Stanislaw Lem is dead, at the age of 84. Lem was one of the first SF writers I ever discovered: my primary school’s small library happened to have a copy of his The Astronauts (Astronauci, 1951), which totally blew me away when I read it at the age of 8. (The plot can be summarised as: Communism! Probe from space! Computers Spaceship! Venus! Robots! Communism! I had my mother take me to a Cosmonaut exhibition in Helsinki around that time and got upset when she didn’t let me wear my CCCP badges with the cool rockets in them.)
Little did I realise that The Astronauts was one of Lem’s earliest works, a utopian space opera. Lem went on to become one of the greatest satirical voices in any genre, standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. I read and re-read The Cyberiad and The Star Diaries as a teenager, enraptured by the linguistic fireworks, marvellously captured by the translator. I didn’t read Solaris until years later —- I found it too depressing —- but the wait was worth it, and after that I read all the Lem I could get my hands on.
Lem was a masterful writer and a virtuoso stylist who had many voices, ranging from comedy to satire to incisive psychological drama. Indeed, his stylistic breadth was such that Philip K. Dick (admittedly suffering from paranoid schitzophrenia at the time) wrote to the FBI in 1974, convinced that “Stanislaw Lem” was in fact a committee of Communist spies, aiming to penetrate the Science Fiction Writers’ Association of America, to which Lem was admitted as a honorary member in 1973. In fact, Lem was expelled two years later after pissing Philip José Farmer and others off by making derogatory comments about the state of American SF (along the lines of “Science fiction is garbage with exceptions and Philip K. Dick is one of them”, ironically enough). Ursula Le Guin and many others objected, and offered Lem a regular membership later, but he refused. I can only imagine that the absurdity of the situation must have amused Lem.
As long as his work lives, he shall have stars at elbow and foot. And death shall have no dominion.