31–40 of 215 posts
> Due to the economic restrictions of Poland under the communist regime, Lem was unable to give Dick his due royalties. Surely losing out on this potential source of income, regardless of reason, would incline Dick unfavourably towards Lem If we pull aside the ideological grandstanding what we see is plain old jealousy, resentment and vindictiveness. That’s usually the case in any context. The ideological grandstandi…
As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"
A lot of his work emphasises how this tendency fails in the face of the sheer unknowable alienness of the outer universe. e.g. Solaris, The Invincible, Fiasco.
Lem liked Phil Dick though, because Dick's work was more sceptical and mind-bending: more like his own work than it was like the spaceship heroics.
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I really like Lem, but Solaris is probably my least favourite of his stories. It does have the thing I most admire in Lem's work of being about true aliens - that is, not just us again but in a Halloween costume like a Star Trek alien - but somehow Solaris doesn't "work" for me even though say, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub or Futurological Congress do.
I find it funny that i hated Lem for most of my life... because i was forced to read only his Robot stories in school. I still despise those moralist fables. But his other works? i love them! My favorite is The Star Diaries, despite having some robot stories in them.
These were really light, nicely done stories but when you think about them, they introduce you to actual.problems that come with robotics and AI.
I am glad that I read those and kind of sad that I did not read more of Lem's books early in my life.
Funny how closely his own machinations resemble the (obviously comically deranged) delusions of some of his characters. He was clearly quite self-aware, as another comment noted, or could it be that the whole FBI report was a jest? It really reads exactly like a passage from his novels. The subtext of the report to the FBI, that we must suppress artistic expression in order to protect the innocent minds from dangerou…
Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today. What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible. On a l…
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Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
>... terrible at titles... I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future: Time Out of Joint The Man in the High Castle Martian Time-Slip The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Clans of the Alphane Moon The Simulacra Now Wait for Last Year Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982) Ubik We Can Build You Flow My Tears, The…
Wow this reads like the plot of a bad romcom! I can totally imagine Dick sitting angry in his study getting all worked up over how badly Lem hated US SF and how mean that is, not realizing Lem actually loved his work. All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.
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>... terrible at titles... I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future: Time Out of Joint The Man in the High Castle Martian Time-Slip The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Clans of the Alphane Moon The Simulacra Now Wait for Last Year Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982) Ubik We Can Build You Flow My Tears, The…
They do retain their power because of the notoriety of the stories they head. It's a matter of taste and thus hard to argue, but I do think his titles were kind of clunky. Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?
... or even some parts of the plot ...
It would have been more interesting than the shooting based thriller we got instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
>... terrible at titles... I disagree. Here are some that retain their power all these decades later and will likely do so for the foreseeable future: Time Out of Joint The Man in the High Castle Martian Time-Slip The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Clans of the Alphane Moon The Simulacra Now Wait for Last Year Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)/Blade Runner (1982) Ubik We Can Build You Flow My Tears, The…
It’s hard for me to dissociate my impression of the name from context of learning the name, but I do remember learning about ‘do androids dream of electric sheep’ at a very young age without knowing any context and I did think that was an interesting name.