Love Lem, especially The Futurological Congress
Talk about mind bending.
By the way, there’s a movie somewhat based on it with Harvie Cartell. Worth a watch.
Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
91–100 of 215 posts
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. Those were cancelled subjects, and cancel would be the least punishment there available. That's why everything that was written against the censorship bureau, would be covered by an allegory blanket, and writers were often asked to remove parts of they could be deciphered by the censor officials. Of course later on the i…
In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks. You have to call everything a "dictatorship". You are (maybe not anymore soon?) allowed to publish things at the margins of society that few will read or watch, hence the claim of free speech within a wider propaganda system. Sometimes they allow things to rise and present themselves as a…
I don't think this is true at all, but I guess maybe we can get wishywashy about how you define "mainstream networks." Taking a couple examples from some quick googling for essays written by one of my favorite economists/commentators, Noah Smith:
1: China Is a Communist Success Story. Kinda. (2015) — He talks about how China’s state-owned enterprises and central planning have achieved huge economic growth, and says that while central planning has its limitations, China’s approach shows that it can work to a certain extent.
2: Xi Jinping vs. Macroeconomics (2023) — he analyzes Xi's shift of Chinese resources from the real estate sector to advanced manufacturing, and concludes that it's an attempt to address economic imbalances by promoting high-tech industries. Smith suggests that under certain ideological frameworks (like China's), that kind of policy could be seen as a sound response to economic challenges.
¹ https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-30/china-is-...
² https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/xi-jinping-vs-macroeconomics
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a big fan of PKD and also Blade Runner. You've got a point about the film being so very different, but I think it's subsequent success (it wasn't that successful at the time) justifies the approach to the subject matter. However I do wish that Mercerism (the religion in the book) was included in the film. Maybe someone should attempt to film a more literal adaptation. Edit: thinking about the difference between t…
I'd rather have the obsession everyone has for the few remaining animals on earth, and the race to own at least a replica. Electric sheep are just a background detail in the movie, while they're as central as hunting the replicants in the book... I'd also like the scene where Deckard runs into another blade runner agency, further complicating the question if he's a replicant or not :)
I don't think the human relationship stuff including the animal obsession really fits in the noir movie that Blade Runner ended up being (and hard to say that the decision to turn it into a noir thriller was a bad one considering how influential it's been). I do agree that keeping the other agency and their paranoid testing of each other would have been entirely in keeping with how the film worked out though. But Deckard testing as human would have disagreed with Ridley Scott's idea that he wasn't...
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#94Different take: A solid accusation of being a commie is just the cover that Lem needed to stay out of trouble back home in Poland.
That might have been a more interesting hypothesis about motivation if Philip K Dick was denouncing Lem as a communist propaganda on stage at a convention rather than in a private letter to the FBI
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure you know this, but for those who might not, US sci-fi was just as varied as anywhere else... except in the domain of John W. Campbell, for decades the editor of the biggest-circulation sci-fi magazine in the country, where he very much explicitly selected for that kind of story. Lots of famous authors active in the era have tales of how they edited their work to meet Campbells demands -- I recall one where t…
Yes, indeed. I was thinking of the pulp magazines, and also to an extent the Original Series of Star Trek. See Jeannette Ng's "2019 John W. Campbell Award" acceptance speech on the topic, and commentary that followed.
You're doing a genre with a complex timeline somewhat of a disservice here. Dick's career spanned two or three of the broad "waves" of SF. He was embraced by the New Wave authors probably more than any other writer not of their generation.
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
>... 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…
Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) might not be PKD's best title, but it's arguably his best book.
Not sure about the critical consensus, but VALIS is by far my favorite Dick's book. I read almost all of his works and love very many short stories and novels, however VALIS is in a class of its own in science fiction IMO.
The title is also brilliant: mysterious and vague until you learn what is stands for. What's not to like?
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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" Such statement would hold somewhat true for the Soviet Union until the 80s, but not for Poland, whose society never stopped seeing itself as a part of wider European community, and because of significant migration in the XIX and XX ce…
What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west. Those were cancelled subjects, and cancel would be the least punishment there available. That's why everything that was written against the censorship bureau, would be covered by an allegory blanket, and writers were often asked to remove parts of they could be deciphered by the censor officials. Of course later on the i…
> What I'm saying that writers were clearly forbidden by the communist powers to look towards west.
That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes for most of the Anglo (and Western) literature. Yes, in the second half of the '80s stuff was less rosy in that domain, but that mostly because of the self-imposed austerity we were going through, almost nothing of note was getting published anymore, with rare exceptions (such as a wonderful translation of Proust in 1987-1988, something like that).
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wonderful writer? let's face it: he was a mediocre writer, but had such powerful ideas/visions/themes (you name them) that you, as a reader, are hooked to his stuff.
This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it’s often not entirely appreciated that he wrote to produce a deliberately comic and ironic effect. (Read Lem on PKD’s “transmutation of kitsch into art.”) This is what nearly all of the overly-serious film adaptations of his work miss: he w…
That's an interesting insight, thank you. Are there any good articles about his deliberately comic / ironic approach, or his approach in general? His reliance on cliche story building troupes (like private detectives) can be off-putting at times, would love to understand better what was behind his choices.
Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#99Re: Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
Are those even his titles? Authors generally don't make up the title themselves. Sometimes they can help pick one from a list created by a title editor.
In the fiction publishing world, authors generally do make up their own titles. The editors at the publishing house might exercise veto power and/or make their own suggestions, but I don't think I've ever heard of novelists and short story authors not being allowed to title their own work, with the exception of work-for-hire jobs, e.g., writing a book in a series whose "author" is actually a pseudonym or writing for a book packager.