Stanislaw Lem, 1921-2006

You can read an obit in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but it's pretty thin stuff considering the monumental shelf of books this essayist, philosopher, novelist and occasional poet produced. You may only know his work from two bad films of Solaris, his dazzling 1961 novel (superficially about the scientific investigation of a living planet), which managed to tell a terrifically good story and engage in a brilliant satire of politics, scientific research, and philosophy itself. Lem thought that science fiction was something other than a genre, that it was, in fact, a modern literary strategy for the novel and short stories, as worthy as any other approach.

Harvest Books (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) has re-released most of the Michael Kandel translations originally published by St. Martin's Press in the 1970s under the Helen & Kurt Wolf imprint. Kandel and Lem had an ongoing relationship which, combined with Kandel's highly developed facility for transmitting Lem's wit from Polish to English, yielded by far the best versions of Lem. Solaris was done originally by another translator; rights have been acquired by Harvest/HBJ as well. A personal favorite of the writer is His Master's Voice, 1968.

Clearly inspired by the Bell Labs discovery of universal background radiation from the Big Bang, Lem takes on an innate problem of scientific research where scientists are informed by absolute materialism. A signal arrives from space. It's the first modulated signal that a SETI-like array, set up by the Pentagon, has received. As researchers decode the incoming message, they find themselves unable to avoid what the message contains: instructions for constructing the universe. It is the voice of God. But of course in their role as scientists they can't possibly say that; and in the novel's course the researchers bend themselves into miraculous pretzels trying to rationalize what they've received into a material phenomenom.

You might guess from this that Lem was too difficult for the average reader of science fiction. That would be unfair. Lem had a gift for writing fiction that was hugely popular. You didn't have to be conversant with advanced science to enjoy them, but it made the books far more rewarding if you did. If you haven't experienced anything except Clooney's awful movie (the script was a translated version of Tarkovsky's ghastly version of 20 years earlier, which Lem refused to have anything to do with), you might start with The Cyberiad, delightful short stories about Ivan Tichy, cosmonaut. You might take on a short novel next, the hilarious Futurological Congress before approaching Solaris and other works such as the robotic fairy tales Mortal Engines or the strange crimes and police work in The Invesigation.

Lem was the Voltaire of the 20th century. He also had the capacity to blindside censors in the Soviet Union, who never quite figured out that a central theme in his work was an attack on them and their government. A polymath who did original research in cybernetics, he had enormous wit, was a fine storyteller, and sold tens of millions of books, most outside of the United States. He was also one of the last of that miraculous circle of literary and spiritual types in Poland that included the late John Paul II. Give Lem a try.

Luther