The Future According to Stanisław Lem

In any case, for me it was more cognitive/philosophical: about trying to reach/understand the reality, after passing (yet another) layer of illusion.

So far we're only picking up the swearwords, so this may be a good complement.

I wholeheartedly agree that the need to read between the lines politically, and the belief that science fiction is a serious literary endeavor, put Polish and Soviet scifi on a completely different level of quality than in the West. (The same is likely true for other countries in the Eastern Bloc, but I'm out of my depth there).

I have read a lot of non scifi literature, and I would argue that quite a few of those books are more about impressing with linguistic marvels than about telling a great story. For example, I had such a hard time getting to the story behind the writing in books like Ulysses and The Satanic Verses that I didn't even finish reading them.

Lem was probably one of the most pure sci-fi authors out there. He was not that interested in using sci-fi as a metaphor for everyday issues, but he genuinely wanted to explore issues that were outside of our everyday lives. Such as what would an artificial intelligence or an artificial consciousness look like, what would an alien intelligence or consciousness look like, how could we possibly communicate with a being that is truly alien, i.e., it is completely different than everything we know about life and biological development on earth. His two most famous novels -- Solaris and Fiasco were both about communicating with an alien intelligence, and did not have any anti-communist or anti-soviet satire in them.

I agree he is a great writer. But I do not like it when people say "he was not really a sci-fi writer" as a precursor to saying "he is a great writer", as if one could not be a great writer while being a sci-fi writer. Lem is a great writer and a sci-fi writer. He possessed the most important thing in a sci-fi writer he could think up of interesting and/or important ideas, and he could describe them in an engaging manner and explore the consequences.

By the way, now that sci-fi is a billions of dollars a year business, sci-fi writers still have not bothered to deal with the ideas suggested by Lem. Aliens in modern sci-fi are almost always based on humans in one way or another. Today's sci-fi authors are committing the same mistake the scientists of Fiasco did by thinking too much about themselves when trying to imagine a being that is truly alien to humanity.

As an aside, I find Lem's prose to be rather dry, most of the time (though The Cyberiad is a notable exception). I don't know if this is something one can blame on the translators. In his scientist-focused novels, especially Solaris and The Futurological Congress, this works well; also, those are short works where the stodgy prose doesn't overwhelm. In other, longer works such as Fiasco and His Master's Voice, I find the prose almost unbearable. (Those latter two could really use some editing, too. Fiasco opens up with a seemingly endless chapter wherein a guy wanders around on an ice planet in an exosuit, and the prose catalogues nearly every single step the guy takes; it's infuritating and sleep-inducing at the same time.)

There's an awful lot of sneering at science fiction writing as subpar literature and it's completely unfair. Some of Asimovs work actually is good literature, despite the fact that some is just filler that he wrote because he was more or less forced to by his publishers. I've never particularly rated Clarke, so perhaps your criticisms there are fair. What about Ray Bradbury, or Philip K Dick or Frank Herbert or Zelazny? There are more I could mention too, including some writing today.

Having said that Lem is pretty special. I loved some of The Star Diaries and there's a scene in the Futurological Congress that still brings a smile to my face (sewer rats on hallucinogens hallucinating they're human and playing bridge).

I find that to be more true for Clarke than for Asimov. Clarke likes to present technical marvels, and the stories themselves are quite bare, but Asimov focuses more on the characters, leaving the technical marvels in the background.

Lem is great, as are a variety of other eastern authors, but they're not head and shoulders above their western counterparts nor is the genre lacking in literary skill in the west.

See for examples - Phillip K Dick, Iain M Banks, Daniel Keyes, Frank Herbert and many others.

Lem is excellent, though.

> 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!

The whole thing is here: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Art/tensor.html

Needless to say, Michael Kandel's translation is also hugely impressive.

I don't think it was ever supposed to do that.

funny note: it seems no one reads posted articles on hacker news... people just talk about other stuff related to the topic of the article..

If you like Lem's description of fictitious scholarly research, I strongly recommend Jorge Luis Borges' short stories ("The Library of Babel", "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and "Funes the Memorious" come to mind). The collection Labyrinths has some of the best ones.

I'll pipe up for another, the dazzlingly imaginative Bruno Schulz. His work is half an evocation of his family's life in a small early 20th-century Polish city, and half cosmic and out-there. He's like a Polish Kafka, but more whimsical, less austere. He haunts his own writing like a ghost because of his shocking death and the fact that his major work was lost. This adds poignancy to reading him that wouldn't otherwise be there, like a painting that was damaged in a way that became part of the art and made it a different whole.

Two other Polish modernists that I've been meaning for years to read are Gombrowicz (Ferdydurke) and Witkiewicz (Insatiability). Both are said to be fabulous.

Re-reading Heart of Darkness as an adult was a totally different experience from the forced read of it as a child.

I also really enjoyed Conrad's Nostromo, a true masterpiece.

And if you really want to be pedantic then please also note that the sentence does not say "more accurate", it says "better". This can mean many things: more entertaining, more inspiring, and yes, also more accurate. But because "better" is rather vague, I don't think it's very fair to criticize it as irrational.

Never give up!