10 ms·

I think Lem wrote sci-fi just by coincidence. Soviets would not allow any sort of criticism on serious stuff. But they adored sci-fi and cosmic future of mankin

• jacquesm 12y ago
  I thought he was Polish.
  • idlewords 12y ago
    He was.
    • jacquesm 12y ago
      Censorship in Poland had a funny element, as weird as that may sound. It wasn't un-typical for postcards or letters to contain 'greetings to the censor' at the end or even as the salutation.
      • idlewords 12y ago
        It was a surreal society where everyone had to pretend to be living in an imaginary world. Luckily there weren't too many hard-liners; the jackboot was applied without much enthusiasm after 1956. Life was way harder for the Russians.
• idlewords 12y ago
  Lem had a genuine and lifelong interest in technology. Polish authors found plenty of ways to be critical without having to divert into genre fiction. Lem wrote it because he loved it. 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).
  • cageface 12y ago
    What other Polish or Soviet authors are worth reading? (and translated into English) I love Lem's work but that's the extent of my familiarity with Eastern Bloc sci-fi.
    • arafalov 12y ago
      Try Sergei Lukyanenko (multiple spellings). Most of his works are not translated in English (German has many more), but at least the Night Watch and Day Watch are. They were both made into movies too, though the movies absolutely sucked comparing to the books.
    • idlewords 12y ago
      I highly recommend the Strugatsky brothers. There's a new translation of "Roadside Picnic" out, that would be a great place to start. Another good one is "We" by Evgenii Zamyatin. It's a dystopian novel Orwell cribbed from for 1984.
    • vdaniuk 12y ago
      I am from xUSSR and happy to recommend Strugatsky brothers. Their sci-fi books are deep, thoughtful and authentic.
      • idlewords 12y ago
        Can't agree enough. Is there any more recent Russian sci-fi that you recommend too?
        • vdaniuk 12y ago
          Not really :( 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.
        • flohofwoe 12y ago
          Metro 2033 is a good read, I've been reading the German translation, and this still had that specific 'Russian soul' in it which is hard to describe. I was shocked how bad Metro 2034 is though in comparison, and I am not sure whether it was just a very bad German translation or whether the original book was also 'soul-less'.
• praptak 12y ago
  Lem was actually pretty critical of the whole "SF by coincidence". By his own definition, if you can easily replace lasers and spaceships with cloaks and daggers, then it is not SF.
• dredmorbius 12y ago
  Setting critical literature in fantastical or allegorical contexts is as old as writing. You'll find it in Aesop's fables, Dante, Shakespeare, Swift, and more. Soviet rule was particularly harsh in this regard, and music was another outlet (Shostakovich in particular wrote a number of pieces now considered highly subversive). Lem is excellent, though.
  • lmm 12y ago
    And doing it in SF is as old as the genre itself - Wells wrote War of the Worlds so that he could criticize British colonialism at one remove.
    • dredmorbius 12y ago
      Shelley, Poe, and Verne had the jump on Wells. Their works also had an element of social criticism. It's hard for any adult writing not to. 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.
  • copperx 12y ago
    Just to be clear: Lem is critical of such literature.
    • dredmorbius 12y ago
      Any specific references on that?
• tspiteri 12y ago
  In many cases they use story as boilerplate to present some technical marvel. 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.
• ploj 12y ago
  There's also the fact that society during his time was extremely techno-utopian. That was just as true in the Soviet Union.
• kybernetikos 12y ago
  > they were not best what literature can offer. In many cases they use story as boilerplate to present some technical marvel. 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).
  • DonHopkins 12y ago
    I just watched The Congress -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) -- and WOW, it was excellent. Quite different from the book The Futurological Conference that it's based on: for example, it had cockroaches playing poker instead of sewer rats playing bridge. ;) But well worth watching for its unique take on the entertainment dictatorship. If you liked Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Looker, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you won't be disappointed! Something weird happens in the middle of the film, that's all I'll say... >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-stanislaw-lem http://culture.pl/en/article/ari-folman-on-the-genius-of-sta...
• Nursie 12y ago
  That's incredibly unfair. Scifi is a very broad category. Some of the best imagines just a small change to the world and watches how people live around it. Some is imaginative flights of fantasy, some is realistic futurism. And yes some is the presentation of technological ideas using the story as a simple vehicle. 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.
• atombender 12y ago
  I disagree wholeheartedly (except for your last sentence). Books such as Eden and Fiasco are firmly rooted in the tradition of the sci-fi adventure, even if he adds additional philosophical and scientific concerns that were completely his own. But Lem's work is mostly explicitly grounded in scifi. 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.)
• hristov 12y ago
  I have to strongly disagree there. There may have been some anti-establishment satire in his writing, but that is not the main thing he wrote about. 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.
  • mtobi 12y ago
    And just to get at the topic of anti-establishement satire in poish literature, the prime example has always been Janusz Zajdel. Especially his late two most aacknowledged works, "Limes Inferior" and "Pardyzja" primarily depict totalitarian, dystopian systems and the means of people to game them. It is a great shame that he has been taken by cancer at a relatively young age because the world view he presented in his books was darker and more bitter compared to Lem.
• Joeri 12y ago
  I would argue that the best science fiction is about putting humans in unlikely places and seeing how they adapt. Great sci-fi is definitely not about technology, with technology merely being the instrument to set a stage that couldn't exist in a non-scifi work. See asimov's foundation or leguin's left hand of darkness as examples of technology being just a stage-setting device to tell a great story. 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.