Word: lemly
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Ranging from fiction by Harvard philosopher Rober Nozick to science fiction by the Polish master Stainslaw Lem, the chapters provide an informative, though cursory, survey of thoughts on the brain. Mixed in are humorous digressions: a riddle that supposedly leaves thinkers catabolic (literally) and a brief parable of a man with no head. Often the pieces do not seem to interrelate, but the editors don't intend them to. Their only goal is to present ideas which will undermine the reader's complacent view of his own intellect...
...style has much in common with the fantasy of Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; as in Kafka's The Castle and Lem's Memoir's Found in a Bathtub, Abe's new novel presents a protagonist thrust into an absurd, alien environment with a mission he must accomplish. In the former, a gentlemen K., claiming to be a land surveyor, sets out to reach the castle, while Lem's memoir-writer must wander through endless corridors to escape from a vast underground military complex. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist...
...format. In adopting the medium of fantasy, an author hopes to convince the reader not with the poignant accuracy of his images and characterizations, as in realistic fiction, but with the subtle, subliminal--but equally poignant--truth underlying the fabrication of plot and character. Kafka, Borges, Lem and Marquez succeed on this secondary level by treading a thin line between fantasy and realism--in The Castle, for example. Kafka's careful use of language preserves this ambiguity: the reader is never quite sure of what to accept as plausible, and what to reject as implausible, so that such a distinction...
Finding the diversion welcome, most of the world was watching as Neil Armstrong slowly descended the steps of the lunar module (LEM--remember?), hesitated for a moment on the final rung, then placed the first human bootprint on another world. ("The surface appears to be very, very fine-grained," Armstrong observed while his friend "Buzz" waited to join him, "it's almost sort of a powder.") It was bona fide Big Stuff. CBS and provided 31 hours of continued coverage; ABC naturally stopped after 30. "Save us a copy," the astronauts radioed back, when informed that the New York Times...
...civilization which has become so complex as to be beyond his understanding. Yet John succeeds in uncovering the mystery, and the author's resolution appears to be cogent enough to leave us feeling smugly satisfied that we know the answer. Are we willing to believe Lem, or should we suspect that he is gulling us into accepting his artifice in order to satisfy our expectation of a final solution and our need for one as well? It is not at all clear, for the novel's realism is so intense that the conclusion is entirely unconvincing. We should suspect...