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mtherobot's Reviews (867)
Idk how romance writers can come up with a love interest who's a millionaire vampire (obviously) and also a doctor and also a priest and also a world leader and also...has no discernable personality traits whatsoever lol
Stanislaw Lem was one of the first authors I read when I first got into adult science fiction, and I think about Solaris, like, once every couple of hours. So when I heard a new collection of his stories was being translated into English (many for the first time), obviously I made a netgalley purely to get an ARC of it.
(Insert obligatory netgalley disclaimer here, etc. etc.)
It's interesting for me to think of these stories in comparison to Solaris, with is, I think, a high water mark for thoughtful, philosophical scifi. A lot that is repeated here—Lem returns, again and again, to the idea of alien intelligence: what it would look like, and whether we would recognize it, and what that means about us.
But there's a lot of humor here, too. ("Invasion from Aldebaran", in particular, made me do that weird snort-laugh people do when they read amusing things alone in their bedrooms during a worldwide plague.) Which, you know! Was very refreshing given the general gloominess of life right now. It reminded me of watching the Twilight Zone late at night as a kid, funny and kind of existentially horrifying in equal measure.
I think this style of witty/horrifying/philosophical writing is having something of a comeback lately—I'm thinking, in particular, of Ted Chiang, who's probably the best writer of speculative short friction working right now. Obviously, there's a big gulf there stylistically—each story in this collection comes with a little note about when it was written, but it would be clear even without them that these stories aren't exactly contemporary. Nonetheless I think this collection is a compelling entry point to the Lem-iverse for those who are late to the party, as well as long-time fans who haven't bothered to learn how to read Polish in pursuit of new material.
Also, you know, nice cover!
(Insert obligatory netgalley disclaimer here, etc. etc.)
It's interesting for me to think of these stories in comparison to Solaris, with is, I think, a high water mark for thoughtful, philosophical scifi. A lot that is repeated here—Lem returns, again and again, to the idea of alien intelligence: what it would look like, and whether we would recognize it, and what that means about us.
But there's a lot of humor here, too. ("Invasion from Aldebaran", in particular, made me do that weird snort-laugh people do when they read amusing things alone in their bedrooms during a worldwide plague.) Which, you know! Was very refreshing given the general gloominess of life right now. It reminded me of watching the Twilight Zone late at night as a kid, funny and kind of existentially horrifying in equal measure.
I think this style of witty/horrifying/philosophical writing is having something of a comeback lately—I'm thinking, in particular, of Ted Chiang, who's probably the best writer of speculative short friction working right now. Obviously, there's a big gulf there stylistically—each story in this collection comes with a little note about when it was written, but it would be clear even without them that these stories aren't exactly contemporary. Nonetheless I think this collection is a compelling entry point to the Lem-iverse for those who are late to the party, as well as long-time fans who haven't bothered to learn how to read Polish in pursuit of new material.
Also, you know, nice cover!
