Stanislaw Lem (Polish writer)

After viddying Tartovsky's Solyaris (Солярис) for the uptenth time, I decided to track down the book it was adapted from, which put me onto a Polish gentleman by the name of 'Stanislaw Lem'. I'm usually not a fan of Science Ficton novels, but thoroughly enjoyed Solaris; the psycholoical undertones interweaved between a sort of romance was down right intriguing. So my question is where do I tread from here? I know very little 'bout his other works and was hoping to be enlightened.

  

Ah, fantasitc, I was hoping (expecting) for either yourself or Friede to reply. I will head down to the library on the morrow to see if I can dig up those titles. I must be more careful when flinging 'round genre tags. re SF, I think I have just had some bad first experiences, but I did thoroughly enjoyed Lewis' Space Trilogy.

By the way, just arrived back from a screening of El Topo; first time it has been screened in over twenty years in my country!

Well, it seems all those four books have been translated into English. Took me a little while to find info on Catarrh, but after searching some German sites I found it has been translated to The Chain of Chance in English. Thanks for the help, once I have read those four I will definitely ask for some more info if the others are to my liking. 

Great topic - I've only read Solaris and really should read more since it is a brilliant book - thanks

Black Velvet wrote: I can now second the recommendation of The Investigation. Spent a sleepless night reading after visiting the library yesterday afternoon. This was the only one they had from the list so I snatched it up a first chance. This was a very good read, with an somewhat unconventional punch-line, tho' will admit I had suspicions it would end like this mainly due certain reiterations (I will not go into detail as I wouldn't want to spoil it for others). I hear Catarrh is somewhat of a further extension upon these ideas, hopefully I will find out in the not to distant future. My library also has both His Master's Voice and Prowokacja (translated to One Human Minute in English). I will have to wait patient till I'm up in Sydney again to get my hands on his other books, they have most of his collection, most of the being in storage for some strange unknown reason.

"Catarrh" ("also known as "The Cold" in translation; the Germain title is "Der Schnupfen", by the way) is indeed an extension of the ideas of "The Investigation", but in my opinion better executed. and while you may have foreseen the punch-line of "The Investigation" you definitely will not be prepared of the punch-line of "Catarrh".
"Catarrh", by the way, features one of Lem's recurring heroes, Ijon Tichy; the other one is Pilot Pirx. Lem has great humor, especially in the Tichy books; his hero gets into all kinds of absurd situations. he sometimes made jokes about his name too, like when he quotes fictitious professors like Chimpanzer, Goriller and Gibbons, only to have a cameo appearance as Stanley Lemur . in one of his books he points out that the author Lem does not exist, since LEM was the abbreviation for the "Lunar Excursion Module" in the 1969 Apollo XI mission, and one can certainly not expect a book to be written by such a Lunar Excursion Module.

oops, correction; "Catarrh" does not feature Ijon Tichy; I confused it with another book


Edited by BaldJean - March 05 2008 at 20:55