I risked missing the centenary in mute tribute. He was so many different writers – five, at least. Perhaps I should wonder: had I read Lem at all?Īnyhow, Lem was incommensurable – to SF, to literature, to himself. At some point I learned that Solaris hadn’t been translated directly into English, but from a Polish-to-French translation, with a result Lem described as ‘drastic’ – a beautiful irony for a book that takes as its subject the impossibility of meaningful contact between alien species. My sister and my partner are both literary translators my first editor was Stanisław Lem’s translator. 1Īs a teenager I was oblivious to the matter of translation. I couldn’t read On Site Inspection or Provocation – such tantalising titles! – unless I learned Polish. Some books from Lem’s later period, and innumerable essays, remain untranslated. His turn to science fiction was in the spirit of other Iron Curtain figures who slipped below the censor’s radar by using forms regarded as unserious, like animated film. So his career in English begins with two novels published in Poland in 1959. Lem dismissed them as mutilated by a subservience to Soviet ideology. But his earliest SF novels, Man from Mars and The Astronauts, weren’t. I couldn’t. Lem’s first, non-SF novel, The Hospital of the Transfiguration, written in the late 1940s and depicting a young doctor’s wartime internship in a psychiatric hospital, was translated in 1988. First, I told myself, I’d read or reread ‘all of Lem’. But, having read Lem all my life – or, more precisely, boasted all my life of having read Lem, since I actually gobbled up the books in a mad spate in my youth – I wanted to jump aboard the centenary train. As my grandmother would put it, I know bupkis about Polish literature. All the unstated premises, all the undefined terms (especially ‘science fiction’). Shouldn’t I be just the person for a centenary piece on Stanisław Lem? Novelist and philosopher of technology, author of ‘Solaris’ and scores of novels, stories and essays, one of the great figures in Polish literature, the greatest non-English-language science fiction writer between Jules Verne and Cixin Liu, born a hundred years ago … The trouble – beyond the fact that I’ve dawdled beyond that anniversary – is, well, everything. I write this with those same four Seabury hardcovers on the desk beside me. With an arched eyebrow, she purchased the display copies. It was not enough that the boy be bookish: he should be the right kind of bookish.
The boy wasn’t fooled: the crazy titles of the two books with ‘tasteful’ covers were enticing enough. Congress featured a drawing by Paul Klee. The other two dust jackets – for The Futurological Congress and The Cyberiad – were more restrained, looking like European art-house fiction. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s cup of tea. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Two – Invincible and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. At the booth of the Seabury Press (a publishing division of the Episcopalian Church) he spotted four anomalous hardcovers, all by an author with a peculiar name: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Futurological Congress, The Invincible and The Cyberiad.
That’s to say, a lot of reference books, a lot of speciality non-fiction, and a dearth of science fiction.
The gulf between tom godwin full#
The convention hall’s exhibition booths featured lots of plastic slipcovers and display racks, as well as tables full of books from publishers that relied on library sales. She was a trustee of the Queensboro Public Library, with comp tickets for a regional conference of the American Library Association he was a 15-year-old science fiction fan. A boy and his grandmother travelled on the A train to the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle.
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