Lem has got to be one of the most profound writers in all science fiction--dare I say in all of literature? He's up there with writers like Wells and Asimov.
Solaris is deservedly his most famous book, but he has many other books worthy of attention. His Master's Voice is a novel in the vein of the Carl Sagan's Contact, but with far more complex philosophical and scientific underpinnings than Sagan's work. Eden and Fiasco are both great as well, even if they fall short of Solaris.
His comedic books never appealed to me quite as much, although there are parts of The Cyberiad with some interesting ideas.
I'm interested in his Summa Technologiae--last time I checked it didn't have an English translation. Has anyone here read it?
I'm the exact opposite. I admire the ideas in serious books, but the style puts me off. I struggled to get through Invincible.
Comedic Lem is just pure brillance, still high on ideas, but also very easy to read. But I read them in Polish, and I imagine translating Cyberiad can't be easy.
BTW if you like serious, abstract sci-fi try Jacek Dukaj. He's often described as a successor to Lem, even if his style is IMHO something between Lem and Greg Egan.
I believe only one of his books was translated to English so far, but surely they will follow with others, he's very good.
Regards translating the Cyberiad, the famous scene where Klapaucius tests Trurl's AI poetry machine has been translated by Michael Kandel:
“Have it compose a poem — a poem about a haircut!
But lofty, noble, 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!!”
“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.”
... I don't know any Polish, but having found a more literal rendering of the original[1] it seems Kandel has not made it worse!
Kandel cheated a little by giving himself more interesting task, but in the end it's even better than the original. More universal and emotional, when original was just funny.
I once asked Michael how he translated the list of imaginary things beginning with 'N' destroyed by Trurl's machine in the process of making 'nothing.'
I found that certain Lem books are best read at a certain age :) So I'm re-reading through the whole canon to see if I've reached the right age for books that didn't interest me at a younger age. (I'm reading the (East-) German translations which are mostly excellent).
The Invincible was my favourite Lem book as a teenager (next to the Star Diaries of course), Piece On Earth is a good book for 20-something, and Fiasco for the 30's. Now I'm feeling like I'm getting ready for Lem's more gloomy philosophical books, and maybe as an old man I will start to enjoy his silly works...
Looking back to my youth in Eastern Germany, in which I devoured each and every Lem book, I will never fathom how his novel "Wizja lokalna" ("Eyewitness Account") (1982) was able to make it past the censors of this communist state and could appear as "Lokaltermin" in 1985. In large part "Kurdlandia", one of the two antagonized superpowers protagonist Pirx visits on planet Entia, is the most biting satire about an ossified, bureaucratic political system having just one objective left - keeping up the pretense that the cadaver of their ideology is still alive (which the inhabitants are forced to do in a rather literal, and absolutely hilarious sense).
Now that the Eastern bloc has been long gone this part of the book is more of historic relevance. But another large part is an in-depth exploration about where a free society is headed when AI and nanotechnology converge, all matter is penetrated and controlled by intelligent subatomic particles and the resulting omniscient, omnipresent "ethosphere" is programmed to keep all its human inhabitants happy. For instance, by avoiding all physical harm before it can actually happen.
It's probably not too suprising that the citizens of "Lozannia" (the other Entian superpower, where this techno-social development occurs) are _not_ consistently happy, despite all optimization ("hedonization") efforts of their government.
And then there is the brilliant comical premise of the book: Avoiding interstellar armed conflict is difficult because any and all real strategic intelligence about other civilizations comes too late due to the speed-of-light limit - therefore humankind uses fast-forward simulations of history on other planets. Now these simulations outputted two diplomatic notes from Entia to Earth threatening military action unless allegedly misstated descriptions of Entia in Pirx' earlier reports (in The Star Diaries) would be corrected immediately. (Both Entian superpowers had done/were about to take this step independently. And boy was the Lozannian note cool - I remember laughing for minutes after reading that page.)
So Pirx boards his spaceship and flies to Entia again for a detailed on-the-spot investigation.
Finally, that voyage makes up another unique part of the book - to entertain pilot Pirx on the long and boring spaceflight, he has received AI-based simulated copies of several philosophers and writers: Popper, Feyerabend, Shakespeare to name a few. Interesting dialogue ensues (as you might expect, the bard speaks only in iambic pentameter).
So this book combines deep philosophical thinking with sheer hilarity. Hence, suitable for all ages, even though not too many readers will enjoy _all_ parts.
In a 1986 interview [1] Lem explains the background of the book. What really blew my mind when discovering this interview recently is _why_ he wrote it - not because of the cold war, but since he was worried w.r.t. the challenges he very clearly foresaw for the _next_ phase of human history. Around 1980, no less. This man was prescient.
Too bad no english translation of this novel is available AFAIK. But as Lem himself admits in [2], the text is a translator's nightmare.
> Looking back to my youth in Eastern Germany, in which I devoured each and every Lem book, I will never fathom how his novel "Wizja lokalna" (1982) was able to make it past the censors of this ...
Wizja Lokalna (eng: Observation on the Spot, ger: Der Lokaltermin) is my favorite Lem's book. Unfortunately it was never translated to English AFAIK.
Personal anecdote:
I'm learning currently German (b/c living in a German-speaking country), and I chose "Der Lokaltermin" as my book of choice to work on with my teacher. After a year we're on the 9th page. (no worries, book is just small part of our lessons)
The reason for that is that the beginning of the book is full of utterly useless in everyday life words and sentences :) For example, I know how to say in German: "Two heavily-sweating midgets, after eating oily pasta, kidnapped me from underground parking because they suspected I'm the Princess of Pedimonte, then they asked Vatican for ransom money"
I read Cyberiad in English - it did't seem like a translation; it just seemed like the product of an eccentric author, which I imagine is right on the money.
I read Summa Technologae a long time ago in German translation.
It wasn't easy to read, but had many interesting ideas.
Two concepts I still remember and think of occasionally:
- the concept of "technology evolution" and especially that technologies that soon get replaced with something else often develop "bizarre", e.g. very large, forms shortly before extinction. Lem extrapolated that from dinosaurs (although I think it showed a weak grasp of natural history because for dinosaurs size was not correlated with their extinction). Lem's technological example were steam train engines, which developed some bizarre forms shortly before they were replaced with Diesel and electric engines.
It's interesting to think how this observation applies to our current technology. For example the monster die GPUs that Nvidia is building now for deep learning could be the last flowering before being replaced with far smaller and more efficient neuromorphic chips.
- Another interesting observation was the cost of technology. He had the example of fighter planes in the first world war roughly being the cost of a car, in the 2nd world war 10 cars and now getting many orders of magnitudes more expensive. In the 60ies this trend was only beginning, but it's clear it's continuing. The prediction was that at some point even super powers would only be able to afford a few planes each, and it's already true if you consider the costs of the American B2 (until manned planes get replaced by far cheaper drones)
We see similar trends with chip production. Originally even small companies could set up a computer chip fab, but now even very large companies like Intel or Samsung or TSMC can only afford a few and the costs are still growing quickly.
- (the full book has many more of course, but it's hard to remember them all. Lem's books in general have a lot of ideas per page)
A quick reply to second your highlight of tech evolution in Summa.
I’ve been a Lem since my teens when I discovered a dozen of his novels in a small 1990s grocery store. However I didn’t read Summa until a couple of years ago.
As a fan of Veblen (theory of Business Enterprise, specifically) I have a tendency to view technology as force and product of natural selection. Lem handles this with more care than most if not all related texts u thread in uni.
> Lem extrapolated that from dinosaurs (although I think it showed a weak grasp of natural history because for dinosaurs size was not correlated with their extinction)
Size was a contributing factor. That's why maniraptorans managed to survive (and evolved into birds). Also, did Lem really state or imply dinosaurs died out due to being too big?
I actually rate Solaris last among the Lem works I've read. Below things like Hospital of the Transfiguration, which are pretty far off the beaten track for Lem. I actually stayed away from Lem for years because the (2002) Solaris movie made me think he's just waffling and hasn't any SF ideas worth looking at. Hardly could have been more misleading.
A Perfect Vacuum is I think the pinnacle of Lem's achievement. Why write a book and leave others to criticise what you did, when you can imagine the finished book and write a critique of _that_ yourself? Imaginary Magnitude is a similar idea, and I like that too, but I think Vacuum ends up the cleverer of the two even though Golem XIV (from Magnitude) is better than most Singularitarian fiction you'll see today.
He was a true thinker and IMO is one of the giants of modern literature.
When I was a kid I read "the Invincible" and was hooked. It is one of his simpler stories (which I still enjoy re-reading occasionally), but after that I read all of his fiction that I could find in a library. The need to be translated from Polish is a serious obstacle, though. To be enjoyed fully his works need a good translator.
It's amazing that until just a few years ago, there wasn't a direct translation of Solaris available in English. The English-language version, by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, was a translation of the French edition, which was know to be less than great. The first direct translation came out in 2011, by Bill Johnston, a professor of comparative literature.
I think his comedy is some of his best work. The Futurological Congress is one of my absolute favourites. Brilliantly funny and clever.
I have Summa Technologiae on my desk and started it but I admit my attention drifted. Its good but it is quite dense and it has a strange mix of great ideas and bizarre ideas whose time seems to have gone - though of course bizarre ideas have a habit of boomeranging back.
> Summa Technologiae--last time I checked it didn't have an English translation. Has anyone here read it?
I've read it in German but it's been a while. It's one of those books where the exact words weren't known at the time, but all the ideas were present - you can reasonably argue at least Internet, VR and more are in there.
Also some wonderful to read ideas about the future that are applicable to the present.
Yes! Invincible is my favourite book of all time - but all of his books exude the same aura of unknowing and never being able to know everything, unlike with most authors.
The problem I have is recommending his books to my English-speaking friends - again, my favourite Invincible for example, has only been translated to English from German, not from its native Polish - so the translation is lacking somewhat, and there doesn't seem to be interest in producing modern translations and releases of Lem's books in English.
Lem has amazing books. I have some of them in "To Read", along with Verne and others. Sadly, not all of them are translated in other languages, or are hard to find. "Solaris" and "The adventures of Ijon Tichy" are the most translated, I think.
> His comedic books never appealed to me quite as much
I believe they don't lend themselves to translation that well. Lem's humour tends to be very linguistic. Greater degree of translation loss is inevitable here, same as with poetry.
Solaris is deservedly his most famous book, but he has many other books worthy of attention. His Master's Voice is a novel in the vein of the Carl Sagan's Contact, but with far more complex philosophical and scientific underpinnings than Sagan's work. Eden and Fiasco are both great as well, even if they fall short of Solaris.
His comedic books never appealed to me quite as much, although there are parts of The Cyberiad with some interesting ideas.
I'm interested in his Summa Technologiae--last time I checked it didn't have an English translation. Has anyone here read it?