Favorite science fiction authors: Stanislaw Lem

Someone once said that there are three principal schools of SF writing: the American school, the Russian school, and Stanislaw Lem.

Lem is a Pole and much more popular in Europe than he is in the USA. He has written dozens of books, and some remain untranslated into English. No two of his books are really alike. Some are grim and heavy, some are light and funny---but almost all have some deep philosophical underpinnings, if you care to look for them. Here are some of my favorites.

• The Cyberiad. The rollicking adventures of Trurl and Klapaucius, android engineers. Truly inventive in ideas and language. Beats me how the translator did it---do all these puns work in Polish too? Hilarious stuff, but it might make you stop and think from time to time too.
• The star diaries. The travels of Ijon Tichy, star pilot and practitioner of serendipity. My favorite is the Eleventh Voyage, where Tichy tries to find out why none of the two thousand secret agents sent to the planet of the robots have ever been heard from again. The story about how humans evolved from illegal dumping is also a scream.
• Solaris and His master's voice. Does it bother you that we always seem to be able to communicate with aliens? Does it seem to you that they should be more alien? Read one of these.
• The futurological congress. As disorienting as a Philip K. Dick novel, yet great fun too.

See also Marc Branchu's page on Stanislaw Lem (in French).

Last updated: 2001/08/11 20:54:42
URL: http://www.nmt.edu/~shipman/reading/lem.html