Word: lem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...PERFECT VACUUM by Stanislaw Lem...
...writers who truly comprehend the vocabulary of science. Thomas Pynchon made physical laws part of the structure of Gravity's Rainbow, and science-fiction novelists routinely construct their speculative entertainments from the hard-and software of physics and chemistry. Among the masters of the genre is Stanislaw Lem, a mordant, satirical Pole whose novels and stories have been praised by readers as disparate as Critic Leslie Fiedler and Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Lem has written nearly 30 books, and his European sales are in the millions. (Ten of his works have been translated into English; most of them were...
...Lem story can have the crushing gravity of a collapsing star. His sentences are frequently dense with logic and his points aphoristic: "The progress of human knowledge was a gradual renunciation of the simplicity of the world." Lem's own worlds are complex, twittering word machines ingeniously wired to philosophy, probability theory, cybernetics and literary conventions, which he parodies brilliantly. Unlike most science-fiction writers, he animates his creatures with lively explanations, as in the Cartesian send-up from The Cyberiad: "Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water...
...Lem has a major theme, it is the implications of artificial intelligence. What is natural and unnatural, what is imaginary and what is real-and does it really matter-are questions that stream through the pages of A Perfect Vacuum like ghostly neutrinos. Each story is cast in the form of a review of a nonexistent book. Lem, of course, is both reviewer and conceiver of the unwritten texts. Some are fairly straightforward social and literary satires. Les Robinsonades dismisses Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a puritanized fiction based on a brutish factual account of a castaway (which...
...Futurological Congress is savagely anti-utopian. Lem dreams up a future world in which the only sophisticated technology belongs to the pharmaceutical industry. Where Memoirs Found in a Bathtub enthralls the reader in the narrator's desperately futile search for a purpose, The Futurological Congress sweeps along on Lem's wild imagination. The people live in squalor while they unknowingly take hallucinogens that make them believe they live in the best-of-all-possible-worlds people once believed science would someday provide. The Cyberiad, a collection of short stories, likewise offers tales of how science, once thought so omnipotent, gets...