The Future According to Stanisław Lem

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/09/12/the-future-according-to-stanislaw-lem/

by dnetesn • 12 years ago

205 109 12 years ago

cageface3• 12 years ago

Lem is easily my favorite science fiction author. His intelligence, breadth, and sense of humor are unsurpassed in the genre and rarely found in any writer.

Anybody with a math or software bent that hasn't read his "Cyberiad" should rush out and buy/download a copy right now.

impassebreaker• 12 years ago

Agree. It's a fantastic book. The "Electronic Bard" (one of the stories in the Cyberiad) is one of my all time favorites. It features a computer that learns to write poetry. (The translation is masterful, too). Don't read it while drinking coffee as you will snort it out your nose. It's brilliant and wise and you're right -- few writers match Lem.

qwerta3• 12 years ago

I think Lem wrote sci-fi just by coincidence. Soviets would not allow any sort of criticism on serious stuff. But they adored sci-fi and cosmic future of mankind. Lem could write undisturbed on this field.

Western sci-fi authors such as Asimov and Clarke were great, but they were not best what literature can offer. In many cases they use story as boilerplate to present some technical marvel. Lem was one of the best authors, even outside sci-fi.

jacquesm6• 12 years ago

I thought he was Polish.

idlewords13• 12 years ago

He was.

idlewords13• 12 years ago

Lem had a genuine and lifelong interest in technology. Polish authors found plenty of ways to be critical without having to divert into genre fiction. Lem wrote it because he loved it.

I wholeheartedly agree that the need to read between the lines politically, and the belief that science fiction is a serious literary endeavor, put Polish and Soviet scifi on a completely different level of quality than in the West. (The same is likely true for other countries in the Eastern Bloc, but I'm out of my depth there).

cageface3• 12 years ago

What other Polish or Soviet authors are worth reading? (and translated into English)

I love Lem's work but that's the extent of my familiarity with Eastern Bloc sci-fi.

qwerta3• 12 years ago

I think he could be best compared to earlier authors such as Karel Čapek (inventor of word robot),

I think he would call himself 'futurologist'. Scifi on west was defined by laser-guns and girls in bikini on comic covers. East scifi just adored soviet ideal of future. Hard scifi was recognized much later.

Lem had complicated approach to technology. From his wiki page:

His criticism of most science fiction surfaced in literary and philosophical essays (Fantastyka i futurologia) and interviews.[24] In the 1990s Lem forswore science fiction and returned to futurological prognostications, most notably those expressed in Okamgnienie (Blink of an Eye). He became increasingly critical of modern technology in his later life, criticizing inventions such as the Internet.[25]

EthanHeilman3• 12 years ago

Polish and Soviet scifi on a completely different level of quality than in the West

That isn't entirely true, Lem praised the work of Philip K. Dick (American)[0][1] and Olaf Stapledon (English). He has two essays in which he analyzes Stapledon two great works: Last and First Men, and Star Maker[2].

I think you might also be suffering from a filter. The best of Polish writers were translated, whereas you have access to the glut of all American writers. It is probably true that there was a greater number of bad American writers.

[0] http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

[1]: Dick returned the favor by reporting Lem to the FBI as a communist conspiracy against the west. Arguing that Lem was in fact a committee and not a person. Read the letter here: http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick

[2] http://dpuadweb.depauw.edu/icronay_web/lem%20stapledon.html

TeMPOraL2• 12 years ago

Polish authors found plenty of ways to be critical without having to divert into genre fiction.

There is this misconception popular even among young Poles that the communism in Poland was a period of hardship and oppression. Sure, many things were bad, but if one talks to one's parents and grandparents, they seem to be mostly happy with that period and in many ways would gladly trade it for what we have today.

Especially censorship in Poland was mostly a façade. The system paid lip service to it, but generally people were free to criticize the government, communist reality and made a great lot of self-criticizing works of art.

Living might have been harder in other Soviet states. It definitely was bad in Russia. But here in Poland, we had as benevolent socialist system as one could be. You could be known as a religious person and not a member of the Party, and still hold a top accounting position in a strategic government enterprise.

praptak• 12 years ago

Lem was actually pretty critical of the whole "SF by coincidence". By his own definition, if you can easily replace lasers and spaceships with cloaks and daggers, then it is not SF.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

Setting critical literature in fantastical or allegorical contexts is as old as writing. You'll find it in Aesop's fables, Dante, Shakespeare, Swift, and more. Soviet rule was particularly harsh in this regard, and music was another outlet (Shostakovich in particular wrote a number of pieces now considered highly subversive).

Lem is excellent, though.

lmm• 12 years ago

And doing it in SF is as old as the genre itself - Wells wrote War of the Worlds so that he could criticize British colonialism at one remove.

copperx• 12 years ago

Just to be clear: Lem is critical of such literature.

tspiteri• 12 years ago

In many cases they use story as boilerplate to present some technical marvel.

I find that to be more true for Clarke than for Asimov. Clarke likes to present technical marvels, and the stories themselves are quite bare, but Asimov focuses more on the characters, leaving the technical marvels in the background.

ploj• 12 years ago

There's also the fact that society during his time was extremely techno-utopian. That was just as true in the Soviet Union.

kybernetikos2• 12 years ago

they were not best what literature can offer. In many cases they use story as boilerplate to present some technical marvel.

There's an awful lot of sneering at science fiction writing as subpar literature and it's completely unfair. Some of Asimovs work actually is good literature, despite the fact that some is just filler that he wrote because he was more or less forced to by his publishers. I've never particularly rated Clarke, so perhaps your criticisms there are fair. What about Ray Bradbury, or Philip K Dick or Frank Herbert or Zelazny? There are more I could mention too, including some writing today.

Having said that Lem is pretty special. I loved some of The Star Diaries and there's a scene in the Futurological Congress that still brings a smile to my face (sewer rats on hallucinogens hallucinating they're human and playing bridge).

DonHopkins3• 12 years ago

I just watched The Congress -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) -- and WOW, it was excellent. Quite different from the book The Futurological Conference that it's based on: for example, it had cockroaches playing poker instead of sewer rats playing bridge. ;) But well worth watching for its unique take on the entertainment dictatorship. If you liked Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Looker, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you won't be disappointed! Something weird happens in the middle of the film, that's all I'll say...

According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.

It took longer than its length of two hours to watch, because I had to stop and rewind to replay and and freeze frames frequently. (Check out what's going on in the fish tank while she's saying "I wish you could see me animated, it's pretty sick. It's like a genius designer on a bad acid trip. Oh my god, I don't know, I look like a combination between Cinderella on heroin and an Egyptian queen on a bad hair day".)

I'm going to have to watch it many more times, because there were a lot of details to absorb -- time will tell if it's up there with Blade Runner as one of my favorite movies very loosely based on a great book.

http://culture.pl/en/article/ari-folman-on-the-genius-of-sta...

Nursie• 12 years ago

That's incredibly unfair. Scifi is a very broad category. Some of the best imagines just a small change to the world and watches how people live around it. Some is imaginative flights of fantasy, some is realistic futurism. And yes some is the presentation of technological ideas using the story as a simple vehicle.

Lem is great, as are a variety of other eastern authors, but they're not head and shoulders above their western counterparts nor is the genre lacking in literary skill in the west.

See for examples - Phillip K Dick, Iain M Banks, Daniel Keyes, Frank Herbert and many others.

atombender• 12 years ago

I disagree wholeheartedly (except for your last sentence). Books such as Eden and Fiasco are firmly rooted in the tradition of the sci-fi adventure, even if he adds additional philosophical and scientific concerns that were completely his own. But Lem's work is mostly explicitly grounded in scifi.

As an aside, I find Lem's prose to be rather dry, most of the time (though The Cyberiad is a notable exception). I don't know if this is something one can blame on the translators. In his scientist-focused novels, especially Solaris and The Futurological Congress, this works well; also, those are short works where the stodgy prose doesn't overwhelm. In other, longer works such as Fiasco and His Master's Voice, I find the prose almost unbearable. (Those latter two could really use some editing, too. Fiasco opens up with a seemingly endless chapter wherein a guy wanders around on an ice planet in an exosuit, and the prose catalogues nearly every single step the guy takes; it's infuritating and sleep-inducing at the same time.)

hristov• 12 years ago

I have to strongly disagree there. There may have been some anti-establishment satire in his writing, but that is not the main thing he wrote about.

Lem was probably one of the most pure sci-fi authors out there. He was not that interested in using sci-fi as a metaphor for everyday issues, but he genuinely wanted to explore issues that were outside of our everyday lives. Such as what would an artificial intelligence or an artificial consciousness look like, what would an alien intelligence or consciousness look like, how could we possibly communicate with a being that is truly alien, i.e., it is completely different than everything we know about life and biological development on earth. His two most famous novels -- Solaris and Fiasco were both about communicating with an alien intelligence, and did not have any anti-communist or anti-soviet satire in them.

I agree he is a great writer. But I do not like it when people say "he was not really a sci-fi writer" as a precursor to saying "he is a great writer", as if one could not be a great writer while being a sci-fi writer. Lem is a great writer and a sci-fi writer. He possessed the most important thing in a sci-fi writer he could think up of interesting and/or important ideas, and he could describe them in an engaging manner and explore the consequences.

By the way, now that sci-fi is a billions of dollars a year business, sci-fi writers still have not bothered to deal with the ideas suggested by Lem. Aliens in modern sci-fi are almost always based on humans in one way or another. Today's sci-fi authors are committing the same mistake the scientists of Fiasco did by thinking too much about themselves when trying to imagine a being that is truly alien to humanity.

mtobi2• 12 years ago

And just to get at the topic of anti-establishement satire in poish literature, the prime example has always been Janusz Zajdel. Especially his late two most aacknowledged works, "Limes Inferior" and "Pardyzja" primarily depict totalitarian, dystopian systems and the means of people to game them. It is a great shame that he has been taken by cancer at a relatively young age because the world view he presented in his books was darker and more bitter compared to Lem.

Joeri• 12 years ago

I would argue that the best science fiction is about putting humans in unlikely places and seeing how they adapt. Great sci-fi is definitely not about technology, with technology merely being the instrument to set a stage that couldn't exist in a non-scifi work. See asimov's foundation or leguin's left hand of darkness as examples of technology being just a stage-setting device to tell a great story.

I have read a lot of non scifi literature, and I would argue that quite a few of those books are more about impressing with linguistic marvels than about telling a great story. For example, I had such a hard time getting to the story behind the writing in books like Ulysses and The Satanic Verses that I didn't even finish reading them.

MORGELD• 12 years ago

This is a great introduction to Lem & his writings:

http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/catscan02.txt

flohofwoe2• 12 years ago

I anyone wants to get into reading Lem and finds Solaris too heavy (dare I say 'boring') I recommend to start with:

- The Invincible

- all of the Pilot Pirx short stories

- all of the Ijon Tichy short stories

- Peace on Earth (the conclusion to Tichy's story)

- Fiasco (the conclusion to Pirx' story)

Also of note is that Lem essentially "invented" Virtual Reality in the mid 60's (he called it Phantomology).

idlewords13• 12 years ago

His Master's Voice is also a good entry point, especially if you've read Contact by Carl Sagan. Same conceit taken in two completely different directions.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years ago

HMV also is the best single book ever written about the process of science, and the way scientists actually think. I can't over-state this. I read first read it while an undergrad in engineering in early 80's and during my graduate work in physics slowly came to realize it was the only book I'd ever read that accurately described what I was learning to do as a scientist.

Even though the narrator is nominally a mathematician, his approach to problems is fundamentally that of an empirical scientist, and has nothing at all to do with the cartoon hypothetico-deductive nonsense that philosophers have foisted upon the world as "scientific method".

DonHopkins3• 12 years ago

His Master's Voice took the conceit in at least two completely different directions, itself: the "frog eggs" and the biophilic effect -- nobody could figure out how the same message could be interpreted to produce two such completely unrelated effects.

canjobear• 12 years ago

The "Cyberiad" is an incredibly great introduction too. For example, it contains an electric bard which produces a long poem about tensor algebra, starting with:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

The whole thing is here: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Art/tensor.html

Needless to say, Michael Kandel's translation is also hugely impressive.

vl• 12 years ago

I wonder if Ijon Tichy would better be translated as "Ion Slow" - after all his name is a word-play (compare to Buzz Lightyear, haha).

readerrrr• 12 years ago

Actually Tichy translates best to "quiet".

galfarragem4• 12 years ago

A bit off-topic, but one great polish writer/journalist that deserves to be more known is Kapuściński. His style mixes journalistic objectivity with fiction in a brilliant way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Kapu%C5%9Bci%C5%84ski

His most known book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_(book)

idlewords13• 12 years ago

Sometimes it also mixes objectivity with just making stuff up, which was heartbreaking to discover.

galfarragem4• 12 years ago

It's the fiction part..

dang• 12 years ago

A bit off-topic, but one great Polish writer

I'll pipe up for another, the dazzlingly imaginative Bruno Schulz. His work is half an evocation of his family's life in a small early 20th-century Polish city, and half cosmic and out-there. He's like a Polish Kafka, but more whimsical, less austere. He haunts his own writing like a ghost because of his shocking death and the fact that his major work was lost. This adds poignancy to reading him that wouldn't otherwise be there, like a painting that was damaged in a way that became part of the art and made it a different whole.

Two other Polish modernists that I've been meaning for years to read are Gombrowicz (Ferdydurke) and Witkiewicz (Insatiability). Both are said to be fabulous.

galfarragem4• 12 years ago

+1 to Gombrowicz (Ferdydurke). I've never read it but I watched a theatre play. Trans-Atlantyk (also from Gombrowicz) is also a very good read.

idlewords13• 12 years ago

Gombrowicz is a genius. It's nice to see him mentioned since we just had a Borges thread, and the two were the greatest living authors in Argentina for years.

There's a recent translation of Ferdydurke that's supposed to be good. Be careful not to get the earlier translation, which was translated indirectly from a French intermediate and really doesn't have much to do with the original as a result.

lgieron• 12 years ago

Gombrowicz's diaries are a classic of contemporary literature and testament to the man's genius (and temperament!). Strongly recommended to anyone who wants an ambitious, but rewarding read.

eric_bullington• 12 years ago

Well, I would strongly agree with the Kapuściński recommendation, but while we're going off-topic with great Polish writers, let me suggest that readers re-visit Joseph Conrad.

Re-reading Heart of Darkness as an adult was a totally different experience from the forced read of it as a child.

I also really enjoyed Conrad's Nostromo, a true masterpiece.

yummyfajitas• 12 years ago

Just an interesting aside: Lem is famously known for Solaris, mainly due to the movie adaptations. According to Lem the movies don't really reflect his vision:

..to my best knowledge, the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space... As Solaris' author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book was entitled "Solaris" and not "Love in Outer Space".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

przemoc• 12 years ago

Book was great, I really liked it. I haven't seen the older adaptation yet, but the more recent one (with Clooney) was IMHO terrible. Such adaptations make more harm than good.

MrDom• 12 years ago

I both read the book and watched the clooney movie and I liked both of them. The key to enjoying movie adaptations is to imagine they're two completely separate stories that just happen to have certain names in common.

mtalantikite• 12 years ago

The Tarkovsky version is fantastic, definitely find time to watch it. It's visually stunning. Kurosawa wrote about how much he aesthetically loved Solaris, particularly the way Tarkovsky captured water.

cageface3• 12 years ago

I actually like the Soderbergh version on its own merits, although it may not have much more in common with the book than the title. The soundtrack is amazing.

nickbauman• 12 years ago

I loved Solaris (the book). It's one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written, because it points to the unsolvable question of consciousness that lies near the heart of all of humankind's greatness and flaws. It was the first piece of literature I encountered that actually made the typical human idea of the divine God palpably ridiculous; the idea of the planet Solaris palpably holy. The universe was revealed forever larger after I turned the last page.

brotchie• 12 years ago

I really enjoy this theme of a struggle to communicate or make sense of non-Earth origin life. You mention the Solaris really changed your views of the universe. I highly recommend Diaspora by Greg Egan or Blindsight by Peter Watts if you haven't already read them.

Diaspora fundamentally changed my view of life and the universe.

sixQuarks2• 12 years ago

I take offense with the last sentence in that article: "Nobody can really know the future. But few could imagine it better than Lem."

This simply can't be true. Lem did have a great imagination, coupled with huge talents as a writer. You could say that he was a writer with the greatest imagination.

In a world consisting of 7 billion people, it is very likely there are people out there that have much better and much more accurate imaginations, perhaps people who are correctly predicting detailed outcomes for the next 50 or 100 years.

The problem is that they are not great communicators.

kleiba• 12 years ago

I think you're reading the last sentence too literally which is probably not the way it was meant to be read. Instead it is simply a compliment to the author.

And if you really want to be pedantic then please also note that the sentence does not say "more accurate", it says "better". This can mean many things: more entertaining, more inspiring, and yes, also more accurate. But because "better" is rather vague, I don't think it's very fair to criticize it as irrational.

g8oz• 12 years ago

taking exception maybe more proportionate to the claim rather than taking offense

sixQuarks2• 12 years ago

true, I was feeling dramatic

idlewords13• 12 years ago

Inspired that you found something to get offended by in the very last sentence of the article.

Never give up!

Cyph0n2• 12 years ago

One of the amazing things abut Lem's "Solaris" is how invested humanity became in Solaris, the planet that housed the being they chanced upon. In the story, all of science basically revolved around Solaristics - the study of Solaris. By the time the events in the book take place, Solaristics had existed for over a hundred years. In one scene somewhere in the middle of the book, the protagonist actually sits in a library and starts to describe the key works of the field, but in an indirect way of course. Lem depicts humanity's obsession with the being perfectly, yet never actually spoon feeds the reader. Even so, the reader ends up investing himself/herself into humanity's struggle of understanding the being. I was simply amazed at how he was able to achieve this using only words. I've read a good amount of sci-fi, yet no author, not even the great Asimov, was able to execute such a thing so flawlessly. I'll be sure to read more of Lem's work as soon as I can.

rjsw• 12 years ago

You might also like "A Perfect Vacuum", it is a collection of reviews of nonexistent books, it has a similar feeling of a deep invented world behind the text of the book.

lobster_johnson• 12 years ago

The struggle of science to study Solaris is actually the point of the book, something which was discarded by the movie adaptations. People who know the story solely through the movie adaptations know that Solaris is manifesting people; but that is arguably the least interesting aspect of the story.

If you like Lem's description of fictitious scholarly research, I strongly recommend Jorge Luis Borges' short stories ("The Library of Babel", "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and "Funes the Memorious" come to mind). The collection Labyrinths has some of the best ones.

mgulaid• 12 years ago

I think Solaristics is basically a metaphor for religion or God. How people would be able to communicate with God or a super-being if we get the chance to experience it directly. Solaris keeps cloning the psychic/memories of the visiting scientists. It can’t communicate with people, but it digs through memories to understand, what are the most important thing to each scientist. But this is freaking them out. Memories are the DNA of the individuality. Without memories people would like a bulb of collective consciousness, like Solaris itself. I think Tarkovsky avoided the religion subplot because the Soviet Union's restriction to discuss religoin. Highly recommended read or watch.

funny note: it seems no one reads posted articles on hacker news... people just talk about other stuff related to the topic of the article..

Cyph0n2• 12 years ago

That makes sense I guess.

dobbsbob• 12 years ago

I know about this author from growing up listening to 'Hans Kloss Misery Hour' who is a Polish student that runs an apocalyptic/dystopian broadcast that has consistently recommended Lem.

I like his Patrick Allen narrated post-atomic disaster intros. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Citr--MiseryHour/~3/gWL4KB91Z...

kcovia• 12 years ago

For anyone who doesn't speak Polish and is curious, Lem's name is pronounced 'Stan-ee-swav Lem". The l with a slash is similar to a "w" sound, and the w is similar to a "v/f".

Here's a great free course for anyone interested in learning the language: http://polish.slavic.pitt.edu/firstyear/

thejdude• 12 years ago

Thanks a lot for that! In my current project there are quite a few Polish people, so I always thought it would be nice to learn a bit of the language.

So far we're only picking up the swearwords, so this may be a good complement.

mindcrime• 12 years ago

I started reading Summa Technologiae last year, after a copy showed up at the local Barnes & Noble. I was not familiar with Lem at the time, but it caught my eye anyway. I'm ashamed to admit I got distracted, set it aside, and haven't finished it yet. My initial impression is that it's a great work, and now that I've been reminded, I plan to pick it back up and finish it sooner than later.

lkrubner• 12 years ago

Stanisław Lem had a genius for making fun of bureaucracy. I strongly recommend his novel Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. He could not criticize the Communists, so he made it about the USA, but I think it works perfectly well as criticism of any large bureaucracy. The story is about a man who is just joining The Organization and looking for his first assignment, however, everyone he runs into is unsure if they have been told the truth about him, and if they have been lied to about his assignment, and can they trust that he is who he says he is, or they don't know the assignment, but they can not reveal their ignorance, and if they are being kept ignorant, does it mean that they have been marked for elimination? The man spends the novel trying to find out what his assignment is. It's both funny and sad. Check it out:

http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Found-Bathtub-Stanislaw-Lem/dp...

stared• 12 years ago

IMHO it is the best book by Lem (but not the most typical one).

In any case, for me it was more cognitive/philosophical: about trying to reach/understand the reality, after passing (yet another) layer of illusion.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years ago

It's hard to pin down a "typical" book of Lem's, but there are certain themes he returned to time and again.

1) The role of probability in life: "Chain of Chance" and "The Investigation" (the former is much the better book)

2) The role of scale in our understanding of the universe: "His Master's Voice", "Fiasco" and "Solaris" all touch on this, and are all excellent (I have a special fondness for HMV as a book that describes how scientists actually think and work in a way that nothing else I've encountered does)

3) The role of systems of control in the future of humanity: "Memoirs..." and most of the Ijon Tichy stories fall into this category, and are in my view his weakest work, although "Return from the Stars" is a brilliant book on this theme.

4) The role of cybernetics in the future of evolution: "The Cyberiad" etc.

The problem of the "silent universe" (explored mostly deeply in "Fiasco") is also one that comes up repeatedly, including a long and interesting essay in "Imaginary Magnitude".

api• 12 years ago

“because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors … ?”

This accurately describes one of the main failings of the Internet. It was supposed to give us an age of transparency, but instead it's delivered a choking fog of contradictory nonsense and rumors. It's almost impossible to see what's actually happening through all the propaganda, spin-doctoring, rumor-milling, fear-porn, and wild speculation.

The Fukushima meltdown really drove this home to me. While it was unfolding -- and after -- the Internet was simultaneously telling me everything from "it's not a big deal" to "this is an issue of human survival!" I suspected the truth might be somewhere in between, but this is a fallacy as well as an admission of profound ignorance. Somewhere in between nothing and doomsday is not saying much.

pdonis• 12 years ago

This problem has always existed; the only difference with the Internet is that it's now harder to ignore it.

icebraining• 12 years ago

It was supposed to give us an age of transparency

I don't think it was ever supposed to do that.

otakucode• 12 years ago

As in Lem’s novella, however, this future promises not social and scientific progress, but technological hedonism and senescence.

How does one qualify such an extensive and penetrating understanding of human consciousness as to make books an edible substance as "not ... scientific progress"?

te0006• 12 years ago

Alas, another thread on Lem and again no-one mentions the one text of his most pertinent to HN: Golem XIV. Think transhuman intelligence, think quantum computing, think singularity, and imagine Lem thought about this stuff in the _seventies_ and published in 1981. See http://www.bohemiandrive.com/excritement/1/ for a short review and summary; the e-book is available on Amazon.

The Future According to Stanisław Lem

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