02-14-2020, 10:41 AM
Lem was one of my favorite SF writers. The Cyberiad was my introduction to him. I was bored through the early going, what with all these simple little disconnected stories involving the two constructors. It really takes a hundred pages for it to start working. Then the stories start intersecting, and things get very loopy and complicated. I recall that topology is dredged up as the hardest field of mathematics, and at the time I was good friends with a mathematician who gave up on the field after hitting a wall with topology.
Anyway, Lem was never much for characters and emotion, but he impressed the hell out of me with his creativity, his idea generation, building ever more complex storylines.
I very much liked The Futurological Congress and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, though it always took a long while for his novels to get moving.
Lem was a severe critic of American SF. He felt that science fiction stories should need to be science fiction, whereas most American SF have storylines that could just as well have been told mainstream. Solaris is a shining example of what Lem aspired to write. You just can't mainstream that idea. I didn't much care for Solaris the novel, by the way. It seemed very dry, with too much repetitive description of nebulous formations in the world ocean. But that novel wasn't translated by Michael Kandel, who did brilliant translations of most of his other major work (how did Kandel manage to get all that wordplay to work in English? [And what more was there that was left out?]).
But as I got deeper into Lem, I found that he committed the same sins that he criticized others for. It's really really hard to come up with stories that have to be SF.
My last exposure to him was Fiasco, which was solid, but disappointed me towards the end. I can't remember why, except that I felt it was mostly a mainstream story despite its space-faring setting.
Oh, and I've watched both versions of Solaris. The Clooney one sort of made a different story of it, though I felt it held up pretty well in its own right. As for the Russian version, my goodness that was slow, and pedestrian, with most of it occurring on Earth in the aftermath, just recalling the adventure -- if I'm remembering correctly. But it did have a couple of powerful scenes.
Oddly, though, I'm not recalling a dwarf in either of them. That memory lapse seems almost ... sinful.
Anyway, Lem was never much for characters and emotion, but he impressed the hell out of me with his creativity, his idea generation, building ever more complex storylines.
I very much liked The Futurological Congress and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, though it always took a long while for his novels to get moving.
Lem was a severe critic of American SF. He felt that science fiction stories should need to be science fiction, whereas most American SF have storylines that could just as well have been told mainstream. Solaris is a shining example of what Lem aspired to write. You just can't mainstream that idea. I didn't much care for Solaris the novel, by the way. It seemed very dry, with too much repetitive description of nebulous formations in the world ocean. But that novel wasn't translated by Michael Kandel, who did brilliant translations of most of his other major work (how did Kandel manage to get all that wordplay to work in English? [And what more was there that was left out?]).
But as I got deeper into Lem, I found that he committed the same sins that he criticized others for. It's really really hard to come up with stories that have to be SF.
My last exposure to him was Fiasco, which was solid, but disappointed me towards the end. I can't remember why, except that I felt it was mostly a mainstream story despite its space-faring setting.
Oh, and I've watched both versions of Solaris. The Clooney one sort of made a different story of it, though I felt it held up pretty well in its own right. As for the Russian version, my goodness that was slow, and pedestrian, with most of it occurring on Earth in the aftermath, just recalling the adventure -- if I'm remembering correctly. But it did have a couple of powerful scenes.
Oddly, though, I'm not recalling a dwarf in either of them. That memory lapse seems almost ... sinful.