But I did admire his works. I remember being on a road trip when I was 18, and lolling around in the back of my friend’s VW microbus. With nothing else to do, I picked up a well-worn copy of “The Futurological Congress” and began reading it. I had never heard the name before, but I was blown away by it.
It’s a pity nobody’s ever been able to make a good version of “Solaris.”
Aw man, and I was hoping he’d win the Nobel. Truly among a small handful of great writers who were able to bridge the chasm between SF and great literature. And Tarkovsky’s original version of *Solyaris *has been one of my personal top three movies since I saw it for the first of at least a dozen times by now almost 20 years ago.
Lem was the man to broadly expand my horizons at the tender age of 14 or so. I checked out a book from some guy with a funny name in the Sci-Fi section. The content was astounding…then I found out he was Russian(* insert accurate origin group here) and it was translated to english.
For some strange reason, I’d never considered other languages could be as expressive, or that it could translate so well to English.
Heh. Same age, same book. Almost as much as the story itself, I was impressed by how well the translator was able to keep up the endless wordplay of the drug and technology names. He was the author that got me to make the transition from pulp sci-fi (my main read up to then had been Piers Anthony, for Og’s sake) to actual literature. Reading him, I got interested in Calvino, Borges and Eco, and from them the older classics. He was truly one of those writers that changed my life. And now he’s gone.
But as Walter Windchill said, it’s hard to feel too sad when so much of him is still here with us.
Anyway, yeah, in Microworlds, he goes into fairly extensive detail about his feelings for American SF. IIRC, he had read some early in his life and was deeply inspired by it, but then had little access to any contemporary western SF while he was writing in the 50’s and 60’s. When he started reading it again in the 70’s, was intensely disappointed by what he found, and said so quite plainly. Basically, he thought American SF had started out with enormous potential, but had largely failed to live up to it.
Man, that Wikipedia article is wrong – it’s the worst I’ve ever seen them.
According to Jerry Pournelle, who was president of SFWA the time:
Lem was incorrectly given an honorary membership. The rules only gave them to authors who were otherwise ineligible for membership. It was created for J.R.R. Tolkien (the only true honorary member in SFWA history), who had LOTR pirated; SFWA did not want to recognize a pirated edition, so made him an honorary member and fought to get him the royalties he deserved. Once the authorized edition of LOTR was published in the US, Tolkien joined as a regular member.
Lem, who really had no idea what SFWA was about, wrote an article attacking the organization. Several members (including Philip K. Dick) were angry that the guy had been given the free membership when they paid their dues even when they were trying to scrape together a living. The treasurer (in charge of membership) reread the rules and realized that Lem was ineligible for honorary membership (SFWA does tend to be a bit slipshod in occasionally letting people who are ineligible; we’ve tightened up the rules the past few years to make everything clear to everyone).
Lem was told that there had been a mistake and that he’d be welcome as a member if he paid his dues. Fred Polh offered to pay it for him. Lem never replied. (Note that this wasn’t a free membership – all SFWA members pay dues, though they can be waived or delayed if they ask for a hardship renewal.)
It is important to note that no one has ever actually been kicked out of SFWA, though a few have had memberships downgraded because they were errors when they applied.