Stanisław Lem, best known in the United States for his novel (and the subsequent movie), Solaris, is the best SF writer ever according to Kim Stanley Robinson in his “Foreword” to The Truth And Other Stories (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones). MIT Press is reprinting much of Lem’s work–but they have a long way to go since his collected works in Polish fill 40 volumes.
It’s obvious from Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Foreword” that he’s read a lot of Lem. Over Lem’s long and prolific writing career, several themes keep reappearing. For example, in the excellent title story, “The Truth,” a trio of scientists embark on a risky experiment into the science of plasma. The Government, who is funding their research, knows nothing of this secret test and when disaster strikes–two of the three scientists die–the whole incident is hushed up. The surviving scientist tries to tell the truth about what happened, but he is dismissed as a brain-damaged eccentric.
“One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Seconds” is a story written in 1976. Lem creates a journalist who works the night shift setting up the next day’s newspaper with the aid of a four million dollar IBM mainframe computer. Over time, the journalist realizes the computer is setting up print stories before the events have been reported. This opens the door to speculation that computers operate in a different Time Zone than humans. It also suggests Artificial Intelligence before the term was commonly used. Lem shows what canny predictor he can be.
Some of the stories in The Truth And Other Stories were written in the 1950s which might explain why many of them deal with First Contact will aliens and Green-Eyed Monsters, common themes for that decade. If you’re in the mood for stories that will make you think, I recommend The Truth And Other Stories. GRADE: B+
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
FOREWORD By Kim Stanley Robinson — vii
The Hunt — 1
Rat in the Labyrinth — 23
Invasion from Aldebaran — 61
The Friend — 23
The Invasion — 123
Darkness and Mildew — 161
The Hammer — 183
Lymphater’s Formula — 221
The Journal — 269
The Truth — 272
One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Seconds — 295
An Enigma — 323
I m woefully behind on my reading of Lem, George. Thanks for the tip!
Jerry, if you’re interested in Stanislaw Lem, I’ll be happy to send you several of his books.
Thanks, George! E-mail me at house_jerry@hotmail.com and I will forward my address.
Jerry, you’ll be hearing from me soon! Thanks for giving Stanislaw Lem books a Good Home!
Sounds good. I remember reading about Lem in the ’70s when THE INVESTIGATION was first translated. I read it but don’t think I’ve read any of his other books, except a couple of short stories.
Jeff, SOLARIS is Lem’s best selling book in English. And, there’s the 2002 movie version of SOLARIS starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.
The only thing by him I have read is Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, which I read in the late Sixties or early Seventies and found “difficult “. I wonder if any of these are in his The Star Diaries collection, which I had and has since gone into the “I moved and books went into a black hole” place.
Rick, I have lost hundreds of books to the Black Hole over the years. I’m trying hard to organize my books in my basement..,and prepare to part with some of them.
Early on, in English, as Algis Budrys noted, a problem was that the translations of Lem’s work weren’t from Polish to English but instead translations of the French translations. I’ve mostly been holding off till the recent editions (and I do mean recent) which promise translations from his prose directly. I look forward to digging in.
It’s hard to credit Lem with the notion of a precognitive computer, at least as an innovation, in the mid ’70s…
Todd, MIT Press seems to be the major player of translations of Lem’s work into English. I thought the stories in THE TRUTH AND OTHER STORIES flowed well. Philip K. Dick used precognition in many of his stories. Lem toys with the ideas of Artificial Intelligence operating with Time differently than humans do.
Still seems like not quite a major shift on previous concepts: from the SFE:
The ability to foretell the future is also frequently ascribed to Computers and other incarnations of complex Mathematics (see in particular Psychohistory), and to Machines which may be forward-looking Time Viewers or have access to the equivalent of Time Radio Communications. One such machine, able to predict the time of anyone’s death, is the gimmick of Robert A Heinlein’s “Life-Line” (August 1939 Astounding); such predictive power is also an at first unrealized side effect of the Dirac Communicator in James Blish’s “Beep” (February 1954 Galaxy; exp as The Quincunx of Time 1973).
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/precognition
Todd, speaking of Psychohistory, are you watching FOUNDATION on Apple TV? Other than Hari Seldon and Psychohistory, you may not recognize it. I would opine that Apple TV’s FOUNDATION “expanded” on Asimov’s original SF novels.
Not yet…I haven’t been that big on the Foundation series of stories, and I haven’t bought into Apple TV yet! I have been reading the mixed reviews from various folks…
I have never heard of this writer before. I have heard of Solaris though. Woefully ignorant in SF, I fear.
Patti, Stanislaw Lem was a Polish SF writer who had to do a delicate ballet of writing and not getting the Communists on his case. Lem died in 2006, but produced 40 volumes of novels, shorties, and essays.
Lem is also one of my favourite writers – and not only because you could get his books (published in East Germany and printed on horrible paper …) really cheap. Friends of mine at university who had come to the West but still had connections to the East partially financed their studies this way.
What I found intriguing is how he and others (the Strugatzki brothers eg) managed to avoid politics to get by the Communist Censorship which checked every thing written.
Wolf, couch everything sufficiently in metaphor and don’t challenge the status quo too openly and the Lems and Strugatskis of their places and times got by…or you could be a complete tool of the ruling class such as Yefremov…
Todd, are you sure re Yefremov?
Afaik after the success of Andromeda his second novel “Bull’s Hour” was forbidden as being a critical metaphor of communism.
Couldn’t read Lem’s work back in the 1970s. Don’t think I’d do better now, but who knows? I’m doubtful, but maybe.
Steve, I’m not a Lem specialist, but I think the new MIT translations are better than the earlier translations.