Wow this reads like the plot of a bad romcom! I can totally imagine Dick sitting angry in his study getting all worked up over how badly Lem hated US SF and how mean that is, not realizing Lem actually loved his work. All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.
philistine 2 hours ago [-]
Philip K. Dick was vindictive, continually broke, terrible at titles, unlucky, and a wonderful writer. He never had a happy ending.
bookofjoe 1 hours ago [-]
>... 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 Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Radio Free Albemuth
cjbgkagh 57 minutes ago [-]
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - Shakespeare
It’s hard for me to dissociate my impression of the name from context of learning the name, but I do remember learning about ‘do androids dream of electric sheep’ at a very young age without knowing any context and I did think that was an interesting name.
yazantapuz 7 minutes ago [-]
That was similar to my experience too. I discovered "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" in a pop-science magazine article about science fiction novels in the nineties, along with Foundation. Both titles resonated with me and ignited my imagination. Years later, I was finally able to read both and was amazed.
0_____0 1 hours ago [-]
They do retain their power because of the notoriety of the stories they head. It's a matter of taste and thus hard to argue, but I do think his titles were kind of clunky. Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?
nottorp 57 minutes ago [-]
> Can you imagine if Blade Runner retained the title of the work it was derived from?
... or even some parts of the plot ...
It would have been more interesting than the shooting based thriller we got instead.
ndsipa_pomu 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
evbogue 9 minutes ago [-]
Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) might not be PKD's best title, but it's arguably his best book.
csours 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
jll29 1 hours ago [-]
That's why meeting in person is so important, whatever the area.
selimthegrim 34 minutes ago [-]
I suppose someone on the Internet had to ship these two for a first somewhere sometime.
munchler 3 hours ago [-]
> This plot [about an intelligent beam of light] wouldn’t be out of place in one of Dick’s mind-bending novels.
This experience was, in fact, the basis of a novel he wrote called _Valis_.
Trasmatta 3 hours ago [-]
One of my all time favorite books!
The Empire never ended.
ysofunny 33 minutes ago [-]
one mind there is.
within it, two principles contend...
Trasmatta 22 minutes ago [-]
I can feel the plasmate stirring within me. Time for my yearly reread.
grakasja 2 hours ago [-]
A grand chick saved me!
p0w3n3d 2 hours ago [-]
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"
trwired 48 minutes ago [-]
> 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 century, also felt a connection with the US. Poland took advantage of Stalin's death to wrangle itself somewhat free of Soviet hegemony and starting with Gomułka's Thaw [1], adopted a more liberal model. It was still a dictatorship, but in comparison with the Soviet Union itself and also a few of the more repressive regimes in other satellite states, it was significantly more open. Edward Gierek's [2] rule only reinforced that course.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all roses. The inflow of Western culture faced many obstacles still, but those were often more of economical nature — in general books were translated, movies were shown in cinemas, the TV was filled with (somewhat dated) American and Western European TV shows, and Polish artists followed world trends in music (although with significant delay). The „rotten west” mindset never took root in Polish society and the authorities didn't enforce it with much zeal once the most repressive era ended in the mid-50s.
Yes, and as far as I know Stanisław Lem was also genuinely contemptuous of the 1950s default style of US sci-fi: square-jawed heroes who triumph over every puzzle, right every wrong; Cowboys and Indians on a frontier planet, manifest destiny, etc.
A lot of his work emphasises how this tendency fails in the face of the sheer unknowable alienness of the outer universe. e.g. Solaris, The Invincible, Fiasco.
Lem liked Phil Dick though, because Dick's work was more sceptical and mind-bending: more like his own work than it was like the spaceship heroics.
stonogo 18 minutes ago [-]
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 the author switched the 'human' and 'alien' species because Campbell wouldn't print a story where humanity 'lost.'
Truly a fascinating character, and an author in his own right, responsible for the story that John Carpenter would adapt for his film The Thing. I don't share his taste in science fiction, but he had a massive impact on the genre.
KingOfCoders 3 hours ago [-]
Love Lem, especially The Futurological Congress
rdtsc 3 hours ago [-]
> Due to the economic restrictions of Poland under the communist regime, Lem was unable to give Dick his due royalties. Surely losing out on this potential source of income, regardless of reason, would incline Dick unfavourably towards Lem
If we pull aside the ideological grandstanding what we see is plain old jealousy, resentment and vindictiveness. That’s usually the case in any context. The ideological grandstanding is just a fig leaf.
kmeisthax 37 minutes ago [-]
The only thing stronger than society's ability to undercut authors is the author's ability to find any excuse to talk about it.
dgfitz 1 hours ago [-]
This should be the top comment. Turns out ideology can be trumped by emotion.
indigoabstract 3 hours ago [-]
Seems pretty silly in hindsight and probably was back then as well. If communist committees could write like Lem, the world would be a much richer place today.
What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible.
On a lighter note, his electronic bard from The Cyberiad is pretty spot on, quite similar to the LLMs we have now.
kranke155 1 hours ago [-]
What blew me away from the Cyberiad was how funny it was.
troupo 3 minutes ago [-]
I used to know the Russian translation by heart (and all of Ijon Tichy)
2 hours ago [-]
throw8494949 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sfjailbird 5 hours ago [-]
Funny how closely his own machinations resemble the (obviously comically deranged) delusions of some of his characters. He was clearly quite self-aware, as another comment noted, or could it be that the whole FBI report was a jest? It really reads exactly like a passage from his novels.
The subtext of the report to the FBI, that we must suppress artistic expression in order to protect the innocent minds from dangerous ideas, remains as relevant and intriguing today as then.
sambull 1 hours ago [-]
It does appear we are in the banning thought crime phase in the US.
Trasmatta 3 hours ago [-]
As seen in VALIS and the Exegesis, PKD was almost literally living in one of his own stories later in life.
cubefox 3 hours ago [-]
Bruce Sterling's take on this story is still a classic:
It’s a lovely piece, but maybe goes a bit too far in trying to paint Lem as some kind of human-form planet Solaris himself, failing to communicate with ordinary people. For example:
“These essays are the work of a lonely man. We can judge the fervor of Lem's attempt to reach out by a piece like ‘On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction:’ a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian, about French semantic theory. The mind reels.”
That just sounds like an ordinary letter for a 20th century European intellectual. Reading and writing in French and German was table stakes.
thrance 5 hours ago [-]
2 years prior, in 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Stanisław Lem's Solaris to the big screen in the Soviet Union, which may have contributed to Dick's paranoia. Anyway, the film's a masterpiece that I highly recommend, and since it was published before 1975 it is not subject to copyright. You can find it on YouTube [1].
Lem himself talks about the movie a bit there too, around the 24th minute. He didn't seem fond of Tarkowsky's religiousness and the impact it had on the movie.
My impression was similar — the movie seems to be a free retelling and doesn't reflect the book well.
tialaramex 4 hours ago [-]
I really like Lem, but Solaris is probably my least favourite of his stories. It does have the thing I most admire in Lem's work of being about true aliens - that is, not just us again but in a Halloween costume like a Star Trek alien - but somehow Solaris doesn't "work" for me even though say, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub or Futurological Congress do.
johngossman 3 hours ago [-]
Are you a PKD fan too? The two you mentioned are amongst Lem's most Dick-ian stories. Also note, there is a newer English language translation of Solaris. I liked it better than the one I read years ago.
Xelbair 3 hours ago [-]
I find it funny that i hated Lem for most of my life... because i was forced to read only his Robot stories in school.
I still despise those moralist fables.
But his other works? i love them! My favorite is The Star Diaries, despite having some robot stories in them.
johngossman 3 hours ago [-]
I am fascinated by the fact those stories were assigned in school. I happen to love them. I wonder if you would have disliked them as much if they were not school assignments. Many kids grow up up hating Shakespeare and Moby Dick because they were forced to read them.
npodbielski 1 hours ago [-]
I had it as optional and I read it out of my own volition and some of them still stays with me after almost thirty years.
The one about writer wanted his robot to write stories, but in the end realizes that actually stories written by his robot are much better than his, want to turn the robot off but instead robot kills the writer... Makes you think about humanity, robotics, technology and what it is to be human or what is self-aware machine.
These were really light, nicely done stories but when you think about them, they introduce you to actual.problems that come with robotics and AI.
I am glad that I read those and kind of sad that I did not read more of Lem's books early in my life.
thrance 3 hours ago [-]
I haven't read the book (yet), but Tarkovsky's movie is only a loose adaptation of the source material, which you might still enjoy.
selivanovp 3 hours ago [-]
The funny story is that Lem despised this adaptation and for a good reason if you manage to read his book. He called Tarkovsky an idiot and refused to cooperate with him on the script as Tarkovsky threw pretty much all of Lem ideas from the book to shoot Crime and Punishment in space.
ggm 2 days ago [-]
I enjoy both of their writing. I'm not surprised PKD went to paranoid delusions, but I wonder if he also wrote to the Vatican about John Boyd and James Blish? Because on the same grounds their writings were anti-papacy.
I'm guessing Drugs, Valis or the green laser told Dick to do it.
defrost 2 days ago [-]
Dick was self aware to a degree, he lightly mocked his own conspiracy theories in characters that questioned why ten speed bikes only had seven gear wheels, two at the front and five at the back.
He lived in that void along with the three missing gears.
emtel 2 hours ago [-]
Stanislaw Lem was far too much of a genius to believe his works were directed by any sort of committee, communist or otherwise.
He is still overlooked far too much - people seem to regard Solaris as his only work of note. But he has so works, all bizarre, imaginative, and insightful. Fiasco and His Master’s Voice are two of my lesser known favorites.
Too bad Dick reported to the FBI that Lem was a faceless composite communist committee out to get him and brainwash the youth of America and undermine American SF with "crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks", while Lem asymmetrically thought all science fiction writers were charlatans except for Philip K Dick.
>In 1973, Lem became an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a gesture of ‘international goodwill’ on the association’s part. However, in 1976, 70 percent of the SFWA’s voted in favour of a resolution to revoke Lem’s membership. A very quick dismissal for such a prestigious author, but the reasons for his quick ejection from the organisation are clear – he didn’t seem to regard his honorary membership as any sort of honour. He considered American science fiction ‘ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or new literary forms’ and ‘bad writing tacked together with wooden dialogue’, and these are just a few examples of Lem’s deprecatory attitude towards the US branch of his genre.
>Lem, however, considered one science fiction author as exempt from his scathing criticisms – his denouncer, Philip K. Dick. The title of an essay Lem published about Dick is evidence enough of this high regard: A Visionary Among the Charlatans. The essay itself waxes lyrical on Dick’s many excellent qualities as a writer, and expounds upon the dire state of US sci-fi. Lem considered Dick to be the only writer exempt from his cynical view of American SF. It seems likely that Dick was unaware of Lem’s high opinion of him and that he took Lem’s disparaging comments personally, stating in his letter to the FBI:
>"Lem’s creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem’s crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated)."
wtcactus 1 hours ago [-]
Philip K. Dick should have been one of the 1st ones realizing that such a brilliant and creative work as that coming from Lem, could never have been created by a committee, much less by a communist one.
>According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.
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 Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Radio Free Albemuth
It’s hard for me to dissociate my impression of the name from context of learning the name, but I do remember learning about ‘do androids dream of electric sheep’ at a very young age without knowing any context and I did think that was an interesting name.
... or even some parts of the plot ...
It would have been more interesting than the shooting based thriller we got instead.
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.
This experience was, in fact, the basis of a novel he wrote called _Valis_.
The Empire never ended.
within it, two principles contend...
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 century, also felt a connection with the US. Poland took advantage of Stalin's death to wrangle itself somewhat free of Soviet hegemony and starting with Gomułka's Thaw [1], adopted a more liberal model. It was still a dictatorship, but in comparison with the Soviet Union itself and also a few of the more repressive regimes in other satellite states, it was significantly more open. Edward Gierek's [2] rule only reinforced that course.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all roses. The inflow of Western culture faced many obstacles still, but those were often more of economical nature — in general books were translated, movies were shown in cinemas, the TV was filled with (somewhat dated) American and Western European TV shows, and Polish artists followed world trends in music (although with significant delay). The „rotten west” mindset never took root in Polish society and the authorities didn't enforce it with much zeal once the most repressive era ended in the mid-50s.
[1] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_October
[2] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gierek
A lot of his work emphasises how this tendency fails in the face of the sheer unknowable alienness of the outer universe. e.g. Solaris, The Invincible, Fiasco.
Lem liked Phil Dick though, because Dick's work was more sceptical and mind-bending: more like his own work than it was like the spaceship heroics.
Truly a fascinating character, and an author in his own right, responsible for the story that John Carpenter would adapt for his film The Thing. I don't share his taste in science fiction, but he had a massive impact on the genre.
If we pull aside the ideological grandstanding what we see is plain old jealousy, resentment and vindictiveness. That’s usually the case in any context. The ideological grandstanding is just a fig leaf.
What stuck with me after reading many of his works was this underlying theme in several of his novels, of the futility of trying to make contact or reason with alien entities which are so vastly different from us, no bridge of understanding is possible.
On a lighter note, his electronic bard from The Cyberiad is pretty spot on, quite similar to the LLMs we have now.
The subtext of the report to the FBI, that we must suppress artistic expression in order to protect the innocent minds from dangerous ideas, remains as relevant and intriguing today as then.
"The Spearhead of Cognition", 1987, https://germanponte.com/txt/catscan/sterling.html#ym2
“These essays are the work of a lonely man. We can judge the fervor of Lem's attempt to reach out by a piece like ‘On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction:’ a Pole, writing in German, to an Austrian, about French semantic theory. The mind reels.”
That just sounds like an ordinary letter for a 20th century European intellectual. Reading and writing in French and German was table stakes.
[1] https://youtu.be/Z8ZhQPaw4rE
Lem himself talks about the movie a bit there too, around the 24th minute. He didn't seem fond of Tarkowsky's religiousness and the impact it had on the movie.
Timestamped link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQq4aKldaw&t=1434
My impression was similar — the movie seems to be a free retelling and doesn't reflect the book well.
I still despise those moralist fables.
But his other works? i love them! My favorite is The Star Diaries, despite having some robot stories in them.
These were really light, nicely done stories but when you think about them, they introduce you to actual.problems that come with robotics and AI.
I am glad that I read those and kind of sad that I did not read more of Lem's books early in my life.
I'm guessing Drugs, Valis or the green laser told Dick to do it.
He lived in that void along with the three missing gears.
He is still overlooked far too much - people seem to regard Solaris as his only work of note. But he has so works, all bizarre, imaginative, and insightful. Fiasco and His Master’s Voice are two of my lesser known favorites.
Lem and Dick are such precious peas in a pod!
Too bad Dick reported to the FBI that Lem was a faceless composite communist committee out to get him and brainwash the youth of America and undermine American SF with "crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks", while Lem asymmetrically thought all science fiction writers were charlatans except for Philip K Dick.
https://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick
https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) (depauw.edu) 140 points by pmoriarty on June 19, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 51 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
>In 1973, Lem became an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, a gesture of ‘international goodwill’ on the association’s part. However, in 1976, 70 percent of the SFWA’s voted in favour of a resolution to revoke Lem’s membership. A very quick dismissal for such a prestigious author, but the reasons for his quick ejection from the organisation are clear – he didn’t seem to regard his honorary membership as any sort of honour. He considered American science fiction ‘ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or new literary forms’ and ‘bad writing tacked together with wooden dialogue’, and these are just a few examples of Lem’s deprecatory attitude towards the US branch of his genre.
>Lem, however, considered one science fiction author as exempt from his scathing criticisms – his denouncer, Philip K. Dick. The title of an essay Lem published about Dick is evidence enough of this high regard: A Visionary Among the Charlatans. The essay itself waxes lyrical on Dick’s many excellent qualities as a writer, and expounds upon the dire state of US sci-fi. Lem considered Dick to be the only writer exempt from his cynical view of American SF. It seems likely that Dick was unaware of Lem’s high opinion of him and that he took Lem’s disparaging comments personally, stating in his letter to the FBI:
>"Lem’s creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem’s crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated)."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMI8HWhqEc
The Congress (2013) Scan Scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8
HN thread about "Bruce Willis Sells Deepfake Likeness Rights So His 'Twin' Can Star in Movies" and The Congress discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33044479
>According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36209861
>People who haven't used psychedelics don't tend to get or appreciate The Congress as much as those who have.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34953477
>I just watched The Congress -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) -- and WOW, it was excellent.