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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

Stanislaw Lem is one of my favorite authors. "His Masters Voice" is one of my favorite books.

"Cyberiad" and "Mortal Engines" are also great books but much more playful and probably geared towards a younger audience, even if some of the subject matter is philosophically deep.

I think Stanislaw Lem kind of suffered from the same fate as Gibson's work in that there have been a few attempts at making them into movies but they haven't ever really took off or translated well.

I do wish his books were in the public domain, though.

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> "Cyberiad" and "Mortal Engines" are also great books but much more playful and probably geared towards a younger audience

yeah, i'm from poland and "Fables for Robots" (= most of the stories found in "Mortal Engines") was given as optional reading in elementary school

"His Master's Voice" is a gem. I found it really difficult to get through the first time, as a teenager. Part of that may be a function of the translation. I later read it a second time after spending significant amounts of time in academia, and loved it for its cynical but largely accurate portrayal of human behaviour.

I also really enjoyed "The Futurological Congress" (which is of Lem's easier-to-digest stories in my opinion) and "Fiasco".

The Soderbergh movie is pretty good. Not quite the same story as the book but I attribute that to the difficulty of making a planet a character in a movie.

Every realization of the Solaris story demands patience and thought from its audience, and I expect that's the root of the problem with its lack of popularity.

Tarkovskis Solaris is really good.

Lem hated it. He said Tarkovski turned his book into a Dostoyevsky novel.

The problem is that it focused almost exclusively on the relationship drama and jettisoned the science fiction.

I found the movie to be incredibly boring, so I read the book to find out if it was just a bad adaption. In my opinion the book was even more boring.

Well, you can’t watch a Tarkovski movie and expect gripping or drama. The same goes for Lem’s books. They just require a different mindset.

Lem hated Tarkovski's "Solaris".

Strugatski brothers hated his "Stalker" based on their "The Roadside Picnic".

Tarkovski was always making his own movies based on his own (understanding of) stories. Basing them on other people's work was just a pretext :)

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