Probably my favorite story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
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Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#12Lem 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 ele…
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.
Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#13Probably my favorite story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
It might be a good novel (I've only seen the Tarkovsky film, Stalker) but this wasn't written by Stansilaw Lem.
Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#14Creative fantasy? If life exists in the plasma of a Sun, creating an artificial 'sun' would no more create life than building a crib creates a baby.
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.
Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#15Probably my favorite story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
This is by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who were contemporaries of Lem.
FWIW by favorite Strugatsky novels were Hard to Be a God, and The Doomed City.
Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#16Probably my favorite story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
I really enjoyed Snail on the Slope.
Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#17>"We did it on August 6"
Notably, the Feast of the Transfiguration.
Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#18Lem 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.
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.
Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#19Lem 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.
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.
Re: The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)
#20I 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.
For another example along these lines, there's David Brin's "Sundiver": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96472.Sundiver