So Long, Lem

Stanislaw Lem just died. He was (until yesterday) perhaps the best living science fiction writer around. In fact, I'm not even sure if I'd call him an sf writer. Sure, he wrote about robots, the future and all that sort of stuff, but his work was far more intellectually dense than usual for the genre, and, while fun, even playful, had much less of the sf "gee whiz" feeling.

A common complaint about science fiction is it's about a guy taking an imaginary ship to an imaginary planet where he shoots an imaginary monster with an imaginary gun; it has no relationship to real life. And just as bad, that most such writers (like Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego Kilgore Trout) can't write for sour apples. While both these caricatures have, alas, a bit of truth about them, Lem stood apart from even the better writers.

His best-known (but not best) book is Solaris, about a live planet that induces hallucinations in those who investigate it. Part of its notoriety is that it was adapted into two (boring) films by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002).

My personal favorites include The Futurologial Congress, a vision of a society where people take all sorts of drugs to avoid seeing things as they really are; The Cyberiad, a series of tales told by robots that investigate what it means to be alive; and A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of reviews of imaginary books.

Lem was closer to a philosophical writer like Borges than a conventional sf writer. Nothing dates more quickly than science fiction, as the world doesn't turn out like expected, or as a work has future technology with outmoded sociology. Lem, on the other hand, has the depth and imagination to live beyond his time.

And let me also tip my hat to his translators. He wrote in Polish but was read around the world. Since his stuff is full of complex ideas and wordplay, translating him must be quite a task.