'Solaris' sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem dies

Yep.

My favourites are Return from the Stars, His Master's Voice and the Ijon Tichy stories. Solaris is cool too.
 
Sad to see his passing.

I started with Tales of Prix the Pilot. It was far from Lem's favorite, understandably. But it was my introduction to the great man, so I always hold it in esteem.
 
That’s very sad. Stanislaw Lem is an author on my list I unfortunately haven’t reached yet.

As a side note, would you recommend reading Solaris before watching the film (the Andrei Tarkovsky version, of course!), as I usually would? Or vice versa?
 
Always read the book before watching the movie, if you can. The Tarkovsky movie isn't very faithful to the book.
 
rats said:
That’s very sad. Stanislaw Lem is an author on my list I unfortunately haven’t reached yet.

As a side note, would you recommend reading Solaris before watching the film (the Andrei Tarkovsky version, of course!), as I usually would? Or vice versa?
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I don't think it matters much what order you do it. True the Soderbergh movie is truer to the book, but the Tarkovsky movie is just a better movie -- so I recommend you see that one first. Soderbergh is a great filmmaker, but he was trying to capture Tarkovsky's dismal atmosphere and not with tremendous success. No one does dismalness like Tarkovsky did.
 
The whole philosophical aspects (the ocean world as some kind of deity, the impossibility of communication with it, the questions about identity) aren't even mentioned in the Soderbergh movie. In those aspects, the Tarkovsky movie is closer to the book.
 
Orwell said:
The whole philosophical aspects (the ocean world as some kind of deity, the impossibility of communication with it, the questions about identity) aren't even mentioned in the Soderbergh movie. In those aspects, the Tarkovsky movie is closer to the book.
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True that.
 
I haven't read the book, nor seen the original movie, but I thought the remake was A) confusing, and B) boring. I read somewhere that the original was much more confusing, and I decided at that point it would be best to skip it...

Sad to hear about Lem's passing, though.
 
Hmm. Think I’ll stick to reading the book first - prefer to make up my own images and interpretations. :) Certainly sounds intriguing!
 
Anyone here ever read The Investigation? I've read it multiple times and still don't get it.

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The Cyberiad is one of my favorites. Love the war of the babies. Sorry to hear about this.
 
The story about the poetry machine really stood out for me in the Cyberiad. After several (extremely funny) failures, it starts becoming a good poet - too good. Testing its limits, they order it to come up with
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
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It spits out the following:

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!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
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Utter genius.
 
dogjones said:
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Utter genius.
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Twice over: on Lem's part writing it in Polish, and also on the part of the whoever translated it into English. I was continually amazed throughout Cyberiad at the translation achievement.
 
During a thirty minute reading period in 9th grade, in the 70's, I got in trouble for reading Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. Years later I made the Kafka connection.

Lem once proposed that life began on earth because our solar system is on the receding edge of a spiral arm thus lowering the amount of radiation from neighboring stars. Does the amount of solar radiation affect the ability for life to occur?
 
Lem once wrote that life on Earth started because two badly behaved robots decided to dispose of their trash on Earth 4 billion years ago... ;)
 
I really enjoyed some of Lem's stuff, however I couldn't take The Investigation seriously. It was supposed to be set in Britain and features a Scotland Yard detective, but it's so full of mistakes about the UK that makes it almost unreadable for me.
 
Fraser said:
I really enjoyed some of Lem's stuff, however I couldn't take The Investigation seriously. It was supposed to be set in Britain and features a Scotland Yard detective, but it's so full of mistakes about the UK that makes it almost unreadable for me.
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Clearly it was set in Poland as originally written. The translation just lifted the events and set them in England. It should have been left in its original setting. But I can enjoy it anyway. Understand it? That's another matter.
 
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