Fair warning, this story is about 9,000 words. But it's so rich and weird and dazzling. It's among my favorite Lem stories — although i admit i hadn't read anything of his until we (MIT Press, where i work) started reissuing his books last year, so i'm by no means an expert on him. Anyway, there was a lot of interest in an excerpt from Lem's memoir I submitted here a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25533405), so thought i'd share this as well.
Really glad to hear there is an effort forward to bring out more of Lem's work. One of the most interesting SF authors, with what would seem to be a deeper understanding of actual science than most of the others I've read. I especially love His Master's Voice, and am happy to see that on the list of MIT reissues!
Lem's criticism of much mainstream US SF at the time likewise takes the view that there's too little Science behind any of this Science Fiction. I'm not sure how much of his literary criticism is in print, "Microworlds" is the volume I read.
I like my SF very hard ("Incandescence" by Greg Egan is roughly where I'd say I'm comfortable, a plausible mechanism by which a pre-industrial civilisation might discover general relativity, that novel made me cry at the end) but even when he's being totally whimsical I really enjoyed Lem.
Lately on Amazon the term "hard" has been misused or
redefined for "military scifi" / "violent scifi".
That aside,
I just have a regular understanding of most fields in science. I know a bit here and there.
More astronomy.
My field is computer science, so I have
some knowledge there.
What I wonder about is if the average scifi reader expects or even could tell if something is "science" and not fantasy. Huge absurd things of course.
I have read so many different descriptions on how FTL works.
I dont think (ignorance on my part) that we have a solid theory for how it can be done.
- Warping of space/time (or higher dimension),
- "portals" left by "an ancient civilization"(that sort of evades the issue)
- wormholes
- "Taming a god"
- through special cracks in space/time that only a special navigator (species) can feel.
- improbability drive (I do love Douglas Adams).
and many more.
When you read can you take the existence of FTL on just being there, do you reject the ideas fully, or do you judge it on its merits if the description extrapolates current knowledge into a future where we can FTL? (if ever)
> What I wonder about is if the average scifi reader expects or even could tell if something is "science" and not fantasy
I think hard sci-fi requires that the book universe has consistent rules and the book focuses on their consequences, while soft sci-fi focuses on stories and the rules are unspecified or don't drive the plot.
The rules don't need to be what we currently think about our universe for the book to be hard sci-fi.
So, what makes SF, even hard SF, is not so much what can or can't be possible but the storytelling approach which falls out of it.
This is genre fiction, and genres have rules. For example, Romance is a genre of happily ever after endings. If you write what is ostensibly a Romance novel, but the heroine realises six pages from the end that her new lover is cheating on her and so she walks away unhappily and that's it, that's not a Romance novel, a Romance imprint would reject it, if you're a big name author they'd tell you to take it to a literary fiction house - otherwise go away and rewrite with a happy ending.
In SF the rule is "What if ...?", so you absolutely can have anything, unicorns, magic spells, faster than light travel, God can be real, but the story is about what else if that was so? That's where science comes into it. OK, so there are unicorns, what's special about them, just horses with a weird horn or anything more? Do people... ride unicorns? Eat them? Or maybe the unicorns eat people.
A fantasy kingdom with a rich gold mine can be dirt poor and yet money is somehow measured in gold, the thing they have plenty of, in fantasy you needn't explain, but in SF that's either a massive error or the core thesis of a novel.
On FTL specifically. I'm not a fan for reasons Charlie Stross explained when he gave up on writing a sequel I'd kinda wanted to read some day in a setting where he'd tried to tame FTL. FTL is time travel. So, you need to either embrace that, and have arbitrary time travel in your story (good luck producing a narrative you can write down) or come up with a water tight reason nobody ever does this. That's just a high cost it usually isn't worth it.
That said, the Clockwork Rocket series by Egan does just do time travel, but it also has different spatial dimensional layout, it's set somewhere way stranger than the setting for Incandescence, which is our universe albeit not somewhere humans could ever go. Still, I wasn't enormously happy with the outcome, time travel still ends up being sort of cheating even in the framework Egan creates. They do, as hoped, solve their impending disaster by going very, very fast though. Also they fix the patriarchy, which is way harder in a world where women inherently die during the equivalent of childbirth...
You are absolutely correct there is no "solid theory" for FTL. Rather, there is "solid theory" FTL truly is impossible in the universe as we know it, because it would allow effects to happen before the events that caused them. It would allow messages to be sent back in time. The speed of light is much more than the speed of light: it is the speed of causality itself. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, the earth would continue to orbit the disappeared sun for the roughly 8 minutes that lightspeed (or causality-speed) requires for covering the earth-sun distance. Anytime any event happens anywhere in the universe, you can imagine an invisible sphere exploding outward from that event in all directions at lightspeed (causality-speed). The event cannot cause an effect anywhere in the universe until this expanding sphere hits that part of the universe. So picture one of these spheres expanding outward from you at the moment you were born. At age 80 your birth-sphere now has a radius of 80 light-years. There is a 160 light-year diameter ball in the Milky Way all the effects of your birth are limited to. It will be millions of years before anything you ever could have done could have any effect whatsoever in the Andromeda galaxy. There is a "glass half full" optimistic view of this limitation: intergalactic Thanos/Hitler types cannot exist in the universe as we know it. We are well quarantined from the evil in other galaxies (if any exists), and other galaxies are well-quarantined from our evil here (where it definitely exists).
I can't help but read this story as a predecessor of "Solaris", where a contact with a planet-size living entity is actually attempted.
I also see here some characteristic traits of Lem's plots: something we are close to but can't hope really attaining (like personally traveling inside a star), the lack of understanding from well-intentioned lay people, and the idea that there are things we try hard to understand but really can't yet by far, like an ancient Greek, even well-educated, won't understand a quantum-mechanical problem.
This, and great storytelling, as usual. I find this translation quite well made. (I wonder though how would the translators wrestle with Lem's word games, like in "Observations on the spot" or "Futurological congress".)
I was thinking the same thing, but it was at least published after Solaris which came out in '61. Of course, he could have done The Truth before or during the writing of Solaris. It could still be a proto-Solaris. And anyone who's written fiction knows that you produce a lot of material that doesn't make it into the final draft. Maybe The Truth is a bit of Solaris that didn't make the final but Lem liked enough to return to later.
Also, if you feel like more Lem after reading this, I heartily recommend the '72 Solaris film if you haven't seen it. Probably one of the greatest directors (Tarkovsky) of all time filming off of one of the greatest sci-fi authors of all time. Tarkovsky likes long, slow shots the style of which is all but absent from Hollywood today, where they cut like a microtome, so it might seem dull and strange at first, but give yourself a chance to get used to his pacing.
The first novel I read of him was "The Invincible", recommended here. It was great, but it didn't prepare me at all for the second book someone recommended me, "The Futurological Congress". It's like two different styles.
Two Lems for the price of one! What could be better? One serious and the other basically telling SF folk stories, mocking other SF and inventing possible worlds, like Vonnegut did with his Kilgore Trout. Also ‘The Cyberiad’ with Trurl and Klapaucius is somewhat similar to the Ijon Tichy cycle.
For me too, but it was actually two novels in one book, "The Invincible" and "Solaris", and I was young back then (maybe 8yo), and didn't understand that one novel can ends in the middle of the book. Was quite puzzled about the change of topic mid-flight.
My favorite book is "Wizja Lokalna", the title has been translated to English as 'Observation on the Spot' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observation_on_the_Spot). It's a wonderful allegory of problems related to the concept of the 'world of abundance' vs 'communism/authoritarianism'. The presented problems (ethico-sphere, abundance of material thing) are serious and well researched and described, even if in a humorous fashion.
I really like the cover art on these books, by Przemek Dębowski. They have a very suitable and appealing retro-future look, I'd encourage people to them out. I actually ordered one from Dębowski as a poster recently.
I used (and attributed) some of the wonderful cover art and illustrations by Lem and Mroz and others from his web site, to illustrate this article about "GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine":
Truly, being able to read Lem's works untranslated is my favourite thing about being a native polish speaker. There are some fantastic translations out there, but somehow, when it comes to sci-fi, I find works written in polish or other eastern european languages to flow better.
In addition to the above, I find that reading an older physical edition adds much charm to vintage sci-fi. The copy of The Truth I own comes from 1967 and the feel of the old, yellowed pages does enhance the reading experience.
I doubt it, as puns like this are generally not Lem's style in my opinion. "Tichy Ijon" kinda sounds like tachion, which is polish for tachyon, but I would chalk it up to coincidence.
Probably not, the name goes before the surname in Polish (like in English), so saying "Tichy Ijon" would sound a bit unnatural, even if the 'Citizen Tichy Ijon' form was promoted in communist time, probably as a borrowing from a more formal Russian?
The word 'tichy' means 'silent' in Czech/Slovakian, and maybe in some smaller Polish dialects.
Fiasco remains Lem's work that has had the most profound affect for me. The creativity and style of Lem, as it has been brought it English speaking audiences, is unparalleled in bridging science fiction and literature.
Lem is best known for Solaris, of which there are two film adaptations. imho the book is better than both films, and the first film is better than the second.
He is also known among programmers for The Cyberiad, which is available in an amazing English translation by Michael Kandel. The Cyberiad is a collection of tales about two Constructor robots who travel together and try to outdo each other at creating bizarre and often disastrous inventions to solve problems on different planets.
Edit: Here is a snippet in which Klaupacius challenges Trurl's latest invention, the electronic bard, to compose "a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics," and gets a response: https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jbuhler/cyberiad.html
What is really amazing about this (and about the whole English translation by Kandel, but the poetry is particularly amazing) is that to me, as a native English speaker, this seems like it was written originally in English--not written originally in Polish and then translated into English.
Oh man. Definitely. It was upon reading this story years ago that I realized just how magical translations of stories could be. Lem's humor is so precise and dependent on wordplay and the puns are non-stop. I have no idea how Kandel (the translator) was able to bridge the gap between two languages that are so different. The English language results are as sharp and precise as anything anything an English speaker might come up with. Possibly better in some instances.
I read a lot of Lem when I was a kid. Solaris is great, it was definitely one of my favorites. Here's another one that I liked a lot: Return from the stars. It's funny how he predicted a lot of modern technology spot on, but his hero goes to a post office to send a telegram to his friend on another continent.
I love his descriptions of the different phenomena like symmetriads. One of the few books I've read that describes a truly alien intelligence. The often recommend Blindsight being the other one I can think of.
I wish the subject of "solar life" was explored more in sci-fi. It's something that shows up every now and then, but rarely in any detail, or significant to the plot.
Great to see Lem is getting some more recognition in the anglosphere, he hated the american style of sci-fi and really uplifted the genre from cheesy twist-turns into art ...
The DKIST, a 4m diffraction limited solar telescope on top of a mountain in hawaii
https://dkist.nso.edu/, comes online in science mode before the end of the year. It will be able to resolve tens of kilometer scale structures on the sun for the first time. There's still a lot left to be discovered on these small scales as the short timescale coherent radio emissions have indicated for decades. DKIST will give us our first images of whatever is making these very short radio burst... and whatever else is there we didn't predict.
The implication is that processes happen so much faster at temperatures over a million degrees that all you have to do is create the right conditions and then life evolves immediately from our temporal frame of reference.
So the analogy would be closer to watching a goldilocks planet from the edge of the event horizon of a black hole.
Maybe I'm a Crazy Hippie Sun Worshiper, but my take is it's an outlandish creative fantasy to suppose life DOESN'T exist in the sun, with all that hot matter and strong gravity and powerful energy and freaky chaotic shit happening.
Well, it's possible that it's too chaotic. As Lem points out in the story, we don't know enough about plasma physics to know what kinds of patterns can develop, persist, and reproduce over time in such an environment: true in 01964 and, I think, still true despite substantial advances since then. Maybe, as the story suggests, there's a sufficiently rich set of them that the Sun is teeming with life, with civilizations rising and falling every few hours. But maybe in such hot temperatures only very large structures are stable, like the convection cells we see, so that for purposes of life the whole sun is the size of a ribosome, operating on a time scale a billion times slower.
>One hundred and thirty-seven seconds: A short story by Stanisław Lem published in 1976, translated from Polish in 2015 by Marcin Wichary
>Translator’s note: This is my first translation of a Stanisław Lem story. I tried to stay true to the spirit of the original as much as possible, which means original occasional odd idioms, mismatched units, and kilometer-long sentences. The story was published in 1976, and predates desktop publishing and the Internet. To the best of my knowledge, Lem has never visited America. If you are interested, read more about why I translated this story and the translation process.
Marcin actually stalked Stanislaw Lem in person when he was a boy:
>Memoirs of a train traveller: The day I stalked Stanisław Lem
>[...] It must’ve been early 1990s when I read somewhere that Stanisław Lem actually lives in Cracow and quickly, with a naïveté characteristic of a 14-year-old, I formulated a plan — I would go and visit him while we were there.
Then he went on years later to create the Lem Google Doodle! (Not to mention the PacMac one too!)
I have always wanted to ask Michael Kandel how he translated the poetry of the Electric Bard from The First Sally of Cyberiad.
Especially the one that is "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."
I was curious to see that poem in the original Polish, even though I don't know that language, just to compare them. I'd much appreciate hearing from a native Polish speaker how they compare.
I asked Marcin about it, and he linked me to the original Polish version of the Electric Bard -- try translating it to English with google translate to appreciate how astronomically more excellent Michael Kandel's translation is than a machine translation. I really wish I could read and appreciate it in the original Polish!
This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:
The Petty and the Small
Are overcome with gall
When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
Klapaucius too, I ween,
Will turn the deepest green
To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.
Google Translate's Horrible Translation:
Trurl was thrashing here and there, suddenly something crackled,
the press and the machine very matter-of-factly, calmly, declared:
Envy, pride, egoism forces us to be petty.
He will experience this by desiring to go with Electricity
In competition, a certain simpleton.
But Klapaucius
The giant will overtake the spirit like a turtle in a car.
Here's an article about Lem translations that aptly describes Michel Kandel:
Stanislaw Lem has finally gotten the translations his genius deserves
>Lem’s fiction is filled with haunting, prescient landscapes. In these reissued and newly issued translations — some by the pitch-perfect Lem-o-phile, Michael Kandel — each sentence is as hard, gleaming and unpredictable as the next marvelous invention or plot twist. It’s hard to keep up with Lem’s hyper-drive of an imagination but always fun to try.
Wow. Never heard of Janusz Zajdel or Limes Inferior, but i'm intrigued after reading the wiki pages for both. The book's summary brings to mind Zamyatin's "We." Are you translating it into English, and is there a publisher lined up?
