makeitmorenordicnoir t1_iyc39mc wrote
Reply to comment by Muppetude in Interesting essay on Steven Soderbergh’s SOLARIS, which is now 20 years old. by Bullingdon1973
It’s based on a book by Stanislaw Lem….it’s a short take on the story much like what Contact did with the original source material….
warpus t1_iyc649i wrote
The novel is quite amazing and focuses on many different points than the movie does. The novel is more or less about the complexity of truly alien contact, but the movie made it into a sort of love story. It’s Lem too so it’s not at all a traditional alien encounter story. At all
“it’s Lem” so the novels points are not very direct. Lem wrote under communism in Poland and wrote a lot of his works as satire criticizing communism. He had to be really sneaky about it though and fortunately the commie overlords never caught on.
But as a result his style is at times odd and def unique with vaguely hidden satire, in a lot of his works he relies on wordplay (that have been somehow amazingly been translated to English while still retaining the original charm and message), some of his stuff sort of reads like Douglas Adams with a twist, a bunch of it reads like stories for children mixed with philosophy and wordplay, and he even wrote a book of reviews of books that don’t exist.
His work is sort of all over the place but there is a string connecting it all that’s hard to pin down.
Solaris is one of his books that’s a bit more .. like a traditional novel, with no wordplay and probably satire but it’s much harder to spot. I haven’t read all his works but I have read about 15 and Solaris has always been my fav.
The English translations (some via French somehow) are very well done, I’ve read both the polish and English for some of them and it’s incredible how the essence of the story is almost the same, even though I would have guessed that polish wordplay would be hard to translate without losing something.
Highly recommend this author! Not for everyone but there is a lot of variety. Solaris reads completely different from Memoirs from a Bathtub, and the Investigation is a murder mystery set in England that takes a curious approach to the genre, to give some examples.
My fav scene from one of his short stories was when an astronaut fighting with different versions of himself gets pissed off and throws a steak out the airlock. For the rest of the story there is an occasional eclipse as the steak orbits his spaceship, occasionally obscuring the nearby star.
JTDan t1_iyc82k0 wrote
"I'm the WEDNESDAY me!!"
Nobody gets Stanislaw Lem, including me, but I think he's phenomenal.
Citizen_Kong t1_iyd7vtu wrote
It's very sad that sci-fi fandom generally is so anglocentric, otherwise I'm pretty sure Lem would be as revered as Heinlein, Asimov and Dick.
JTDan t1_iydd3k0 wrote
Are you familiar with Phillip K. Dick's letter to the FBI (1974) accusing Lem of being a Communist committee that had infiltrated the Science Fiction Writers of America? Because he was too brilliant, too widely educated and wrote in too many different styles to really be a single person. Yup.
As for Heinlein -- I, too, read and loved Stranger in a Strange Land as a teenager. But even at that age I was weirded out by his habit of making sluts of all his leading ladies, and having them make babies with their fathers, or father figures (read: Heinlein stand-ins). This shit is just gross, my dude. And the older he got, the hornier his female characters became.
Asimov, Bradbury, Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard. Le Guin. There are dozens of writers whose place in the cannon is ahead of those two.
That's my opinion and you are welcome to yours.
Citizen_Kong t1_iyde5rp wrote
Yeah, I know that story. Classic paranoid Dick, lol. Lem was also generally very dismissive of English/American authors, with the sole exception of Dick, funny enough.
Also, yeah, Heinlein is very problematic, but his general influence on Sci-Fi as a genre is still phenomenal.
warpus t1_iydcz16 wrote
At one point he was one of the best sold sci fi authors in the world - in any language, at least judging by the liner notes on some of his older publications. I assumed that’s why his books were translated to English so early and so well. But I agree! These days his works are not as much looked at and read as they seemed to be in the past
Micosilver t1_iydlic7 wrote
Apropo of nothing, if anyone is interested in brilliant Sci Fi that's not anglocentric - check out Strugatsky brothers. Stalker is based on their book.
[deleted] t1_iycom12 wrote
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przyssawka t1_iyd5d31 wrote
How insecure are you? Dude used your comment to share his love for Lem and insight on how to get into his books. You should be happy people unfamiliar with the author may see it and get into old-school polish Sci-Fi.
warpus t1_iydd9o2 wrote
Yeah I’m a big fan and got excited and shared my thoughts
[deleted] t1_iyculkg wrote
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