Stanislaw Lem, who died Monday at the age of 84, was a science fiction writer out of necessity. Born in Poland in 1921, Lem spent much of his adult life in the shadow of the Soviet Union and its dogmas: his medical career was sidetracked by his rejection of T.D. Lysenko, whose ideological distortions of evolutionary theory were embraced by Stalin, and the play of ideas in Lem's stories had to be couched in terms that would pass muster with vigilant communist censors.
Lem was a true heir of Jonathan Swift and H.G. Wells. His sardonic works -– Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Invincible, His Master’s Voice -– use science fiction as a means to play with ideas about consciousness and identity, and acid satire was his favorite mode. The fact that most of his writing is available only in clunky, awkward translations (usually translated into English from other languages, rather than the original Polish) kept his work inaccessible to many readers, but the force of his ideas made itself felt anyway, and guaranteed him cult status among English language readers.
One of his core ideas, returned to in a number of novels, was that the search for other intelligences was doomed to become either tragedy or farce: a truly alien intelligence, he argued, would be too different from our own to be comprehensible.
This theme comes across most powerfully in his best-known work, Solaris (1961, trans. 1970), a novel set in a research station monitoring a planet covered by an immense, protoplasmic ocean that shows signs of consciousness, perhaps even intelligence. Decades of study have produced whole libraries of data, all of it essentially useless. Though it busies itself by endlessly creating and destroying bizarre structures with no clear purpose, Solaris remains oblivious to all attempts at communication. Its only reaction, which may simply be a side effect of the presence of humans, is to generate flesh-and-blood apparitions drawn from the scientists' private obsessions - in the case of the hero, a wife who committed suicide.
Article comments
1 - Comandante Gringo
Enuff with the anti-communism. I'm sure Lem would've rated this U.S.-written obituary at about the same level he rated U.S. Sci-Fi. He like irony quite a lot, didn't he? I know I do.
2 - Caspar Melville
Nice piece but I think you are very unfair to Tarkovsjy's film which is both wonderful and, I think, faithful to the uncanny feeling of the book.
3 - Steven Hart
I'm prepared to have my mind changed about it -- I just added the film to my Netflix cue for another look. The first Tarkovsky film I saw was "The Sacrifice," which was just this side of unendurable, and it tainted everything else I saw.
4 - Phillip Winn
The Sacrifice is abominable, but his take on Solaris is better. It's a tough book to film, of course, for the reasons you state.
5 - Jon Sobel
I thought the Tarkovsky film was a weak reflection of the book, but much better than the later version. Thanks for all the info, I didn't understand why one of my favorite SF writers wasn't considered part of the "canon." The Cyberiad was the first of his books that I read, and the influence of that book, along with the Dali poster in my bedroom, might just explain a lot about me... Anyway I'd call it a very good place to start for those unfamiliar. Are better translations of those books now available?
6 - Steven Hart
Lem's books are crying out for better translations: "Solaris" was based on a French translation from the original Polish, and it shows. As far as I know, that's all we're going to get for the present. I know of no plans to reissue him in upgraded translations.