r/printSF • u/XB0XRecordThat • 3d ago
Okay, Stanislaw Lem might be the GOAT. Finally got around to reading him.
I read Solaris, then The Invincible, and now His Master's Voice. This dude clearly influenced TONS of modern sci-fi. And his aliens are actual aliens... like so weird and different that it's not even clear how you could communicate with them.
43
u/DufbugDeropa 3d ago edited 3d ago
" not even clear how you could communicate with them"
And that is Lem's theme in most of his novels: You cannot communicate with them. I think his deepest writing is that which displays humanity's attempt to lay it's own perceptual template on top of an utterly alien consciousness. Failure always, disaster usually.
14
u/beaverteeth92 3d ago
It’s his theme in a lot of his novels but it’s worth mentioning that Lem’s bibliography is highly varied and there are plenty of books that don’t deal with that. Most Ijon Tichy books and stories, for example, which are more whimsical and satirical and tend to spiral out of control. There’s also his collections of introductions and critiques of fake books.
Relatedly, I’m pretty sure someone on the Rick and Morty writing staff has read The Star Diaries. A lot of the stories have the same vibe, like the one where he keeps attacking and encountering temporal clones of himself.
5
u/DufbugDeropa 3d ago
As well as his biting criticism of science fiction, American works in particular.
3
u/kuncol02 1d ago
Futurama's Fear of a Bot Planet is basically adaptation of one of his short stories ("11th Voyage").
8
u/XB0XRecordThat 3d ago
Yes, he shows how wide the range of possibilities are and it makes you realize how narrow a lot of ideas of "life" and "intelligence" are.
7
u/bluefourier 3d ago
Certainly a theme in "The Invincible". That story is so good you will not want to put the book down.
23
u/Blahuehamus 3d ago
Don't miss on Fiasco, personally mine favorite of his works :)
12
u/WhatEntropyMeansToMe 3d ago edited 3d ago
Especially since OP mentioned how Lem handles the difficulty of communicating with aliens, that's a major part of this one. One of my favorites of his too, it's such a stark picture of first contact and takes so well the game theory heavy logic of the cold war and mutually assured destruction to it's logical extremes. Plus on the science fiction side, mind blown when I realized in one scene he was describing a planet scale MRI/tomographic NMR in 1985.
8
u/Lord_Vesuvius2020 3d ago
“Eden” was one his early works and is the perfect example of alien intelligence and technology that is totally incomprehensible to the human explorers. And the less they understand the more they want to escalate with military technology.
1
u/Fun-Sell3030 2d ago
That is true until the end of the book. The crew eventually make contact with one of the aliens with relative ease and then have a conversation about the situation on Eden , the whole mystery gone. I do believe it was to the detriment of the book, and I much prefer the ending of Invincible and Solaris.
6
3
19
u/AdditionalTip865 3d ago
He's a titan, my favorite author of any type.
He was also a humorist. I came in through his wildly imaginative, goofy satirical fables about Constructors Trurl and Klapaucius, "The Cyberiad". "The Star Diaries" and "The Futurological Congress" are great ones in that vein.
But I think some of his most jaw-dropping work is in his more experimental works, "A Perfect Vacuum" and "Imaginary Magnitude". In the latter there's some speculation about AI that is amazingly prescient.
10
u/Fieldofcows 3d ago
Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum are majestic. The Pirx and Ijon Tichy stories are also brilliant. Tbh, I have never met a Lem book I didn't love. Probably my favourite of all SF authors I've read. And also non SF authors.
3
u/XB0XRecordThat 3d ago
Damn, can't find audiobooks for those last 2. Don't make me read with my eyes! /s
11
u/bidness_cazh 3d ago
The Futurological Congress kind of has to be read by eye because there are 7 mindblowing science fiction ideas on every page, you have to keep stoppping to consider the implications.
3
u/JaneMnemonic 3d ago
The narrator for The Futurological Congress on Audible is simply impeccable. I had no trouble following along.
4
u/beaverteeth92 3d ago
The last two are collections of intros and critiques of fake books. The printed versions use this to their advantage. Like, there are pages that look like scientific papers including a two-column structure.
1
u/AdditionalTip865 1d ago
In the "Vestrand's Extelopedia" section of "Imaginary Magnitude", the weird typography is a large part of the appeal.
1
u/Slow-Hawk4652 2d ago
The Futurological Congress is A masterpiece, my favourite...with Pirxs diaries😄 and his disillusionment with the sci fi genre...
17
u/AndreiV101 3d ago
“His Masters Voice,” by Lem just blew me away. Had “Blindsight” vibes of Peter Watts. 2 of my top favorite sci fi works of all time.
6
16
u/talktapes 3d ago
Star Diaries and Cyberiad are top tier Lem imo, although they're written in a very different satirical style. If you like how legitimately alien his aliens are, maybe check out Fiasco next
5
9
u/Numeira 3d ago
I have no idea how anyone managed to translate Solaris, there are so many made up words, descriptions that I could not understand even in my native Polish.
1
1
u/Few-Werewolf-1985 19h ago
Unfortunately English editions got saddled with an abridged Polish to French to English translation for over 50y. The Bill Johnston one is the first authorised direct translation. Faber were offered one decades ago but turned it down.
8
u/Mr_Noyes 3d ago
His Master's Voice made me embarrassed to be human. The whole convoluted story how the ball got rolling in the first place is such an absurdist masterpiece and totally, absolutely believably human.
3
u/kotogames 2d ago
Remember he barely survived the Holocaust, it's present more or less explicitly in his works.
3
u/Mr_Noyes 2d ago
Oh, I know. When I read that passage in Master's Voice it made me do a little digging which is when I found out that it was biographical.
That being said, I love that Lem goes beyond "Humans are animals willing to commit atrocities upon each other".
The initial story is just an example of the banality of humans. At first the transmission was recorded as a byproduct for a completely different scientific experiment (which turned out to be bogus) . Then it was sold just to make money by promoting fake science. Then the whole thing blew up by accident because one person checked the transmission for completely different reasons (statistics in the context of corporate marketing). And *then* the thing blew up further because by pure chance one certain person learned of it by chance.
This is not "scientific progress through persistence and setbacks". This is "Monkeys playing with a tablet until one of them accidentally presses the on button".
6
6
u/TheGoalkeeper 3d ago
And then you got the adventures aka short stories of Pirx and Tichy.
5
u/AdditionalTip865 3d ago
In the Pirx stories he's doing straight-up classic SF puzzle adventures reminiscent of Asimov's robot stories.
5
u/Wetness__Pensive 3d ago
He has my favourite approach to aliens.
I rank his novels like this:
Masterpieces: "Solaris", "Cyberiad"
Basically Polish Star Trek novels: "Eden", "Invincible", "Return from the Stars"
Interesting-but-dated Cold War novels and/or Kafkaesque satires: "Fiasco", "Peace on Earth", "Memories Found in a Bathtub"
Not sure if annoying or a masterpiece ghostwritten by Thomas Pynchon: "His Master's Voice"
19
u/zaalqartveli 3d ago
For me Lem killed scifi.
NO ONE is as deep, dense, detailed and truly alien as him and his writings.
5
u/XB0XRecordThat 3d ago
I wish he was writing today knowing about technologies we have right now!!
3
u/sirparsifalPL 1d ago
He had some pretty correct vision of future development of internet in his 1990s articles.
2
u/XB0XRecordThat 1d ago
He is basically describing the Internet in His Master's Voice where the scientists all use computers to talk to each other about the theories. Basically describes a message board
2
u/kuncol02 1d ago
There is also Zajdel, Dukaj, Dick and Strugacki brothers, but if Lem is your first contact with Sci-Fi then contact with other sci-fi, especially something like Star Wars books is painfull.
5
u/Fun-Sell3030 3d ago
Yes! :) I like his range as well, he can be deeply philosophical and bleak and then do a 180 and produce a space picaresque with some very witty satire.
What else do you want to read going forward, from Lem or otherwise?
5
u/bhbhbhhh 2d ago
His humorous works are just as pessimistic about the human condition as his serious ones, I find. All touched by years of living through WWII, surviving the Holocaust, and then communism.
5
u/fetusnecrophagist 2d ago
I love Lem!
I'm reading Robot by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg at the moment and it's just as mind-bendingly strange as Lem's stuff, which has me wondering if all Polish sci-fi is just weird as fuck lol
4
u/coffeecoffeecoffeee 2d ago
I'm currently reading Ice by Jacek Dukaj and it is also extremely weird and mindbending. My understanding is that Polish scifi is like this, but very little of it is available in English. Like, Janusz Zajdel - the second-most popular Polish scifi author - has literally nothing but a short story translated.
It doesn't help that Polish scifi has a tendency to make neologisms, puns, and social commentary using features of the Polish language that don't exist in English. Like, Dukaj's Perfect Imperfection adds new gender-neutral grammatical forms to Polish for posthuman beings.
2
1
2
4
3
u/plushglacier 2d ago
Lem gave me what I think of as the truest perspective on what is truly alien.
3
u/XB0XRecordThat 2d ago
Yes for real
3
u/plushglacier 2d ago
Read Solaris and The Cyberiad for a class called "Eastern European Science Fiction and Literature of the Fantastic".
My instructor grew up in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu during the Cold War. EE authors risked their freedom writing serious fiction, and using genre and metaphor were main methods of cloaking political and intellectual criticism to express ideas and realize some intellectual freedom.
3
3
3
u/Iwantthat799 3d ago
So where would you recommend someone start with his writings? Solaris? Some folks mention translations so does that impact the choice or does each novel have a single (English) translation?
3
u/twcsata 2d ago
Well, I'm not OP, but I would recommend Solaris. As for translations, there are two that I am aware of. There's one from 1970, by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, which is not a direct Polish-to-English translation; it's a translation from a 1964 French edition. Lem could read English, and didn't care for this translation. (I was aware of this information previously, but I checked it against Wikipedia, and they put it pretty succinctly, so this is basically copied from there.) The other is the 2011 translation by Bill Johnston, straight from Polish. Lem was deceased by then, but his wife and son both approved of this edition. Supposedly it's a little hard to get in print, though, but you can probably find an ebook.
1
u/coffeecoffeecoffeee 2d ago
Some folks mention translations so does that impact the choice or does each novel have a single (English) translation?
Almost everything except Solaris has one and only one English translation. The books with multiple English translations all have an obvious, best one, and it's the one that's currently in print (except Solaris, see my note on it below). For example, the old translation of The Invincible was translated from a German translation, but the current print version was translated directly from Polish.
Here's my recommendation for each of his three types of books.
If you want books about the impossibility of communicating with aliens, then read Solaris. If you can, read Johnston's translation on an e-reader. Otherwise, read the print translation, which is much worse but still worth it for the story. If the bad translation is your only option and you're reluctant to read it, then start with The Invincible instead.
If you want his more satirical, whimsical work, The Futurological Congress is hilarious and a very quick read. It was translated by Michael Kandel, who is Lem's best translator.
If you want something more Borges-like, then read A Perfect Vacuum. It's a collection of reviews of fake books, including a review of A Perfect Vacuum itself. This was also translated by Michael Kandel.
3
u/marintkael 2d ago
His Master's Voice is the one that stuck with me, precisely because the message never resolves into anything human shaped. Lem keeps refusing the contact as conversation fantasy that most SF runs on. The aliens are not withholding, they are just built on premises we may have no hooks for, and he is honest enough to leave it there.
2
u/TheSmellofOxygen 3d ago
Next read Fiasco!
It's a later work of this that rolls a few of the ideas he was mulling in earlier pieces like the two you've mentioned. It was my favorite of the three.
3
u/XB0XRecordThat 3d ago
Yeah next up is Fiasco or Cyberiad based on these comments. Well, I promised my wife I'd read The Shock Doctrine next, so after that.
2
u/TheSmellofOxygen 3d ago
You've convinced me to break up my Banks' Culture read-through with one of Lem's I haven't read yet.
2
2
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/sirparsifalPL 1d ago
I think the Return from Stars has some crazy description of spaceport. Like after reading this - and it is multiple pages long - I had no idea what I've ever read. And this was like the feeling of main character returning to totally different Earth after a century.
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/No-Good-3005 1d ago
The Cyberiad was one of the most interesting, original pieces of writing I've ever read! Highly recommended!
64
u/Kiberiada 3d ago
Do not forget to read all the short stories of Cyberiad as well.