The Invincible (Ace Science Fiction Special 4) [Paperback]

Stanislaw Lem (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Polish (translation)

Product Details

• Paperback: 223 pages
• Publisher: Sidgwick and Jackson (U.K.) (August 23, 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0283979623
• ISBN-13: 978-0283979620
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,093,156 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stanislaw Lem is the most widely translated and best known science fiction author writing outside of the English language. Winner of the Kafka Prize, he is a contributor to many magazines, including the New Yorker, and he is the author of numerous works, including Solaris.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Those Strange Planets Can Be Murder, August 11, 2002

By 

miles@riverside (Indio, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Invincible (Ace Science Fiction Special 4) (Paperback)

An impressive science fiction thriller, despite the fact that my Ace paperback edition is an English translation of a German translation of a Polish novel.

A military spacecraft lands on an unexplored planet to determine the whereabouts of a lost crew. The story resembles the film ALIENS in some ways, and also the Niven-Pournelle-Barnes novel LEGACY OF HEOROT; although this novel predates those other stories by a few decades. A better way to describe it is to call it a horror novel in a Perry Rhodan vein, for those of you who are old enough and pathetically geeky enough to benefit from that reference. It employs many elements of space opera: laser guns, antimatter cannon, force fields, atomic combat, and other such special effects commonly found in Perry Rhodan and Doc Smith's LENSMAN. But this one has a much creepier tone to it than what you'd expect from space opera.

The theme to the book is similar to that of other Lem novels, like SOLARIS and THE INVESTIGATION, where the heroes find themselves up against increasingly complex and frustrating phenomena. I liked this one better than those two, however. Recommended, but you'll have to look to find a copy.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good Lem, September 3, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Invincible (Ace Science Fiction Special 4) (Paperback)

A rather common theme in Lems writing (Solaris, Fiasco) is human encounter with an alien, fundamentally incomprehensible civilisation or "organism". In Lem's view such an encounter is likely to escalate to the level of destruction or surrender because human motives and interpretations are with necessity confined within human frames of reference, no form of closer understanding is possible. In "Invincible" an expedition shall find out the fait of a previous lost expedition. The aggressor (the result of a very particular form of evolution) this time is the alien being a deadly threat because of human presence (or rather, human technology) only. The plot unfolds with many twists and turns typical of Lem and is good entertainment for anyone liking Solaris or Fiasco.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great World, July 1, 2002

By 

[e-mail] (PARISFRANCE) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Invincible (Ace Science Fiction Special 4) (Paperback)

I read this after "Eden" and found it to be an interesting book, for it deals with an alien life form which is complex and strange. As in all his books, Lem explores human understanding of a foreign world.