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Hello Summer!
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2005
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In the Research Reading topic, we were to list some of our favorite authors and books...I neglected to mention one very important and, for me, influential writer: Stanislaw Lem. Though the movies made of his most famous work, Solaris have been slow and terrible, the actual novel is amazing. Lem was a master of exploring the question of trying to know the universe, the difficulty of looking beyond ourselves, outside ourselves.
How can we ever expect to understand what is truly alien when we can't stop anthropomorphizing? Was one of the many dark questions he asked in his novels. How, come to that, can we even know each other? Or whether anything outside our own heads is real and immutable?
His troubling conclusion was that we couldn't. A fascinating writer he explored the reaches of this inner space as much as he ever explored outer space. Among my favorites of his: Solaris and Futurological Congress. His unique insights will be missed.
How can we ever expect to understand what is truly alien when we can't stop anthropomorphizing? Was one of the many dark questions he asked in his novels. How, come to that, can we even know each other? Or whether anything outside our own heads is real and immutable?
His troubling conclusion was that we couldn't. A fascinating writer he explored the reaches of this inner space as much as he ever explored outer space. Among my favorites of his: Solaris and Futurological Congress. His unique insights will be missed.
WARSAW (AP) — Stanislaw Lem, a popular science fiction writer whose novel Solaris was filmed twice, died Monday in his native Poland, his secretary said. He was 84.
Stanislaw Lem, seen here in 2003, wrote his first novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration, in the 1940s but it was cesored until 1956.
Lem died in Krakow, Wojciech Zemek told The Associated Press. Zemek did not give other details or the cause of death, citing only Lem's advanced age.
Lem was one of the most popular science fiction authors of recent decades to write in a language other than English, and his works were translated from Polish into more than 40 other languages. His books have sold 27 million copies.
His best-known work, Solaris, was adapted into films by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. The latter starred George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.
His first important novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration, was censored by communist authorities for eight years before its release in 1956 amid a thaw following the death of Josef Stalin.
Lem's other works include The Invincible,The Cyberiad,His Master's Voice,The Star Diaries,The Futurological Congress and Tales of Prix the Pilot.