An animation of a robot, leading to several mini games. Is this the most complex Google logo ever?
I’ve not read much of his work, can someone explain the references? I presume there’s more to it than the assumption that science fiction = robots.
The Cyberiad, which deals primarily with robots is one of his more notable works.
Great heavens, that is just extraordinarily cool. I love how Google plays with its usual minimalist interface. I wonder how long it takes them to work on something like this.
I’m just getting a turkey thing with color-changing feathers. No robots or games.
google.co.uk and list of all google doodles.
Weird guy, Lem. He deplored the American way of science fiction, which lead to a much-celebrated row with the SFWA. I’m not a big fan of his books, yet he was an early influence on me because two of his stories were made into movies that I saw as a kid (First Spaceship on Venus and Voyage to the End of the Universe. They were European productions, which I saw undoubtedly because our local theatere could rent them cheap). He’s most famous for the films based on his novel Solaris, but the first film isn’t completelt faithful to it, and the second (produced by James Cameron and starring George Clooney) is really based on the first film, and has even less of Lem’s book in it. The book, for what it’s worth, only exists in English in an incomplete translation of Lem’s book into French.
I thus always feel as if Lem’s mostly been kept at a distance from me – my experience with his stuff has mainly been at second or third hand. When I get really close – a direct English translation from the Polish – I haven’t found it compelling, I’m afraid.
I ran a panel on him the year after his death at a science fiction convention. I think that he would have condemned the undertaking (not only the panel, but the convention as well), which I thought was amusing.
Doesn’t the word “robot” come from his play “R.U.R.”?
Huh. I got a turkey Doodle. The link sends me to a search on Thanksgiving.
That’s Carl Kapec. He was Czech and much earlier.
Go to the Google UK link.
nm
Pretty darn cool.
:smack: I knew that.
R.U.R. was written by Karel Capek, but the word is attributed to that play, and springs from the slavic root word “rabot” = “to work.” Capek was Czech. Lem was Polish.
Elipse of Bliss, converge, O lips divine
the product of our scalars is defined!
-Stanislaw Lem, “Love & Tensor Algebra”
Karel Capek. R.U.R. isn’t too good, but his War with the Newts is a classic.
I could never warm to Lem, but I think that’s because he had shitty translaters. The prose is very clunky, and I doubt it’s that bad in the original Polish.
I am not quite sure what you are saying here. I read Solaris in English translation years ago. (I loved it, it was much better than the film - the original, critically lauded Russian film, that is, I haven’t seen the George Clooney version - which, as you say was considerably different from the book both in plot details and, I thought, in overall feel.) Are you saying that the version I read was a translation from an earlier French translation? It did not seem to be “incomplete” in any obvious way.
I read quite a bit of Lem’s other stuff too, back in the day, including The Cyberiad. I thought it was terrific, though Solaris was the best of it.
My favorite Lem is The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress, both of which are brilliant. I like Solaris but not as much.
The version of The Cyberiad I thought was very well-served by translators - considering one of the stories involved a poetry-writing computer (complete with poems), I really wondered how they did it!
Damn that was some piece of work!
Right. It’s various vignettes from the Cyberiad or based thereon.
[quote]
I am not quite sure what you are saying here. I read Solaris in English translation years ago. (I loved it, it was much better than the film - the original, critically lauded Russian film, that is, I haven’t seen the George Clooney version - which, as you say was considerably different from the book both in plot details and, I thought, in overall feel.) Are you saying that the version I read was a translation from an earlier French translation? It did not seem to be “incomplete” in any obvious way.
[\quote]
Yup. An abridged novel often doesn’t seem abridged if you don’t know what the original had. My understanding is that the incomplete translation into english via the French is the only one we have for Solaris. Other Lem novels have been translsated direct from Polish. Some more than once.
And if you compare the novel Solaris to both film versions it’s clear that they are very different things.
This is, sadly, the state of affairs for a lot of foreign SF. The only work of any length translated into English from Kurd Lasswitz is an incomplete translation of Zwei Planete. Willy Ley, who was inspireed by them (as were a lot of those at Peenemunde) translsated two short stories into English in the 1950s. I saw a third translation of a short story a couple of years ago in an anthology of German SF. But that’s all there is for an influential German pioneer of SF who was a contemporary of Jules Verne, and as important in his native Germany.
Thanks so much for posting this! We’ve got a Thanksgiving turkey one, which is cute, but nothing like the epic Lem doodle. That thing is awesome, and the ending is hilarious.