"Who was Stanislaw Lem? The Polish science fiction writer, novelist, essayist, and polymath may best be known for his 1961 novel Solaris (adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkosvky in 1972 and again by Steven Soderbergh in 2014). Lem's science fiction appealed broadly outside of SF fandom, attracting the likes of John Updike, who called his stories 'marvelous' and Lem a poet of 'scientific terminology' for readers 'whose hearts beat faster when the Scientific American arrives each month.' Updike's characterization is but one version of Lem. There are several more, writes Jonathan Lethem in an essay for the London Review of Books, penned for Lem's 100th anniversary – at least five different Lems with five different literary personalities. Only the first is a 'hard science fiction writer,' the genre originating not with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but 'in H.G. Wells' technological prognostications.' Represented best in the pages of Astounding Stories and other sci-fi pulps, hard sci-fi 'advertises consumer goods like personal robots and flying cars. It valorizes space travel that culminates in successful, if difficult, contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies.' The genre also became tied to 'American exceptionalist ideology, technocratic triumphalism, manifest destiny' and 'libertarian survivalist bullshit,' says Lethem. Lem had no use for these attitudes. ... Much of Lem's work was of another kind, as Lethem explains in the short film above, a condensed version of his essay. The second Lem 'wrote fairy tales and folk tales of the future.' The third, 'wrote just two novels, yet he could easily be, on the right day, one's favorite.' Lem number four 'is the pure post-modernist, who unified his essayistic and fictional selves with a Borgesian or Nabokovian gesture.' This Lem, for example, wrote the very Borgesian A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books. Lem number five, says Lethem, is 'another major figure,' this one a prolific literary essayist, critic, reviewer, and non-fiction writer whose breadth is staggering. ..."
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