Western sci-fi authors such as Asimov and Clarke were great, but they were not best what literature can offer. In many cases they use story as boilerplate to present some technical marvel. Lem was one of the best authors, even outside sci-fi.
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 love Lem's work but that's the extent of my familiarity with Eastern Bloc sci-fi.
Another good one is "We" by Evgenii Zamyatin. It's a dystopian novel Orwell cribbed from for 1984.
Is there any more recent Russian sci-fi that you recommend too?
I've heard some good things about Metro 2033 by Gluhovskiy, a post-apocalyptic novel about survivors living in Moscow underground train system after the nuclear war in 2013, but haven't read it myself.
Karel Čapek (pre soviet)
František_Běhounek (part of Italia north pole expedition) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franti%C5%A1ek_B%C4%9Bhounek
J. M. Troska https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Ondřej Neff (post soviet) and his stories around Clarkes monoliths.
He mostly writes hard sci-fi with political and philosophical elements, often about transhumanism, but he also did weird philosophical alternative history book - "Lód" (Ice).
Some English reviews of his books:
http://greglewicki.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/perfect-imperfec...
http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2012/02/10/black-o...
I think he would call himself 'futurologist'. Scifi on west was defined by laser-guns and girls in bikini on comic covers. East scifi just adored soviet ideal of future. Hard scifi was recognized much later.
Lem had complicated approach to technology. From his wiki page:
> His criticism of most science fiction surfaced in literary and philosophical essays (Fantastyka i futurologia) and interviews.[24] In the 1990s Lem forswore science fiction and returned to futurological prognostications, most notably those expressed in Okamgnienie (Blink of an Eye). He became increasingly critical of modern technology in his later life, criticizing inventions such as the Internet.[25]
Funnily enough, his robots were actually androids - biological, rather than mechanical, beings.
He also wrote, in 1922, a pantheistic gem called The Absolute at Large: mankind finds out how to get energy from matter annihilation. But that frees up "the absolute", which inspires religious devotion ...
(Pierre Boule, in "Les jeux de l'esprit", probably wrote up the opposite premise, general triumph of rationalism, with pretty much the same result, general conflict.)
That isn't entirely true, Lem praised the work of Philip K. Dick (American)[0][1] and Olaf Stapledon (English). He has two essays in which he analyzes Stapledon two great works: Last and First Men, and Star Maker[2].
I think you might also be suffering from a filter. The best of Polish writers were translated, whereas you have access to the glut of all American writers. It is probably true that there was a greater number of bad American writers.
[0]: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
[1]: Dick returned the favor by reporting Lem to the FBI as a communist conspiracy against the west. Arguing that Lem was in fact a committee and not a person. Read the letter here: http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick
[2]: http://dpuadweb.depauw.edu/icronay_web/lem%20stapledon.html
I suspect that there is a slight conspiracy: "the first rule of science fiction writers club is that you don't talk about Stapledon". It inspired most of modern science fiction but very few outside of the field have heard about it. Accelerando, The Shape of Things to Come, 1984, That Hideous Strength, 2001, Blindsight, most of HP Lovecraft, etc... all borrow from him.
To C.S. Lewis and AC Clarke's credit, they do acknowledge the importance of Stapledon to their work.
Do you think 'Last and First Men' changed your perspective?
The timescale of the book is staggering. It's like that 'pale blue dot' picture.
http://www.wscribe.com/parables/pass.html
For those that haven't read the book or that don't have access to it, the book follows the 'first men' (us) and their successors across billions of years. Not all movement in time is progress and not all change is natural. Very much recommended, I won't write any more here to not spoil the book for future readers.
Cut them some slack. If they say anything different it's likely some lunatic will label them "unamerican". While the country, as it presently stands, will not endure for long in a planetary timescale, we'll be fortunate if some of the core ideals behind its foundation last for a longer time and help guide our descendants into the deep future.
There is this misconception popular even among young Poles that the communism in Poland was a period of hardship and oppression. Sure, many things were bad, but if one talks to one's parents and grandparents, they seem to be mostly happy with that period and in many ways would gladly trade it for what we have today.
Especially censorship in Poland was mostly a façade. The system paid lip service to it, but generally people were free to criticize the government, communist reality and made a great lot of self-criticizing works of art.
Living might have been harder in other Soviet states. It definitely was bad in Russia. But here in Poland, we had as benevolent socialist system as one could be. You could be known as a religious person and not a member of the Party, and still hold a top accounting position in a strategic government enterprise.
Poland had a ton of things that were very very wrong, look no further than the SB and their victims. The fact that 98% of a nation experienced no significant hardships does not detract from that at all.
It is very well possible to have a totalitarian dictatorship in which everybody has a job and there is food on the table and an outward appearance of relative prosperity, but totally rotten underneath.
Poland did not have a 'benevolent socialist system' by any measure.
I'll just leave this link here, you can research the SB and Jaruzelski on your own good time:
Ex: While living in Poland, once I commented to a friend that my grandparents could barely read and one grandmother couldn't read at all. He thought I was joking. Or another example: my grandfather got his first shoes when he went to military service. These situations were unthinkable in Poland during communist times. In Poland at the same time lots of people were having university education and most people from lower classes were having holidays.
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).
>According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.
It took longer than its length of two hours to watch, because I had to stop and rewind to replay and and freeze frames frequently. (Check out what's going on in the fish tank while she's saying "I wish you could see me animated, it's pretty sick. It's like a genius designer on a bad acid trip. Oh my god, I don't know, I look like a combination between Cinderella on heroin and an Egyptian queen on a bad hair day".)
I'm going to have to watch it many more times, because there were a lot of details to absorb -- time will tell if it's up there with Blade Runner as one of my favorite movies very loosely based on a great book.
http://culture.pl/en/article/ari-folman-on-the-genius-of-sta...
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.
As I said, it's part of literature. Sci Fi filled that role as it came into existence, in part a result of science emerging as a thing in the 19th century, distinct from natural philosophy.