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Aside: Lem is great, he has books as quirky as Philip K. Dick, as hard sci-fi as Clark and as funny and weird as Douglas Adams. If you like sci-fi and haven't t

by ajuc 5y ago

Aside: Lem is great, he has books as quirky as Philip K. Dick, as hard sci-fi as Clark and as funny and weird as Douglas Adams. If you like sci-fi and haven't tried Lem check out Solaris or Futorogical Congress (quirky), Invincible (hard sci-fi) and Cyberiad (funny and very weird). And on top of that Lem published nonfiction books about philosophy of science and futurology. Dick even thought Lem was in reality a collection of writers hired by communist party to inflitrate USA through science fiction and to gain monopoly on the publishing market :) Also there's saying in Polish that Lem's books divide into "early Lem" where astronauts explore stars and find glorious communism and "late Lem" where astronauts explore cosmos and find dystopian communism :)

DonHopkins 5y ago
I just fed some web pages I wrote about Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad into GPT-3, and it admitted it was an evil machine! https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-cyberiad-and-simcity-and-admits-it-s-an-evil-machine-d7d769d02c89 https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-... TLDR: Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website!
- ajuc 5y ago
  > NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality. This sounds like artifact description from Dwarf Fortress. Now I want them to include GPT-3 to make these descriptions :)
sn41 5y ago
Lem's "His Master's Voice" is the closest in fiction to what academic research feels like. I would also add Fiasco to the list of great Lem works.
nosianu 5y ago
The funniest Lem story for me is from the Star Diaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries). It's the story where he - alone - travels in his rocket ship and a tiny meteor destroys the steering mechanism. He has everything he needs to fix it, the only problem: Simultaneously somebody needs to do something on the outside and on the inside of the spaceship. But he is alone. He is lucky though, on the star maps he finds a few space/time bending vortexes. He manages to manipulate the rockets to fly through that cluster of vortexes. Then, during the next night, he wakes up - someone who looks exactly like him woke him up and asks him to go and help him with the repairs. He refuses because he thinks he is in a dream and repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem. He prefers sleep undisturbed by such dreams. The next evening the situation is the opposite: He goes to his room and finds someone looking exactly like him sleeping in his bed. He wakes him up and tries to convince him to do repairs, but the sleepy guy refuses because repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem. The space/time vortexes somehow made him appear as different versions of himself on the ship. The story continues with ever more complicated plots between various instances of himself. There even is a bit of violence when Ijon of Wednesday finds Ijon of Saturday with a blue eye (like someone hit him) and later it turns out Ijon of Thursday had hit Ijon of Friday in there encounter. Or something like that, it's just extremely funny. At the end of the vortex cluster there are so many versions of Ijon on the spaceship they have to hold a congress with public order and an agenda and lots and lots of discussions. Turns out you can't even rely on yourself, he never manages to get exactly one other person to join with the repairs. Either he cannot convince the other guy for various reasons ("I'm you from Saturday and the controls have not been repaired yet. So it makes no sense for me to join you, from Wednesday, because if the repairs had been done on Wednesday I would know!"), or there are two many but only two space suits and they argue until the next vortex removes too many people and they have to start from scratch. Really, check it out, the Ijon Tichy "Star Diaries" are about the funniest stories out there, and are quite deep too. Definitely a treasure. I read almost all of Lem's books in my (East German) childhood.

by ajuc 5y ago

DonHopkins 5y ago

I just fed some web pages I wrote about Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad into GPT-3, and it admitted it was an evil machine! https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-cyberiad-and-simcity-and-admits-it-s-an-evil-machine-d7d769d02c89 https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-... TLDR: Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website!

ajuc 5y ago
> NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality. This sounds like artifact description from Dwarf Fortress. Now I want them to include GPT-3 to make these descriptions :)

sn41 5y ago

Lem's "His Master's Voice" is the closest in fiction to what academic research feels like. I would also add Fiasco to the list of great Lem works.

nosianu 5y ago

The funniest Lem story for me is from the Star Diaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries). It's the story where he - alone - travels in his rocket ship and a tiny meteor destroys the steering mechanism. He has everything he needs to fix it, the only problem: Simultaneously somebody needs to do something on the outside and on the inside of the spaceship. But he is alone. He is lucky though, on the star maps he finds a few space/time bending vortexes. He manages to manipulate the rockets to fly through that cluster of vortexes. Then, during the next night, he wakes up - someone who looks exactly like him woke him up and asks him to go and help him with the repairs. He refuses because he thinks he is in a dream and repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem. He prefers sleep undisturbed by such dreams. The next evening the situation is the opposite: He goes to his room and finds someone looking exactly like him sleeping in his bed. He wakes him up and tries to convince him to do repairs, but the sleepy guy refuses because repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem. The space/time vortexes somehow made him appear as different versions of himself on the ship. The story continues with ever more complicated plots between various instances of himself. There even is a bit of violence when Ijon of Wednesday finds Ijon of Saturday with a blue eye (like someone hit him) and later it turns out Ijon of Thursday had hit Ijon of Friday in there encounter. Or something like that, it's just extremely funny. At the end of the vortex cluster there are so many versions of Ijon on the spaceship they have to hold a congress with public order and an agenda and lots and lots of discussions. Turns out you can't even rely on yourself, he never manages to get exactly one other person to join with the repairs. Either he cannot convince the other guy for various reasons ("I'm you from Saturday and the controls have not been repaired yet. So it makes no sense for me to join you, from Wednesday, because if the repairs had been done on Wednesday I would know!"), or there are two many but only two space suits and they argue until the next vortex removes too many people and they have to start from scratch. Really, check it out, the Ijon Tichy "Star Diaries" are about the funniest stories out there, and are quite deep too. Definitely a treasure. I read almost all of Lem's books in my (East German) childhood.