Stanislaw Lem,.1921-2006
WILSON, JOHN
Stanislaw Lem, 1921-2006 Science fiction's master of the universe. BY JOHN WILSON The writer Wirt Williams had a theory that novelists— "like quarterbacks," he would add—^were most likely to...
...The detectives are investigating a series of bizarre incidents at rural mortuaries in which corpses seem to have been reanimated...
...Look at Terry Bradshaw...
...In its unsettling shifts, its incongruous mix of tones and styles— suspense, metaphysical horror, humor, absurdity, intellectual puzzle—the novel both anticipates and surpasses later works that were trumpeted as the very model of postmodernism...
...Here, once again, Lem is working with a clear template and playing against it in various ways, particularly in his brilliant imagining of an encounter with an alien life form, radically different from the familiar aliens of yore...
...A case in point is the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, who died on March 27 at the age of 84...
...1984) also recalls The Investigation...
...1987), Lem's most ambitious treatment of the theme of alien contact...
...The Invincible (1964...
...Lem's IQ, as he mentioned in passing in an autobiographical essay, was above 180, but no one who read many of his books needed that datum to conclude that here was an unusually powerful and wide-ranging intelligence...
...His best-known novel is Sol^-ris, thanks to the film version by Andrei Tarkovsky, and the recent remake...
...Other readers will have other favorites, and no one who plunges into Lem should miss his memoir of childhood, Highcastle, or his collection of essays, Microworlds, (which includes the much-quoted, much-abused essay, "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case— With Exceptions...
...Among the many mansions of the House of Fiction, there is room for the occasional polymath...
...The names of places and characters are clearly parodic...
...The Cham of Chance (1976...
...A lot of Lem is available in English, John Wilson is the editor ofBooks & Culture...
...But the tone is very different, not least because this is a first-person narrative...
...The template is a mystery novel, featuring Scotland Yard detectives, crossbred with the conventions of the modern Gothic tale...
...but more remains to be translated, both novels and works in other genres...
...Some will be drawn to his reviews of imaginary books, others to the fables that recall the philosophical tales of Voltaire and his age...
...1976) has some affinities with The Investigation, though at first it appears to be very different, featuring as it does a classic sci-fi scenario: A spaceship is sent to a distant planet where another ship landed a year earlier, sent one intelligible message, and then apparently encountered some unknown disaster...
...The physical setting is rendered with such virtuosity that it haunts my dreams for weeks afterward every time I read the book...
...Also involved as a consultant is an eccentric academic who subjects these mysterious events to statistical analysis...
...Meanwhile, he was reading widely in literature and philosophy, and he embarked on a career as a writer of science fiction...
...A meditation on how we think about cause and effect—and about the role of chance in our lives—the novel sounds terribly pat, but in fact its "solution" is the opposite of the tidy summing-up as performed, for instance, by the redoubtable Hercule Poirot...
...If you like it, go straight to Fiasco (1986...
...Still, he allowed, there were exceptions...
...Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a "kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature" in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world...
...Here the subject is a series of deaths at a resort in Italy, and there are elements of the thriller and the Golden Age mystery...
...It's not a bad book to start with, but I will move on to my personal favorites from Lemland...
...Lem is the driest of writers—not desiccated, not narrow, not at all—but his prevailing humor is dry, and his best books can be reread with pleasure every few years...
...in English, 1976), is neither a parody nor a pastiche, strictly speaking, but has elements of both...
...The intellectual puzzle is foregrounded, only to be turned inside out...
...Let us hope that an enterprising publisher or two are willing to underwrite the Englishing of some of these missing items: That would be a fitting memorial...
...BY JOHN WILSON The writer Wirt Williams had a theory that novelists— "like quarterbacks," he would add—^were most likely to flourish if they were reasonably intelligent but not off-the-scale brainy...
...The first, The Investigation (in Polish, 1959...
...The son of a physician, Lem was trained in the sciences...
...Too much intellection, Williams thought, tended to gum up the works in one way or another...
Vol. 11 • April 2006 • No. 28
