the human condition.
"Fiasco" is my personal fave, and possibly my favourite SF novel so far. "HMV" is a book that, had it not been pigeonholed as Eastern European Science Fiction, probably should have won global acclaim simply as a work of literature. To the above list, I'd probably also have to recommend "Peace On Earth" - it's sublimely creative lunacy and yet makes total sense in its own context.
In terms of advice for new readers of Lem, I'd also point out that he wrote in at least two totally distinct styles. I'd therefore suggest that anyone trying him for the first time should at least read one of his absurdist comedies (e.g. "The Futurological Congress" or "Cyberiad") plus one of his hard SF stories (e.g. "Fiasco" or "Solaris"), as you might love one Lem but not enjoy the other.
One last detail: my understanding is that the English version of "Solaris" was translated from Polish into French and then into English, and so it doesn't flow quite as well as the straight Polish-to-English translations, particularly those by Michael Kandel. I always thought it a bit of a shame that, given the amount of time and money spent on the Soderbergh/Clooney film adaptation, no-one kicked back enough for a straight Polish-English translation of the original novel.
We all have our favorites. Personally I think that the Strugatski brothers had
some awesome books, but after reading their English translations, I do not think
that I could convince a Brookline Bridge buyer that this is the case.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Stanislaw Lem was arguably the greatest non-English science fiction writer
I think Robert Heinlein was a better writer. Pretty sure he wasn't English.
Oh, you mean "greatest SF writer who didn't write in English". Oh, do you think I'm nitpicking? Well, if you care that little about what words mean, you probably shouldn't write book reviews.
I've written a review of The Futurological Congress , but not of his other books, which include some other gems. Cyberiad is a great piece of fun, and His Master's Voice has dated much better than most of the alien contact stories from the 1960s.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Then, you can convince a Brookline Bridge buyer to buy an original and a textbook on Russian. After a few years of thorough language studying, he will be able to appreciate Strugatskis' writings raw and uncut. :-)
In "The Futurological Congress" the Philip K. Dick-type "reality reversals" are brought on by psychoactive chemicals. But Lem obviously considered other forms of cheating subjective reality, long before "The Matrix": In his non-fiction "Summa Technologiae" (1964) -unfortunately never translated to English- he suggested a new technology he called "Phantomatics" which is what we today would call "Virtual Reality"! BTW in the same book Lem also considered the possibilities of micro- and nanotechnology. Bear in mind that the censorship in communist Poland meant Lem never had an opportunity to read Richard Feynman's ideas on the subject, and had to "re-invent the wheel" on his own. Without the language- and ideology barriers he could have become a major source of inspiration in the 1960s and maybe accelerated the development of science fiction to reach beyond the usual topics of the genre. Lem was inspired by authors such as Olaf Stapledon and felt SF should not be confined to a literary ghetto, but be used to address those deep issues authors and philosophers would find hard to approach in ordinary mainstream fiction.
was arguably the greatest science fiction writer would be more accurate, IMHO.
This notion doesn't even really make sense. Evolution has dictated that certain things make us happy and others make us sad but that doesn't mean there is something objectively reasonable about being happy when you have high social status and many mates and sad when you have few material resources. Moreover, I think we should be particularly suspicious about the judgments we make when we see these scenarios in fiction (e.g. brave new world). The problem is that we are extremely accustomed to infering things about people's mental states from their external circumstances so when that link is broken we are highly vulnerable to reaching the wrong conclusions. For instance, to steal an example from Brave New World, despite being axiomatically told Soma makes people happy when we read about the people who take it we somehow assume they aren't 'really' happy.
I think a much more productive way to think about these situations is to instead imagine reacting to an alien society which behaved in such a manner and thereby stripping away many of our prejudices.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The Strugatsky brothers from Russia incidentally wrote the story that later was turned into the film "Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky, who had previously made the first film version of Lem's "Solaris". Both films confirm that SF themes can be successfully used for "highbrow" films, if the director and producer treat the subject with the respect it deserves. Kubrick's "2001", while brilliant, was very cold compared to Tarkovsky's two films.