Microworlds [Paperback]

Stanislaw Lem (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 24, 1986

In this bold and controversial examination of the past, present, and future of science fiction, Lem informs the raging debate over the literary merit of the genre with ten arch, incisive, provocative essays. Edited and with an Introduction by Franz Rottensteiner. Translated by Rottensteiner and others. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ten essays, 1971-83: ranging from autobiography through analyses of the underpinnings of sf to examinations of specific authors and works - delivered in thunderous yet calculated tones, and a welter of academic polysyllables. The autobiographical piece is most engaging and revealing - with Lem candidly discussing his upbringing, his Jewish heritage, the German and Russian occupations of Poland, his own sf. Elsewhere, he demonstrates his formidable intellect and his self-imposed conceptual limitations: he finds fiction without intellectual challenge boring (and has no patience with the notion of fiction as entertainment); in his view, sf works in which neither the objects nor the ideas have any basis in reality are merely "empty games." Later, however, Lem cogently discusses sf's various time-travel motifs - notwithstanding his previous denunciation of "empty games" where "impossible time-travel machines are used to point out impossible time-travel paradoxes." "The primary unsolved problem" of sf, he writes, is "the lack of a theoretical typology of its paradigmatic structures" - yet he fails to demonstrate why this lack is so damaging. On the incestuous nature of Western sf, he's devastating: "critiques are not produced independently, but are written by either the authors or the editors of anthologies, who evaluate each other's works." (He also blasts publishers and editors for camouflaging advertising as criticism.) For all these reasons, sf is trashy and apt to remain so. Moving on to specifics, Lem shows himself to be a penetrating but often arbitrary and petulant critic. Just about the only Western sf author he approves of (Ballard and Bradbury rate a maybe) is Philip K. Dick - who "tries to probe the neglected, latent, untouched, as-yet-unrealized potentialities of human existence." A. E. van Vogt's work is condemned as "stupid lies" without a shred of evidence or analysis; Borges, Lem determines, "has suffered from a lack of a free and rich imagination." He criticizes Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon for what Leto thinks Keyes' should have written; the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic - which Leto not only analyzes brilliantly, but finds enjoyable - comes in for similar treatment. Clearly, there's some ax-grinding going on. In sum: guaranteed to offend and provoke. (Kirkus Reviews )

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (November 24, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156594439
• ISBN-13: 978-0156594431
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,305,887 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

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For SF writers who want to be real writers, October 30, 2000

By 

Philip Challinor - See all my reviews

This review is from: Microworlds (Paperback)

One of the essays in this book got the author's honorary membership of the American SF Association revoked. Or rather, some of it did, in a way. "Science Fiction - A Hopeless Case with Exceptions" was published in the US in a mutilated "translation" under the tactful title "A Scientist's Choice of the World's Worst Writing", and Lem was unceremoniously booted out of the organisation. The essay in question is in fact a harsh, but in its essentials accurate, dissection of the deplorable state of science fiction and science fiction criticism as compared with the rest of literature, and deserves serious attention. (The exception discussed, by the way, is the work of Philip K Dick, and a detailed review of Dick's Ubik, justifying its claim to be taken as serious fiction, also appears in Microworlds.) There is also a fine review of the Strugatsky brothers' extraordinary novella Roadside Picnic, which was the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky's equally extraordinary though somewhat different film Stalker; an interesting essay on Jorge Luis Borges, noting the unique qualities and the limitations apparent in his stories; and, perhaps most valuably, a couple of long essays on what science fiction could be if it could only kick its maleficient Star Wars-style good-guy/bad-guy simplemindedness. Lem is precise, logical, detailed, cantankerous and fascinating. The world's greatest writer of grown-up science fiction and fantasy is once again pointing the way for the rest of us.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lem argues for intelligent sci-fi, February 10, 2002

By 

Neil Ford (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy (Hardcover)

I found this book totally by accident, while browsing the sf&f shelves of one of the big bookstores without much hope, and I'm glad I did, because Lem's essay, "Science-fiction : a hopeless case - with exceptions", really crystallised a lot of the things that concerned me about science fiction, and showed that at least one other person thought that sf should at least try to be literature. (Although written in 1970, and from the isolated position of Communist Poland, this essay is still depressingly accurate - although things have improved since his time.)

The guy is a heavy thinker, and come from a European tradition of taking science fiction seriously as a literature of ideas (Lem wrote the classic Solaris, which was made into a Russian movie). He is quite readable, however, and is obviously passionate about his subject. This book is essential for any academic study of science fiction, and for any reader who takes the genre's potential seriously.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Unitas Oppositorum of Stanislaw Lem, October 24, 2006

By 

Muhammad Pyran Hewitt "polymathic autodidact" (Athens, Georgia USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Microworlds (Paperback)

Although the book in its entirety is highly recommended for fans of Lem, I would like to present some comments extracted from the essay entitled Unitas Oppositorum: The Prose of Jorge Luis Borges.

Lem states: "In each story we can find the same kind of method: Borges transforms a firmly established part of some cultural system by means of the terms of the system itself. In the fields of religious belief, in ontology, in literary theory, the author "continues" what mankind has "only begun to make." Using this tour d'adresse Borges makes comical and absurd those things which we revere because of their current cultural value."

"However, each of these tales has in addition another - wholly serious - hidden meaning. At base, his curious fantasy is, I claim, quite realistic. The author therefore has the courage to deal with the most valuable goals of mankind just as mankind himself does. The only difference is that Borges continues these combinatory operations to their utmost logical conclusions."

"Considered from a formal point of view, the creative method of Borges is very simple. It might be called unitas oppositorum, the unity of mutually exclusive opposites. What allegedly must be kept separate for all time (that which is considered irreconcilable) is joined before our very eyes, and without distorting logic. The structural content of nearly all of Borges's stories is built up by this elegant and precise unity."

"In the beginning he was a librarian, and he has remained one, although the most brilliant manifestation of one. He had to search in libraries for sources of inspiration, and he restricted himself wholly to cultural-mythical sources. They were deep, multifarious, rich sources - for they contain the total reservoir of the mythical thought of mankind.

But in our age they are on the decline, dying off as far as their power to interpret and explain a world undergoing further changes is concerned. In his paradigmatic structures, and even in his greatest achievements, Borges is located near the end of a descending curve which had its culmination centuries ago. Therefore he is forced to play with the sacral, the awe-inspiring, the sublime, and the mysterious from our grandfathers. Only in rare cases does he succeed in continuing this game in a serious way. Only then does he break through the paradigmatically and culturally caused incarceration which is its limitations, and which is quite contrary to the freedom of artistic creation he strives for. He is one of the great men, but at the same time he is an epigone. Perhaps for the last time. He has lit up - given a paradoxical resurrection to - the treasures transmitted to us from the past. But he will not succeed in keeping them alive for any long period of time. Not because he has a second-rate mind, but because, I believe such a resurrection of transitory things is in our time quite impossible. His work, admirable though it may be, is located in its entirety at the opposite pole from the direction of our fate. Even this great master of the logically immaculate paradox cannot "alloy" our world's fate with his own work. He has explicated to us paradises and hells; but in his books Borges knows nothing about them."

"If Schopenhauer had never existed, and if Borges presented to us the ontological doctrine of "The World As Will," we would never accept it as a philosophical system that must be taken seriously; we would take it as an example of a "fantastic philosophy." As soon as nobody assents to it, a philosophy becomes automatically fantastic literature."