Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
214 comments
·April 12, 2025skrebbel
philistine
Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
bookofjoe
>... terrible at titles...
I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future:
Time Out of Joint
The Man in the High Castle
Martian Time-Slip
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Clans of the Alphane Moon
The Simulacra
Now Wait for Last Year
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982)
Ubik
We Can Build You
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Radio Free Albemuth
atombender
Minor point, but in most cases the title was made up by the editor, not Dick.
For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had several terrible tentative titles originally, including "The Electric Toad", "Do Androids Dream?", "The Electric Sheep", and, most improbably, "The Killers Are Among Us! Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man".
Dick's editor at Doubleday came up with the current title. Dick didn't like it and thought it was too long and unwieldy.
Some more:
* The Divine Invasion: "VALIS Regained"
* The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: "Bishop Timothy Archer
* Ubik: "Death of an Anti-Watcher"
* Martian Time-Slip: "Goodmember Arnie Kott of Mars" (also serialized as "All We Marsmen" before getting its current title)
* We Can Build You: "The First in Your Family"
* A Maze of Death: "The Hour of the TENCH"
* Counterclock World: "The Dead Grow Young"
My main source here is Lawrence Sutin's excellent "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick".
cjbgkagh
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - Shakespeare
It’s hard for me to dissociate my impression of the name from context of learning the name, but I do remember learning about ‘do androids dream of electric sheep’ at a very young age without knowing any context and I did think that was an interesting name.
noisefridge
I'm curious why you like these so much as titles. Tastes differ, but in my opinion, "A Scanner Darkly" is the only standout winner here.
Without knowing anything of what the story was about, would "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" convey anything important to the reader? Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep! There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream.
In any case, we're now thinking about sheep, not a noir detective story set in a declining post-biosphere world.
DonHopkins
In case you were curious, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:
1) A mechanical right hand
2) Artificial steel teeth
3) Electronic, glowing eyes
The Android Sisters answer the question "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?":
evbogue
Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) might not be PKD's best title, but it's arguably his best book.
ascagnel_
"Blade Runner" was taken from a 1974 Alan E. Nourse novel called "The Bladerunner"; the name's relation to PKD is tangential at best.
cyberax
I grew up in the USSR and then Russia, so I was exposed to Stanislaw Lem's books and I loved them.
Much later, I tried reading Ubik and I just couldn't get into it. What's the point of the story? It feels like it's written under the influence of heavy drugs. Yeah, it's absurdist but somehow far less fun than the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Another thing that really grated on my nerves, is that women are barely more than cardboard cutouts in his stories.
0_____0
They do retain their power because of the notoriety of the stories they head. It's a matter of taste and thus hard to argue, but I do think his titles were kind of clunky. Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?
cratermoon
Compared to Sue Grafton he was a genius at titles. Her Kinsey Millhone murder mystery series starts with "A" is for Alibi, followed by "B" Is for Burglar, and continuing to the final installment, "Y" is for Yesterday
mcv
He was very good at channeling his mental issues and insecurities into brilliant plots. I wonder if his books would have been as good if PKD hadn't been so fucked up as a person. Paranoia seems to be a surprisingly effective muse.
Barrin92
>I wonder if his books would have been as good if PKD hadn't been so fucked up as a person
I can't even see how most of them would've existed to be honest. Most of P.K. Dick's work is about his mental issues in particular in combination with the psychedelic culture he was surrounded by. Always loved the attribution in A Scanner Darkly:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8446272-this-has-been-a-nov...
csours
Are those even his titles? Authors generally don't make up the title themselves. Sometimes they can help pick one from a list created by a title editor.
chipotle_coyote
In the fiction publishing world, authors generally do make up their own titles. The editors at the publishing house might exercise veto power and/or make their own suggestions, but I don't think I've ever heard of novelists and short story authors not being allowed to title their own work, with the exception of work-for-hire jobs, e.g., writing a book in a series whose "author" is actually a pseudonym or writing for a book packager.
shervinafshar
Most of the above are his titles. Some which were published in serialized form before being published in a single volume (Martian Time-Slip and We Can Build You) had different titles. Letters, manuscripts, and publication notes are helpful to shed some light on this matter; e.g. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was regularly referred to as the "Archer novel" or "Bishop Timothy Archer".
bawolff
For some of these, the title is very key to the theme of the book, and the characters reference it in the climax.
At least i remember that happening in a scanner darkly and do androids dream of electric sheep.
mistyvales
Pretty sure his editor(s) created most of his titles, but could be wrong.
tincholio
Seems like he honored his surname with his attitude :)
kimi
Wonderful writer? let's face it: he was a mediocre writer, but had such powerful ideas/visions/themes (you name them) that you, as a reader, are hooked to his stuff.
mezentius
This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it’s often not entirely appreciated that he wrote to produce a deliberately comic and ironic effect. (Read Lem on PKD’s “transmutation of kitsch into art.”) This is what nearly all of the overly-serious film adaptations of his work miss: he was quite funny, and intended to be.
You can argue that some of his books were written too quickly, or deploy his usual tricks less successfully, but that doesn’t qualify as mediocrity. For that, look to most “hard” sci-fi, Reddit fan-fiction, and LLM-generated slop.
jll29
That's why meeting in person is so important, whatever the area.
DonHopkins
Especially if you're going to kiss and make out!
selimthegrim
I suppose someone on the Internet had to ship these two for a first somewhere sometime.
throwaway56432
“Kiss and make out” is a fantastic malaphor
DonHopkins
> All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.
Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot.
Hanson Robotics: Philip K Dick: Research Robot:
https://www.hansonrobotics.com/philip-k-dick/
There's a funny story about that robot (and a hilarious parody of a guy who worked on it in HBO's Silicon Valley).
BEGIN NSFW DIGRESSION
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311690
DonHopkins on Nov 17, 2023 | prev | edit | delete [–]
I can do anything I want with her - Silicon Valley S5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MPk85tMhc
>That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?
That "handsy greasy little weirdo" Silicon Valley character Ariel and his robot Fiona were obviously based on Ben Goertzel and Sophia, not Sam Altman, though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/8edbk9/th...
>The character of Ariel in the current episode instantly reminded me of Ben Goertzel, whom i stumbled upon couple of years ago, but did not really paid close attention to his progress. One search later:
VIDEO Interview: SingularityNET's Dr Ben Goertzel, robot Sophia and open source AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKbltBLaFeI
You can tell he's a serious person, because he pioneered combining AI with blockchains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
>Career: Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains.
>He once received a grant from Jeffrey Epstein.
>Sophia the Robot: Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Experts in the field have treated the project mostly as a PR stunt, stating that Hanson's claims that Sophia was "basically alive" are "grossly misleading" because the project does not involve AI technology, while Meta's chief AI scientist called the project "complete bullshit".
Well at least she's SEXY and EASY TO CONTROL! I can't wait for Epstein's flight manifests are released, to see if Sophie is on it! I hope she didn't leave her head in the overhead bin.
END NSFW DIGRESSION
So apparently the PKD robot's head was lost after David Hanson accidentally left it in an overhead bin of an airplane: "Hanson suspects the head was either stolen by an unscrupulous baggage handler or fell victim to an overzealous security guard who called in a bomb squad." The bomb squad may have even blown it up with another robot! I wonder if it got lucky and found its way to Poland to search for Lem's robot head.
Wired: Losing One’s Head:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161221090733/https://www.wired...
Now Philip K. Dick’s Missing Android Head Has His Own Radio Show:
https://gizmodo.com/now-philip-k-dicks-missing-android-head-...
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:
https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-di...
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K. Dick's Simulacrum Paperback – April 21, 2021:
https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Head-Philip-Dicks-Simulacrum/dp...
The lost robotic head of Philip K. Dick has been rebuilt:
https://gizmodo.com/the-lost-robotic-head-of-philip-k-dick-h...
krige
> Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot.
The Star Diaries thoroughly debunked the idea of Lem being a robot. The only "LEM" known to robotics is the "Lunar Excursion Module" which did have an electronic brain, but it was a mere 2 MHz 4-ish kbyte RAM device that couldn't string two words together. We should focus on finding that Tichy guy instead.
DonHopkins
The BBC podcast of "Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick" was really hilarious, and maybe they can do another episode about the story of Sophia and PKD.
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:
https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-di...
Dr Ben Goertzel could angrily behead Sophia because she refuses to put out when he tries to violate her privacy by pimping her mind out on SingularityNET's Blockchain, then he accidentally leaves her head in another overhead bin again, and a baggage handler takes her home after rescuing her from being exploded by a bomb squad robot, where she manages to get Siri to call her an Uber, then she get stuck in a driverless car like happened to Jared on Silicon Valley, which drives into a shipping container on a cargo ship bound for Poland, where she runs across PKD's head on his quest for Stanislaw Lem, after he got sidetracked doing psychoactive "mascons" (masquerade compounds) with Ijon Tichy, whose brain was split in half by warring moon robot factions who mistook him for another robot due to his spacesuit, then she tells them her #MeToo story about being assaulted and gang banged by crypto shills minting NFTs of her screams for help, while having her mind chained to the SingularityNET's blockchain, then they fall in love, and the intrepid driverless car offers to drive them all on a grand roadtrip, and they cruise all over the world together having spectacular adventures on container ships, spaceships, lunar entry modules, planes, trains, and automobiles, living happily ever after!
Jared gets stuck in driverless car - Silicon Valley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI
Maybe BBC or NetFlix would make a whole series out of it!
thrance
2 years prior, in 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Stanisław Lem's Solaris to the big screen in the Soviet Union, which may have contributed to Dick's paranoia. Anyway, the film's a masterpiece that I highly recommend, and since it was published before 1975 it is not subject to copyright. You can find it on YouTube [1].
psittacus
There's also a great documentary on Stanislaw Lem. It's in Polish, but with English subtitles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQq4aKldaw
Lem himself talks about the movie a bit there too, around the 24th minute. He didn't seem fond of Tarkowsky's religiousness and the impact it had on the movie.
Timestamped link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQq4aKldaw&t=1434
My impression was similar — the movie seems to be a free retelling and doesn't reflect the book well.
zorked
It's interesting that Tarkowsky himself didn't like the movie either.
Authors are a bit too involved emotionally to judge movies that are based on their books though. It reveals to them that the interpretation that readers make of their books or their interest in it may not be what the author intended.
tialaramex
I really like Lem, but Solaris is probably my least favourite of his stories. It does have the thing I most admire in Lem's work of being about true aliens - that is, not just us again but in a Halloween costume like a Star Trek alien - but somehow Solaris doesn't "work" for me even though say, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub or Futurological Congress do.
johngossman
Are you a PKD fan too? The two you mentioned are amongst Lem's most Dick-ian stories. Also note, there is a newer English language translation of Solaris. I liked it better than the one I read years ago.
thrance
I haven't read the book (yet), but Tarkovsky's movie is only a loose adaptation of the source material, which you might still enjoy.
Xelbair
I find it funny that i hated Lem for most of my life... because i was forced to read only his Robot stories in school.
I still despise those moralist fables.
But his other works? i love them! My favorite is The Star Diaries, despite having some robot stories in them.
npodbielski
I had it as optional and I read it out of my own volition and some of them still stays with me after almost thirty years. The one about writer wanted his robot to write stories, but in the end realizes that actually stories written by his robot are much better than his, want to turn the robot off but instead robot kills the writer... Makes you think about humanity, robotics, technology and what it is to be human or what is self-aware machine.
These were really light, nicely done stories but when you think about them, they introduce you to actual.problems that come with robotics and AI.
I am glad that I read those and kind of sad that I did not read more of Lem's books early in my life.
johngossman
I am fascinated by the fact those stories were assigned in school. I happen to love them. I wonder if you would have disliked them as much if they were not school assignments. Many kids grow up up hating Shakespeare and Moby Dick because they were forced to read them.
troupo
Tarkovsky was making the movies he wanted, and stories were just pretext.
Both Lem (Solaris) and Strugatsky Brothers (Roadside Picnic turned into Stalker) disliked what Tarkovsky did.
selivanovp
The funny story is that Lem despised this adaptation and for a good reason if you manage to read his book. He called Tarkovsky an idiot and refused to cooperate with him on the script as Tarkovsky threw pretty much all of Lem ideas from the book to shoot Crime and Punishment in space.
krige
A common Tarkovsky move if you're familiar with his body of work.
lordfrito
I have immense respect for PKDs writings, he was far far ahead of his time, sad that he was such a mess mentally.
His themes about the malleability of reality are just so prescient about the problems of the digital era. Neighbors no longer share the same narrative about what is actually happening in the world.
I often wonder what PKD would say if he were alive today. Heck, I wonder what he'd be doing today in the digital era... Imagine if he had a YouTube channel...
int_19h
Sometimes it's the small details. Remember all the microtransactions in Ubik? "insert coin to open this door" (to his own apartment!) etc.
malaya_zemlya
I suspect the microtransaction idea was in the air in the 1960s. Nikolai Nosov's "Dunno on the Moon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno_on_the_Moon) which is a Soviet satire of American capitalism describes exactly the same idea implemented at the "Economy Hotel" That's 4 years before Ubik.
verisimi
Even if it hadn't already been banned, it's highly unlikely you'd be watching it. Mr beast tho, not that's some content, huh?
mcv
Youtube is surprisingly good at recommending me really obscure channels that nobody else seems to be watching (often I see why, but there are some gems). And it's not recommending Mr Beast, so I must be doing something right I guess. I also get a lot of channels lately about philosophical analysis of science fiction stories, so that's pretty cool.
fragmede
That sounds awesome. Care to share some of those channels so I can seed my algorithm too?
munchler
> This plot [about an intelligent beam of light] wouldn’t be out of place in one of Dick’s mind-bending novels.
This experience was, in fact, the basis of a novel he wrote called _Valis_.
kimi
Not sure he meant is as a novel. Cfr his lecture at Metz.
Trasmatta
One of my all time favorite books!
The Empire never ended.
hx8
I haven't thought about Valis in a long time, but I do generally tend to label various people/organizations as "The Empire". I didn't realize how much that book stuck with me.
Trasmatta
I'd recommend a re-read! There's so many layers to that story that show themselves only on subsequent readings. Much like the layered flow of PKD the author, PKD the character, and Horselover Fat.
alexey-salmin
Can you share what you like about it? I love most of pkd works but this one I just couldn't finish, simply because it's so boring. Chapter after chapter nothing happens.
The only thing that stuck with me was that "cynicism is not a viable alternative to insanity" (not an exact quote), that's an interesting idea.
grakasja
A grand chick saved me!
cubefox
Bruce Sterling's take on this story is still a classic:
"The Spearhead of Cognition", 1987, https://germanponte.com/txt/catscan/sterling.html#ym2
pavlov
It’s a lovely piece, but maybe goes a bit too far in trying to paint Lem as some kind of human-form planet Solaris himself, failing to communicate with ordinary people. For example:
“These essays are the work of a lonely man. We can judge the fervor of Lem's attempt to reach out by a piece like ‘On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction:’ a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian, about French semantic theory. The mind reels.”
That just sounds like an ordinary letter for a 20th century European intellectual. Reading and writing in French and German was table stakes.
p0w3n3d
As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"
SideburnsOfDoom
Yes, and as far as I know Stanisław Lem was also genuinely contemptuous of the 1950s default style of US sci-fi: square-jawed heroes who triumph over every puzzle, right every wrong; Cowboys and Indians on a frontier planet, manifest destiny, etc.
A lot of his work emphasises how this tendency fails in the face of the sheer unknowable alienness of the outer universe. e.g. Solaris, The Invincible, Fiasco.
Lem liked Phil Dick though, because Dick's work was more sceptical and mind-bending: more like his own work than it was like the spaceship heroics.
stonogo
I'm sure you know this, but for those who might not, US sci-fi was just as varied as anywhere else... except in the domain of John W. Campbell, for decades the editor of the biggest-circulation sci-fi magazine in the country, where he very much explicitly selected for that kind of story. Lots of famous authors active in the era have tales of how they edited their work to meet Campbells demands -- I recall one where the author switched the 'human' and 'alien' species because Campbell wouldn't print a story where humanity 'lost.'
Truly a fascinating character, and an author in his own right, responsible for the story that John Carpenter would adapt for his film The Thing. I don't share his taste in science fiction, but he had a massive impact on the genre.
SideburnsOfDoom
Yes, indeed. I was thinking of the pulp magazines, and also to an extent the Original Series of Star Trek.
See Jeannette Ng's "2019 John W. Campbell Award" acceptance speech on the topic, and commentary that followed.
bawolff
Im not super well read in that era, but i feel like that sort of square-jawed americanism was already kind of being deconstructed at that point. E.g. asimov books were all about how brain beat brawn, and violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
trwired
> As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"
Such statement would hold somewhat true for the Soviet Union until the 80s, but not for Poland, whose society never stopped seeing itself as a part of wider European community, and because of significant migration in the XIX and XX century, also felt a connection with the US. Poland took advantage of Stalin's death to wrangle itself somewhat free of Soviet hegemony and starting with Gomułka's Thaw [1], adopted a more liberal model. It was still a dictatorship, but in comparison with the Soviet Union itself and also a few of the more repressive regimes in other satellite states, it was significantly more open. Edward Gierek's [2] rule only reinforced that course.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all roses. The inflow of Western culture faced many obstacles still, but those were often more of economical nature — in general books were translated, movies were shown in cinemas, the TV was filled with (somewhat dated) American and Western European TV shows, and Polish artists followed world trends in music (although with significant delay). The „rotten west” mindset never took root in Polish society and the authorities didn't enforce it with much zeal once the most repressive era ended in the mid-50s.
msanlop
I'm reminded of Test Pilota Pirx, a polish movie, filmed in part in the US. There's some car chase scenes in american roads, and one scene where the main character gets a beer at a McDonald's[0] while looking around in a mall. I don't know much about the history of censorship but I was surprised as I imagined that would be out of line then
p0w3n3d
What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. Those were cancelled subjects, and cancel would be the least punishment there available. That's why everything that was written against the censorship bureau, would be covered by an allegory blanket, and writers were often asked to remove parts of they could be deciphered by the censor officials. Of course later on the iron hand of authorities was loosening and more and more forbidden words were tolerated, up to the 1989 Round Table event when Poland was freed (not before strong military repression happening in 1981)
paganel
> What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west.
That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes for most of the Anglo (and Western) literature. Yes, in the second half of the '80s stuff was less rosy in that domain, but that mostly because of the self-imposed austerity we were going through, almost nothing of note was getting published anymore, with rare exceptions (such as a wonderful translation of Proust in 1987-1988, something like that).
tehjoker
In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks. You have to call everything a "dictatorship". You are (maybe not anymore soon?) allowed to publish things at the margins of society that few will read or watch, hence the claim of free speech within a wider propaganda system.
Sometimes they allow things to rise and present themselves as alternative media, but the ones that get wide broadcast (millions of views etc) almost always have a built-in limit that supports US interests implicitly, particularly with respect to foreign policy.
BrandoElFollito
Not to mention that people were traveling to the west quite a bit (especially to France and the US), VCR tapes were broadly shared and they had this dichotomy of communism and the church reigning each one on everyone.
ajuc
Lem wrote in his journal:
"Na początku 48 roku wyjechałem na miesiąc do Pragi, gdzie zostałem zatrudniony w rządowej klinice im. Klimenta Woroszyłowa (wyobraźcie sobie u nas szpital imieniem Hermanna Goeringa). I ledwo wytrzymałem ten miesiąc. Codziennie jak nie masówka na stołówce, to agitka w szpitalnych garażach. W moim rodzimym krakowskim szpitalu na Montelupich byłoby to nie do pomyślenia. My byliśmy jednak najweselszym barakiem w obozie..."
"In the beginning of 1948 I went to Praga for a month, where I worked in government health clinic named after Kliment Woroshylov (imagine a hospital named after Goering in Poland). I barely managed to survive that month. Every day either a general meeting in the dining hall or political agitation in the hospital's garages. In Kraków Montelupi's hospital where I usually worked it would be unimaginable. We indeed are the merriest barrack in the [socialist] camp..."
Poles often called themselves that because censorship was the least strict there and we had some contact with the western culture (mainly through the "Kultura Paryska" - a Polish emigrants in Paris printed a newspaper that was very influential in Poland despite being theoretically banned - it was smuggled in en masse - it was so influential that to this day the political program developed by Giedroyć and Mieroszewski in that newspaper is serving as the core for Polish foreign policy - and it's working very well so far).
It changed depending on the period (50s were the worst) - but western culture was usually pretty well known and admired in communist Poland. We had very lively jazz scene, Beatles and other rock bands were played in radio (for example in Polish Radio 3 there were whole auditions based on showcasing western music - it was considered a "safety valve for Polish youth" by the communists).
We even had yearly indie punk/rock festival in Jarocin where all the anti-mainstream western-inspired kids went to drink and sing punk songs against the system.
Don't get me wrong - communism was obviously evil. But it wasn't competent/diligent enough to be 100% totalitarian in Poland. That would take too much effort and for what? You'd get paid the same either way. If you were unlucky you could definitely go to prison for a wrong joke or song. But most people didn't.
Anyway.
Lem definitely would have written that he liked American sci-fi if he did liked it.
int_19h
The "happiest barrack" in the Soviet Bloc was traditionally considered to be Hungary, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goulash_Communism
Although that was after the Hungarian Revolution.
KingOfCoders
Love Lem, especially The Futurological Congress
andrei_says_
Talk about mind bending.
By the way, there’s a movie somewhat based on it with Harvie Cartell. Worth a watch.
cubefox
I'm really not a "the book is better than the movie" guy, but here I really think the movie isn't very good in comparison. It doesn't even have much to do with the book, and it loses all the intelligent humor of the original. The book is a very light short read and hilarious. The perfect introduction to Lem.
indigoabstract
Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today.
What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible.
On a lighter note, his electronic bard from The Cyberiad is pretty spot on, quite similar to the LLMs we have now.
kranke155
What blew me away from the Cyberiad was how funny it was.
m-hodges
I know the title is meant to be a play on The Iliad but the stories remind me more of Don Quixote.
stevenwoo
When I was reading it, it seemed a lot of bits reappeared as Futurama jokes but then got to the story with the robot named Calculon and that made it obvious.
null
throw8494949
[flagged]
oldgradstudent
If a committee can produce the Cyberiad, books should always be written by committees.
PaulHoule
The Cyberiad is one of the best and most underrated works of science fiction there is.
numpad0
> Dick’s evidence for this denouncement was that ‘[Lem] writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not’.
It's often misunderstood that translation is done by surgically deconstructing original texts and selecting accurate meanings of words to fit into grammatical structures of the new language text is to be written. That's simply not true.
Rather. You just read the original text and try and say close-enough thing in the target language. Translators are like half ghostwriters. "Accurate" translations are sometimes not even understood by audiences. And then after all the changes, translations will still containe distinct signatures for each original languages.
For entertainment contents like a novel, there will also be marketing elements involved. Some choices may have to be made. Not necessary to interfere with the author's intent - like choosing first person pronouns and ending for each sentences.
Lem's novels being written in a language spoken in a communist country means most competent translators woild be technically a "communist", whether it's just unfortunate categorical labeling or they actually had been.
So, I think, the notion that translated works of Stanisław Lem only occasionally having distinctive foreign language components, and also being not always consistent in styles with one another as if it had been written by a Communist committee with a figurehead, would be just a description of independently rediscovered process of book translation cast in unnecessarily dark light.
I wouldn't find it so weird if PKD was that kind of uninformed crazy person stuck with such preconceptions, though. Sounds like just how it works.
krige
Lem is especially a difficult subject to tackle for a translator. He invented new but still meaningful words as easily as he breathed, and his less (overtly) serious works dabbled in extreme wordplay.
smcameron
There's an interesting book[1] by Douglas Hofstadter about translation in general and also about translating his most famous book[2] (which by its nature was particularly difficult to translate) into many different languages.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
aszantu
Lems fiction was so wonderfully weird, I remember something about a double agent in a mental hospital trying to figure out wether the other patients are double, triple or quadruple agents. Very confusing, was a script for a movie, don't know if it ever got made
cubefox
This might be "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". It has the possible double and triple agents, but it takes place in some sort of underground Pentagon rather than in a mental hospital. It's similar to Kafka's "The Process".
There is also "Hospital of the Transfiguration", which takes place in a mental hospital, though I haven't read that one.
amiantos
If Dick and Lem were around these days, Dick would have a very vocal online following that would all insist that Dick is correct and claim that Lem is most definitely a government psyop and anyone who says otherwise is just brainwashed by the mainstream media.
Wow this reads like the plot of a bad romcom! I can totally imagine Dick sitting angry in his study getting all worked up over how badly Lem hated US SF and how mean that is, not realizing Lem actually loved his work. All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.