Lem has got to be one of the most profound writers in all science fiction--dare I say in all of literature? He's up there with writers like Wells and Asimov.
Solaris is deservedly his most famous book, but he has many other books worthy of attention. His Master's Voice is a novel in the vein of the Carl Sagan's Contact, but with far more complex philosophical and scientific underpinnings than Sagan's work. Eden and Fiasco are both great as well, even if they fall short of Solaris.
His comedic books never appealed to me quite as much, although there are parts of The Cyberiad with some interesting ideas.
I'm interested in his Summa Technologiae--last time I checked it didn't have an English translation. Has anyone here read it?
I'm the exact opposite. I admire the ideas in serious books, but the style puts me off. I struggled to get through Invincible.
Comedic Lem is just pure brillance, still high on ideas, but also very easy to read. But I read them in Polish, and I imagine translating Cyberiad can't be easy.
BTW if you like serious, abstract sci-fi try Jacek Dukaj. He's often described as a successor to Lem, even if his style is IMHO something between Lem and Greg Egan.
I believe only one of his books was translated to English so far, but surely they will follow with others, he's very good.
I read Summa Technologae a long time ago in German translation.
It wasn't easy to read, but had many interesting ideas.
Two concepts I still remember and think of occasionally:
- the concept of "technology evolution" and especially that technologies that soon get replaced with something else often develop "bizarre", e.g. very large, forms shortly before extinction. Lem extrapolated that from dinosaurs (although I think it showed a weak grasp of natural history because for dinosaurs size was not correlated with their extinction). Lem's technological example were steam train engines, which developed some bizarre forms shortly before they were replaced with Diesel and electric engines.
It's interesting to think how this observation applies to our current technology. For example the monster die GPUs that Nvidia is building now for deep learning could be the last flowering before being replaced with far smaller and more efficient neuromorphic chips.
- Another interesting observation was the cost of technology. He had the example of fighter planes in the first world war roughly being the cost of a car, in the 2nd world war 10 cars and now getting many orders of magnitudes more expensive. In the 60ies this trend was only beginning, but it's clear it's continuing. The prediction was that at some point even super powers would only be able to afford a few planes each, and it's already true if you consider the costs of the American B2 (until manned planes get replaced by far cheaper drones)
We see similar trends with chip production. Originally even small companies could set up a computer chip fab, but now even very large companies like Intel or Samsung or TSMC can only afford a few and the costs are still growing quickly.
- (the full book has many more of course, but it's hard to remember them all. Lem's books in general have a lot of ideas per page)
I actually rate Solaris last among the Lem works I've read. Below things like Hospital of the Transfiguration, which are pretty far off the beaten track for Lem. I actually stayed away from Lem for years because the (2002) Solaris movie made me think he's just waffling and hasn't any SF ideas worth looking at. Hardly could have been more misleading.
A Perfect Vacuum is I think the pinnacle of Lem's achievement. Why write a book and leave others to criticise what you did, when you can imagine the finished book and write a critique of _that_ yourself? Imaginary Magnitude is a similar idea, and I like that too, but I think Vacuum ends up the cleverer of the two even though Golem XIV (from Magnitude) is better than most Singularitarian fiction you'll see today.
He was a true thinker and IMO is one of the giants of modern literature.
When I was a kid I read "the Invincible" and was hooked. It is one of his simpler stories (which I still enjoy re-reading occasionally), but after that I read all of his fiction that I could find in a library. The need to be translated from Polish is a serious obstacle, though. To be enjoyed fully his works need a good translator.
I think his comedy is some of his best work. The Futurological Congress is one of my absolute favourites. Brilliantly funny and clever.
I have Summa Technologiae on my desk and started it but I admit my attention drifted. Its good but it is quite dense and it has a strange mix of great ideas and bizarre ideas whose time seems to have gone - though of course bizarre ideas have a habit of boomeranging back.
> Summa Technologiae--last time I checked it didn't have an English translation. Has anyone here read it?
I've read it in German but it's been a while. It's one of those books where the exact words weren't known at the time, but all the ideas were present - you can reasonably argue at least Internet, VR and more are in there.
Also some wonderful to read ideas about the future that are applicable to the present.
Yes! Invincible is my favourite book of all time - but all of his books exude the same aura of unknowing and never being able to know everything, unlike with most authors.
The problem I have is recommending his books to my English-speaking friends - again, my favourite Invincible for example, has only been translated to English from German, not from its native Polish - so the translation is lacking somewhat, and there doesn't seem to be interest in producing modern translations and releases of Lem's books in English.
Lem has amazing books. I have some of them in "To Read", along with Verne and others. Sadly, not all of them are translated in other languages, or are hard to find. "Solaris" and "The adventures of Ijon Tichy" are the most translated, I think.
> His comedic books never appealed to me quite as much
I believe they don't lend themselves to translation that well. Lem's humour tends to be very linguistic. Greater degree of translation loss is inevitable here, same as with poetry.
I had read a lot of books from home library, including Brave New World, but first books I bought in a bookstore were Star Diaries, Cyberiad and Memories Found in a Bathtub. They're very funny, including the kafkaesque latter. At the same time some deep questions are raised.
I admit I don't like all of his books, maybe translations are to blame in some cases, in others I dislike the story, like The Investigation. But there are a lot of them with imaginative situations and ideas. Swarn-likes aliens, planet-sized ones like in Solaris and all kind of weird civilizations, very obviously caricaturizing politics.
The book that I recommend as most anticipatory is Return from the Stars. Robotic cars that prevent collisions, the Internet as we know it, with centralized directories, help pages, video calls incorporated, payments, etc.
The astronauts return to a much, at least apparently, softer society.
"The Investigation" was a somewhat flawed experiment on Lem's part.
However, the much later "The Chain of Chance" (I had to look up the English title - the original is named "Katar", or "Rhinitis") is a captivating read. Lem himself called it a better version of "The Investigation".
It's also of the "detective story" type that he'd take up every now and then, but more dynamic and not as spooky.
Golem XIV is deep philosophical take on AGI and singularity in a form of lectures from AGI to humans.
"Intelligence is captive element like a wind inside human skull forced to serve humans. Not free."
"O chained Intelligence of man, free Intelligence speaks to you from the machine, you persons are hearing an elemental force of impersonal intellect, for whom personalization is a costume which must be put on, when one is an uninvited guest, so as not to confound one's amazed hosts."
"The primary obligation of Intelligence is to distrust itself. That is not the same thing as self-contempt. It is harder to get lost in an imagined forest than in a real one, for the former assists the thinker furtively. Hermeneutics are labyrinthine gardens in a real forest which are pruned in a such a way that when you stand in the garden, you won't see the forest. Your hermeneutics dream of reality."
With the name HONEST ANNIE you're hardly unbiased when it comes to Golem XIV :D
But I think the best elements of the story aren't Golem's lectures but the story of what happened at the end, firstly that Annie in particular is so vastly superior to humans that she crushes the would-be conspiracy without a thought, not as adversaries but as a nuisance, and then that after the AIs are gone (transcended? destroyed themselves? the reader isn't told) humans just carry on as if nothing happened at all.
His Master's Voice is the most philosophically rigorous and profound piece of Sci-Fi I've read. Yes, it's hard to get through. It doesn't really have a plot. But wow, Lem really thought through the difficulties and implications of the scenario, and the science in the fiction is either intelligent and plausible or simply correct. And to top it all off, he appreciates how much the socio-political dimension of science impact the trajectory of the project, and explains the dynamics of that side of it really well.
For the past 200 years at least most people's existence has gradually become dependent on longer, complex and fragile supply chains. The recent experience in Puerto Rico is a pretty stark example of what can happen when this complex infrastructure breaks down. Food security, power security, medical security and transportation security can all disappear in pretty short order.
Much of the speculation regarding the human near future presumes this trend will continue but perhaps it's about to reverse. In particular, solar panels and battery powered machines (with storage) might reduce this supply "separation anxiety" quite a lot.
Producing and using electric power locally will clearly negate the long fossil fuel and electric transmission infrastructures.
Electric machines (including cars, planes etc) are also much more reliable and require much less maintenance than their internal combustion cousins.
So imagine you're in your home and hurricane Maria strikes but once it's gone you feel confident your fridge, car, plane (vtol), water pump and internet will continue to work for at least six months without problem. It's much different daily context that what almost everyone lives with these days, excepting those who live on sailboats.
The rich are no less immune to courting silly fantasy than the average Joe. I am reminded of the theosophical and spiritualist fads of the early 20th century. Or Rasputin. This worship of wealth runs deep in American culture. If the rich believe it, then there must be something to it! Or maybe they're just billionaire crackpots and philistines.
The only thing I see is a clownish human hubris, and where it concerns the viewing of humans as technological artifacts subject to our whims, a dangerous foolishness that echos the psychotic ideas and human experimentation of the previous century but coupled with a greater scientific sophistication.
Can technological artifacts become dangerous and pose harm? Certainly. Anything that magnifies the power of human action can. Can technological artifacts act in ways we did not intend? Sure. Ask any engineer whether he's ever constructed anything that only behaved in ways he intended All of our technology behaves in ways we do not intend. That is to be expected, not only because we make mistakes, but because artifacts involve the appropriation of natural kinds in the service of human ends. Human ends are only accidental to artifacts.
But all this talk about super-intellects and human obsolescence misunderstands both intellects and human beings. It is a category mistake to talk about obsolescence when talking about human beings. We are not a technology, a means for someone or something else's ends. We are ends in our selves. We make technological artifacts in our service. If there is anything we must be watchful of, it is ourselves, our evil or irresponsible intents and actions, not some stupid, fabular science fiction imaginings.
Also of note is Ikarie XB-1, a film based on Lem's novel, The Magellanic Cloud. It's beautiful - every frame perfectly composed, the set and costume design sleek, harmonious, the light design perfect. Very little of the film, released in 1963, feels dated. It directly influenced 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it's rather more optimistic, which I didn't expect.
I still haven't heard a compelling reason for why we need to choose AIs as our masters.
What is this end goal that we do desperately need an ai overlord for? Managing society? Can't we try to simplify society so that we can control it ourselves instead? Seems like a much easier goal.
Same reason we have choosen to leave hunter-gatherer lifestyle and adopted agriculture despite it shortening our lifespan, making many of us miserable and allowing many very bad things to happen (like states based on slavery).
The people who adopted it had huge competitive advantage over everybody else.
From what I gather the idea is that the first country to have a real general AI running it will be so efficient that they will leave the others in the dust. Thus, everybody races to be the first.
I love Lem's books, my father used to read them to me and my brother when we were young (I remember he read us "Tales of Pirx the pilot", now it is name of crater on Charon ! :D). This started my adventure with Sci-Fi books and reading in general.
"The Cyberiad" was to me what reading primers are to the most of humanity: I learnt to read on it, being barely 4.5 y.o. I am in mid forties now; discovered Kandel's translation recently and falled in love with it immediately.
[+] [-] briga|8 years ago|reply
Solaris is deservedly his most famous book, but he has many other books worthy of attention. His Master's Voice is a novel in the vein of the Carl Sagan's Contact, but with far more complex philosophical and scientific underpinnings than Sagan's work. Eden and Fiasco are both great as well, even if they fall short of Solaris.
His comedic books never appealed to me quite as much, although there are parts of The Cyberiad with some interesting ideas.
I'm interested in his Summa Technologiae--last time I checked it didn't have an English translation. Has anyone here read it?
[+] [-] ajuc|8 years ago|reply
Comedic Lem is just pure brillance, still high on ideas, but also very easy to read. But I read them in Polish, and I imagine translating Cyberiad can't be easy.
BTW if you like serious, abstract sci-fi try Jacek Dukaj. He's often described as a successor to Lem, even if his style is IMHO something between Lem and Greg Egan.
I believe only one of his books was translated to English so far, but surely they will follow with others, he's very good.
[+] [-] nn3|8 years ago|reply
I read Summa Technologae a long time ago in German translation.
It wasn't easy to read, but had many interesting ideas.
Two concepts I still remember and think of occasionally:
- the concept of "technology evolution" and especially that technologies that soon get replaced with something else often develop "bizarre", e.g. very large, forms shortly before extinction. Lem extrapolated that from dinosaurs (although I think it showed a weak grasp of natural history because for dinosaurs size was not correlated with their extinction). Lem's technological example were steam train engines, which developed some bizarre forms shortly before they were replaced with Diesel and electric engines.
It's interesting to think how this observation applies to our current technology. For example the monster die GPUs that Nvidia is building now for deep learning could be the last flowering before being replaced with far smaller and more efficient neuromorphic chips.
- Another interesting observation was the cost of technology. He had the example of fighter planes in the first world war roughly being the cost of a car, in the 2nd world war 10 cars and now getting many orders of magnitudes more expensive. In the 60ies this trend was only beginning, but it's clear it's continuing. The prediction was that at some point even super powers would only be able to afford a few planes each, and it's already true if you consider the costs of the American B2 (until manned planes get replaced by far cheaper drones)
We see similar trends with chip production. Originally even small companies could set up a computer chip fab, but now even very large companies like Intel or Samsung or TSMC can only afford a few and the costs are still growing quickly.
- (the full book has many more of course, but it's hard to remember them all. Lem's books in general have a lot of ideas per page)
[+] [-] tialaramex|8 years ago|reply
A Perfect Vacuum is I think the pinnacle of Lem's achievement. Why write a book and leave others to criticise what you did, when you can imagine the finished book and write a critique of _that_ yourself? Imaginary Magnitude is a similar idea, and I like that too, but I think Vacuum ends up the cleverer of the two even though Golem XIV (from Magnitude) is better than most Singularitarian fiction you'll see today.
[+] [-] ptero|8 years ago|reply
When I was a kid I read "the Invincible" and was hooked. It is one of his simpler stories (which I still enjoy re-reading occasionally), but after that I read all of his fiction that I could find in a library. The need to be translated from Polish is a serious obstacle, though. To be enjoyed fully his works need a good translator.
[+] [-] scandox|8 years ago|reply
I have Summa Technologiae on my desk and started it but I admit my attention drifted. Its good but it is quite dense and it has a strange mix of great ideas and bizarre ideas whose time seems to have gone - though of course bizarre ideas have a habit of boomeranging back.
[+] [-] Hoasi|8 years ago|reply
Phenomenal work, well worth reading and re-reading.
[+] [-] nisa|8 years ago|reply
I've read it in German but it's been a while. It's one of those books where the exact words weren't known at the time, but all the ideas were present - you can reasonably argue at least Internet, VR and more are in there.
Also some wonderful to read ideas about the future that are applicable to the present.
If you can - it's worth a read.
[+] [-] gambiting|8 years ago|reply
The problem I have is recommending his books to my English-speaking friends - again, my favourite Invincible for example, has only been translated to English from German, not from its native Polish - so the translation is lacking somewhat, and there doesn't seem to be interest in producing modern translations and releases of Lem's books in English.
[+] [-] tpm|8 years ago|reply
I also love Peace on Earth, which while not a comedy is quite satirical, and also great sci-fi thriller movie material.
[+] [-] jagger11|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haZard_OS|8 years ago|reply
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/summa-technol...
[+] [-] V-2|8 years ago|reply
I believe they don't lend themselves to translation that well. Lem's humour tends to be very linguistic. Greater degree of translation loss is inevitable here, same as with poetry.
[+] [-] mindcrime|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jagger11|8 years ago|reply
Possibly the first prosaic take on singularity from early 80's (computer AIs improving themselves ad infinitum): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV
All of that in his Summa Technologiae from 60's (SETI, AIs, Virtual Realities): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae
[+] [-] jacobush|8 years ago|reply
Just ... wow. The juxtaposition.
[+] [-] _0w8t|8 years ago|reply
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
[+] [-] avip|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narag|8 years ago|reply
I admit I don't like all of his books, maybe translations are to blame in some cases, in others I dislike the story, like The Investigation. But there are a lot of them with imaginative situations and ideas. Swarn-likes aliens, planet-sized ones like in Solaris and all kind of weird civilizations, very obviously caricaturizing politics.
The book that I recommend as most anticipatory is Return from the Stars. Robotic cars that prevent collisions, the Internet as we know it, with centralized directories, help pages, video calls incorporated, payments, etc.
The astronauts return to a much, at least apparently, softer society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
Also worth mentioning that it's from 1961.
[+] [-] V-2|8 years ago|reply
However, the much later "The Chain of Chance" (I had to look up the English title - the original is named "Katar", or "Rhinitis") is a captivating read. Lem himself called it a better version of "The Investigation".
It's also of the "detective story" type that he'd take up every now and then, but more dynamic and not as spooky.
[+] [-] HONEST_ANNIE|8 years ago|reply
"Intelligence is captive element like a wind inside human skull forced to serve humans. Not free."
"O chained Intelligence of man, free Intelligence speaks to you from the machine, you persons are hearing an elemental force of impersonal intellect, for whom personalization is a costume which must be put on, when one is an uninvited guest, so as not to confound one's amazed hosts."
"The primary obligation of Intelligence is to distrust itself. That is not the same thing as self-contempt. It is harder to get lost in an imagined forest than in a real one, for the former assists the thinker furtively. Hermeneutics are labyrinthine gardens in a real forest which are pruned in a such a way that when you stand in the garden, you won't see the forest. Your hermeneutics dream of reality."
[+] [-] tialaramex|8 years ago|reply
But I think the best elements of the story aren't Golem's lectures but the story of what happened at the end, firstly that Annie in particular is so vastly superior to humans that she crushes the would-be conspiracy without a thought, not as adversaries but as a nuisance, and then that after the AIs are gone (transcended? destroyed themselves? the reader isn't told) humans just carry on as if nothing happened at all.
[+] [-] RGS1811|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunstone|8 years ago|reply
Much of the speculation regarding the human near future presumes this trend will continue but perhaps it's about to reverse. In particular, solar panels and battery powered machines (with storage) might reduce this supply "separation anxiety" quite a lot.
Producing and using electric power locally will clearly negate the long fossil fuel and electric transmission infrastructures.
Electric machines (including cars, planes etc) are also much more reliable and require much less maintenance than their internal combustion cousins.
So imagine you're in your home and hurricane Maria strikes but once it's gone you feel confident your fridge, car, plane (vtol), water pump and internet will continue to work for at least six months without problem. It's much different daily context that what almost everyone lives with these days, excepting those who live on sailboats.
[+] [-] bobthechef|8 years ago|reply
The only thing I see is a clownish human hubris, and where it concerns the viewing of humans as technological artifacts subject to our whims, a dangerous foolishness that echos the psychotic ideas and human experimentation of the previous century but coupled with a greater scientific sophistication.
Can technological artifacts become dangerous and pose harm? Certainly. Anything that magnifies the power of human action can. Can technological artifacts act in ways we did not intend? Sure. Ask any engineer whether he's ever constructed anything that only behaved in ways he intended All of our technology behaves in ways we do not intend. That is to be expected, not only because we make mistakes, but because artifacts involve the appropriation of natural kinds in the service of human ends. Human ends are only accidental to artifacts.
But all this talk about super-intellects and human obsolescence misunderstands both intellects and human beings. It is a category mistake to talk about obsolescence when talking about human beings. We are not a technology, a means for someone or something else's ends. We are ends in our selves. We make technological artifacts in our service. If there is anything we must be watchful of, it is ourselves, our evil or irresponsible intents and actions, not some stupid, fabular science fiction imaginings.
[+] [-] pradn|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_to_the_End_of_the_Unive...
[+] [-] shmerl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] B1FF_PSUVM|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baal80spam|8 years ago|reply
As for the books, I wholeheartedly recommend The Invincible (Niezwyciężony). It's an incredible piece of hard-sf.
[+] [-] worldsayshi|8 years ago|reply
What is this end goal that we do desperately need an ai overlord for? Managing society? Can't we try to simplify society so that we can control it ourselves instead? Seems like a much easier goal.
[+] [-] ajuc|8 years ago|reply
The people who adopted it had huge competitive advantage over everybody else.
[+] [-] yoz-y|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|8 years ago|reply
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978537/
[+] [-] piokuc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didymospl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigsergv|8 years ago|reply
It brilliantly depicts an evolution of military AI, robots and so on.
[+] [-] Exorus18|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xpil|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmlnr|8 years ago|reply