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RIP: Stanislaw Lem
« on: 2006-03-29 00:56:22 » |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/books/28lem.html
Stanislaw Lem, Author of Science Fiction Classics, Is Dead at 84
Stanislaw Lem, a Polish science-fiction writer who, in novels like "Solaris" and "His Master's Voice," contemplated man's place in the universe in sardonic and sometimes bleak terms, died yesterday in Krakow, Poland. He was 84.
The cause was heart failure, his secretary, Wojciech Zemek, told The Associated Press.
Mr. Lem was a giant of mid-20th-century science fiction, in a league with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. And he addressed many of the themes they did: the meaning of human life among superintelligent machines, the frustrations of communicating with aliens, the likelihood that mankind could understand a universe in which it was but a speck. His books have been translated into at least 35 languages and have sold 27 million copies.
What drew the admiration of many of his fellow writers was the intensity with which he studied the limitations of humanity, in ways that could be both awed and pessimistic.
In "Solaris," a densely ruminative novel first published in 1961 — and made into films by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002) — contact is made with a dangerous and unknowable alien intelligence in the form of a plasma ocean surrounding a distant planet. As they attempt to understand the organism, astronauts aboard a space ship are plagued by hallucinations drawn from their own memories.
In "His Master's Voice," published in 1968, scientists in a Pentagon-sponsored project are similarly perplexed by a superior alien communication, this time from a pulsating neutrino ray. But the failed experiment gives the ill-tempered narrator, Peter Hogarth, a sense of wonderment: "The oddest thing," he says, "is that defeat, unequivocal as it was, left in my memory a taste of nobility, and that those hours, those weeks, are, when I think of them today, precious to me."
Born in 1921 in Lviv — then part of Poland but now in Ukraine — Mr. Lem began to study medicine as a young man, but his education was interrupted by World War II. He worked as a mechanic during the war and later returned to his medical studies but did not take his final exams out of fear that his services would be needed in the military. His first literary works were poems and short stories.
He emerged as a major science-fiction author in the early 1950's with works that he later disavowed as simplistic, and he sometimes ran afoul of the Communist censors. In one early book, "The Cloud of Magellan," he had wanted to write about cybernetics, a banned concept. "In order to get the novel through," he told The New York Times in 1983, "I had to rename the field 'mechanioristics' — I created a new term." An editor wasn't fooled, and for a time, Mr. Lem said, the book remained unpublished.
Among his other works are "The Invincible" (1964) and "The Cyberiad" (1967). Some, like "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" (1961) and "The Futurological Congress" (1971), are darkly satirical pictures of cold war-era life, involving technocratic societies that have broken down under the weight of their advanced machines.
Mr. Lem sometimes ridiculed his chosen genre. In "His Master's Voice," Hogarth, in an effort to come up with new ideas, tries reading some science-fiction stories but dismisses them as "pseudo-scientific fairy tales."
Some of his most ambitious works drifted into experimental and philosophical territory. "Summa Technologiae" (1964) is a speculative survey of cybernetics and biology, and "A Perfect Vacuum" (1971) is a self-conscious experiment in meta-fiction, a set of reviews of 16 nonexistent books. One of the books reviewed is "A Perfect Vacuum" itself. "Did Lem really think," the review reads, "he would not be seen through all this machination?"
Mr. Lem's survivors include his wife and a son, The A.P. said.
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