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Some books get better as they go because slow worldbuilding in the first half pays off with Chekhov's guns firing in the second half. This book got a lot better as it went, but it's not a novel, it's a collection of short stories in the order they they were originally written, from 1956 or thereabouts to 1993. How much of this is due to Lem's style changing or my tastes is subjective.
Although Lem is a big name in mid-century SF, I'd never actually read him. The book starts with a foreword from Kim Stanley Robinson, who has a lot of praise for Lem's novel "...masterpiece Solaris, which tells the alien story so definitively that it renders unnecessary any more alien stories. Nothing further can be said on this topic, and saying the same thing again in a different way is not very satisfying; possibly it can be said that there should be no more alien stories, that when one feels the urge for such a thing one should simply reread Solaris and learn its lessons again." I understand this is supposed to be a badge of honor, but to me it makes me more likely to disengage (with Robinson at least)--if I happen to like alien stories that have been written in the last six decades, does this just make me a poser?
The first few stories, to me, felt very dry. Lem does a lot of descriptions of "realistic" settings, and to me the prose-to-action or dialogue ratio dragged. In discussion with one of my work buddies, it came up that 1. stories in translation may be more challenging, and 2. stories, especially in older subgenres, that do a lot of idea exploring but not much plot or characterization can be off-putting. But it occurred to me that Cixin Liu matches both of these criteria as well, and I adore his novels (some of his short stories can be flat, though).
But as the anthology continued, Lem's styles branch out to more fantastical settings and story formats; in fact, large portions of "The Hammer" are dialogue-only, between a human and a robot, without even speaker tags.
Credit to Antonia Lloyd-Jones for a sometimes-imposing translation task; this paragraph is typical of "The Journal."
"The Truth" is even more reminiscent of Cixin Liu, both in the matter-of-fact descriptions of weird experimentation, and then a tangent about ball lightning, which was itself the topic of one of Liu's novels! And then "One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Seconds" was an amazing depiction of news and computers in the age of Twitter...that happened to be written in 1976. Robinson had hyped it up in the intro, but given the intro and the first few stories my expectations had fallen off by the time I got to that point, and they were indeed surpassed!
Overall: my silly recommendation would be to read the stories in reverse order, and if you get bored, feel free to stop. ;)
Bingo: it's a gimme for "five or more short stories," but I was kind of hoping to use my Escape Pod flash fiction for that square. We're allowed one mulligan, so maybe I'll look for "works in translation" or something on a previous year's card and swap that out. Or, gasp, I could just read the flash fiction without counting it towards bingo, what a shock ;)
Although Lem is a big name in mid-century SF, I'd never actually read him. The book starts with a foreword from Kim Stanley Robinson, who has a lot of praise for Lem's novel "...masterpiece Solaris, which tells the alien story so definitively that it renders unnecessary any more alien stories. Nothing further can be said on this topic, and saying the same thing again in a different way is not very satisfying; possibly it can be said that there should be no more alien stories, that when one feels the urge for such a thing one should simply reread Solaris and learn its lessons again." I understand this is supposed to be a badge of honor, but to me it makes me more likely to disengage (with Robinson at least)--if I happen to like alien stories that have been written in the last six decades, does this just make me a poser?
The first few stories, to me, felt very dry. Lem does a lot of descriptions of "realistic" settings, and to me the prose-to-action or dialogue ratio dragged. In discussion with one of my work buddies, it came up that 1. stories in translation may be more challenging, and 2. stories, especially in older subgenres, that do a lot of idea exploring but not much plot or characterization can be off-putting. But it occurred to me that Cixin Liu matches both of these criteria as well, and I adore his novels (some of his short stories can be flat, though).
But as the anthology continued, Lem's styles branch out to more fantastical settings and story formats; in fact, large portions of "The Hammer" are dialogue-only, between a human and a robot, without even speaker tags.
"Why do you talk like a man?"
"I don't understand."
"Your pronouns are masculine. You don't have a sense of gender, do you?"
"Would you like me to talk like a woman?"
"No. I'm just asking."
"It's more convenient for me like this."
"What do you mean, more convenient?"
"It's to do with an established convention. Certain--preliminary assumptions. I am--psychologically, right now--a man. The abstraction of a man, if you prefer. Certain differences do appear in the network systems--relating to gender."
Some of today's culture-war stuff is too didactic for me, but this was from 1959!!"I don't understand."
"Your pronouns are masculine. You don't have a sense of gender, do you?"
"Would you like me to talk like a woman?"
"No. I'm just asking."
"It's more convenient for me like this."
"What do you mean, more convenient?"
"It's to do with an established convention. Certain--preliminary assumptions. I am--psychologically, right now--a man. The abstraction of a man, if you prefer. Certain differences do appear in the network systems--relating to gender."
Credit to Antonia Lloyd-Jones for a sometimes-imposing translation task; this paragraph is typical of "The Journal."
How they imagine this originator, we cannot know, but here too we are free to form various conjectures. If they were modest in their demands and circumspect in their hypostasizing, they would probably recognize that the Being that originated their Totality is imperfect, though not devoid of a sense of humor, a singular one, in that it metamorphoses into mathematical forms, and, by delighting in complex ambiguities, it betrays certain weaknesses: vanity, for example. Because it was partly out of vanity that we conceived all the Cosmoses, dark with chlana, bright with ylem, or others that revolve within our boundlessness, loaded with the persistence of activated alterations, separated by the abysses of our thinking: the fact that this readiness for creation was at least partly assisted by conceit is not one we could deny. We do not know if they are capable of understanding the split between omnipotence and logic that has often troubled us, because we refused to sacrifice one to the other, and endeavored, as much as we could, to preserve moderation, which was not always fully possible.
("Ylem" is actually a thing rather than the author being cheeky and naming something after himself. "Chlana" is a neologism, I think.)"The Truth" is even more reminiscent of Cixin Liu, both in the matter-of-fact descriptions of weird experimentation, and then a tangent about ball lightning, which was itself the topic of one of Liu's novels! And then "One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Seconds" was an amazing depiction of news and computers in the age of Twitter...that happened to be written in 1976. Robinson had hyped it up in the intro, but given the intro and the first few stories my expectations had fallen off by the time I got to that point, and they were indeed surpassed!
Overall: my silly recommendation would be to read the stories in reverse order, and if you get bored, feel free to stop. ;)
Bingo: it's a gimme for "five or more short stories," but I was kind of hoping to use my Escape Pod flash fiction for that square. We're allowed one mulligan, so maybe I'll look for "works in translation" or something on a previous year's card and swap that out. Or, gasp, I could just read the flash fiction without counting it towards bingo, what a shock ;)
