Word: lemly
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...Lem's work arose and later broke from a utopian tradition in Soviet science fiction whose ancestry dates back to the industrial revolution's impact on nineteenth-century thought. Chernyshevsky's 1862 novel What is to Be Done?, an idealistic apothesis of reason, and its immediate rebuke by Dostoevsky in Notes From Underground, a defense of irrationality, are perhaps the progenitors of the utopian/anti-utopian debate. Since then, utopian literature has focused primarily on the issues of technology and political ideology...
...departing from this tradition, Stanislaw Lem shifted his focus from society to the individual. He considers his early utopian novels too optimistic and naive, and in his mature works he is interested in the subjective view of the individual as he tries to cope with a reality he cannot understand. And although his novels are often set in futuristic or chimerical landscapes, Lem's characters are in essence real-life men facing problems familiar to every reader...
...LEM'S VEHICLE IN The Chain of Chance is a variation upon the conventional detective novel--one might call it a murder without a murderer--which he infuses with an inventive twist of probability theory. Civilization has grown so complex, he maintains, that it is governed only by laws of random chance. As a result, the protagonist--and the reader--is alienated from the reality he thinks he can understand and control. In the depersonalized modern world, common sense has become nearly meaningless. The effect is eerie and sobering...
...Lem's philosophical concerns, the novel remains a suspensful and realistic detective story. The author's acuity of observation and penchant for statistical minutiae makes each character convincing and interesting. A significant portion of this short novel consists of meticulous descriptions of the victims and the circumstances of their deaths, making The Chain of Chance both a forensic pathologist's delight and a challenge to armchair sleuths, because, hidden among the barrage of details are the clues to this mystery. To understand them one might have to be pre-med, but the novel's tendency toward the arcane does...
...Lem's narrator, a retired French-Canadian astronaut named John, relates the details of an undercover investigation into the mysterious deaths of eleven tourists visiting a health spa in Naples. As with most writers of detective stories, Lem never lays all his cards on the table; the reader only gradually learns that the victims were all middle-aged foreigners, balding and of athletic build. (Is it by chance too that the picture of Lem on the book's back cover matches this description?) In addition, the men were wealthy, single, and had been receiving treatments for rheumatism at the Vittorini...