Word: lem
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Stanislaw Lem's stories are somewhat like the enormous gag that Edwin Land, the wealthy inventor of the camera that bears his name, pulled on Harvard when he tied his contribution for the Science Center to the stipulation that the structure look like his photographic brainchild. Lem is an absurd humorist whose jokes are too big to be funny. He writes of a world gone mad. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress are tales set in future societies that no longer know where they have come from or where they are going. Indeed, they no longer know...
...societies are huge machines with no purpose but their own preservation. The people who comprise the mechanism have lost all individual sense of purpose. They only have direction if they accept a job and a place in their society--a role in keeping the aimless device in perpetual motion. Lem's joke is so big that it sucks in human effort and wastes lives. His punch line is the pain of purposelessness...
...novels were first published in Poland in 1971, but one is set in the Rocky Mountains, and the other starts in the Costa Rica Hilton and moves to Manhattan. Lem is an Eastern European but his mind wanders in an American technological wilderness, and the paranoia he evokes is at home under the shadow of the Science Center. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub starts where a comfortable narrative would already be well into the body of its tale. The narrator is in some indefinite Pentagon Three, buried deep within the Rocky Mountains. Pentagon Three, with thousands of offices, miles...
...LEM WRITES science fiction, a genre that has long been considered serious reading only for physics wonks, drug fiends, and junior birdmen. Lem writes a parody of modern life that is serious reading for anyone who is concerned that there be a place for humanity amidst the machinations of the modern world. No need for concern? Visit the offices of any large corporation. Visit the Boston offices of the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare. There are the reports on reports on reports. There are the file cabinets stuffed with manila folders being wheeled aimlessly from room to room...
...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...