Word: lem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FICTION: A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem ∙ Birdy, William Wharton Dubin's Lives, Bernard Malamud Nostalgia for the Present, Andrei Voznesensky ∙ The Coup, John Updike ∙ The Flounder, Gunter Grass ∙ The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever...
FICTION: A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem ∙ Birdy, William Wharton Dubin's Lives, Bernard Malamud Nostalgia for the Present, Andrei Voznesensky ∙ The Coup, John Updike ∙ The Flounder, Gunter Grass ∙ The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever
FICTION: A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem ∙ Birdy. William Wharton Nostalgia for the Present, Andrei Voznesensky ∙ The Coup, John Updike ∙ The Flounder, Gunter Grass ∙ The Stories of John Cheever. John Cheever ∙ The World According to Garp, John Irving...
...Lem's rationalists have a weakness for rationalizing. A man who considers himself a genius of the highest order also believes that such elite members of the race are never recognized. In another story Lem overloads the probability theory to suggest playfully that no one should exist. Each man's chances of being, says Lem's Professor Kouska, is a "teragigamegamulticentillion-to-one shot." In physics, one chance in a centillion is considered an impossibility because there are fewer than a centillion seconds before the end of the universe. The origin of this fact is unclear...
...Lem plays his most sophisticated games when he reflects on the production of artificially intelligent beings. Indeed, God himself is considered as a vast cybernetic mind that may be the legacy of a first-generation universe that died billions of aeons ago. The machines of this universe were the laws of nature, a perfect solution to the problems of spare parts and maintenance. As for the problems of an unnatural nature, Lem writes that "if one considers 'artificial' to be that which is shaped by an active Intelligence, then the entire Universe that surrounds us is already artificial...