He was one of the most prominent Polish writers of the 20th century, and arguably the most brilliant science fiction writer. His literary talent and wisdom, as well as his dramatic life, together made this wizard. Anthony Burgess praised him as "one of the wisest, most erudite and most humorous of today's active writers", and Kurt Vonnegut praised him for his "excellent use of language, imagination and the way he portrays tragic characters", and his works have been translated into 52 languages and more than 40 million copies worldwide. More legendary, as early as 70 years ago, he predicted the emergence of the Internet, search engines, virtual reality and 3D printing, bluntly saying that human beings will encounter the challenges of artificial intelligence and information explosion.
September 12, 2021, the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famous Polish writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem, has been commemorated around the world, and Poland has directly named 2021 the "Year of Lem". Yilin Publishing House recently launched the world's first set of "Lyme Anthology" in Chinese Simplified Chinese, which fully demonstrated the charm of this top science fiction writer to Chinese readers for the first time. The anthology contains six of his masterpieces: "Solaris Star", "Futurological Congress", "Voice of its Lord", "Invincible", "Fiasco", and "Eden". Among them, the Star of Solaris is a new translation, and the other five are the first translations. The birth of this set of "Lyme Anthology" showed the charm of this top science fiction writer to Chinese readers for the first time.
Many people know Lem and it begins with Solaris Star. As a well-deserved masterpiece of Lemme, this book is also "a modern philosophical reader" (Dai Jinhua), and it is indeed the iris key to enter the door of the "Lyme universe".
The star solaris is covered by a mysterious blue ocean, which is like a mirror, reflecting the deepest obsessions and longings, confusion and fear of the human heart. In 1972 and 2002, the novel was adapted to the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh, respectively. In particular, Tarkovsky's adaptation, which was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in the same year and the International Film Critics Association Award, created a classic in the history of cinema, and became a science fiction film masterpiece that could not be shaken in the hearts of fans.
Lem was born in 1921 in Lviv, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) to a wealthy family of doctors. In 1939, the outbreak of World War II brutally shattered his youth. With a Jewish family background, he was forced to hide his name, change his identity, and work as a welder. After 1945, when he found that his family was no longer sustainable, he officially embarked on the path of writing. Between 1946 and 1949 after the war, Lem published the first work of his life. Lem studied medicine at the Jagiellonian University. Although he didn't finish his studies, in conversations with professors and classmates, Lem asked the most important questions that would permeate his future work: Where is the boundary between man and machine? Can man build "from atoms"? Where are the ethical standards in the era of artificial intelligence?
In fact, Lem wrote more than 30 novels and many short stories in his lifetime, such as "Solaris Star", "Futurology Conference", "Fiasco" and so on. He single-handedly elevated Polish science fiction to the world level, and in 1996 was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the Polish National Medal, after which Poland's first artificial satellite was named.
Liu Cixin said: "Lyme has a very great imagination and is truly unique. His works have a deeper description of the relationship between man and the universe, and compared with American science fiction novels, they are more refined in literature, have a more far-reaching artistic conception, and also bring more memories and reflections. ”
Wu Yan commented on him: "Lem can always mock our lives from the core, he can cook together scientific and technological papers, folk tales, fables, myths and legends, etc., and use humor and power to penetrate the absurd language and absurd plot on the back of the paper, returning to our world." ”
Indeed, Lem was skeptical of the possibility of human interaction with other civilizations. His novels depict extraterrestrial life extensively, such as Solaris: "Solaris was discovered by humans nearly a hundred years before I was born. The planet orbits two stars, one red and the other blue. In the first forty years after its discovery, not a single ship approached it. At the time, the Gamov-Shapley hypothesis was considered indisputable, asserting that it was impossible to produce life on planets orbiting binary stars. Due to the interaction between the gravitational fields of the two stars orbiting each other, the orbits of these planets are constantly changing. The resulting perturbations will cause the planets' orbits to contract and expand alternately, and if initial life does emerge, they will be ruthlessly destroyed by the heat of radiation or the freezing cold. In Solaris, the cycle of these changes is millions of years, a short period of time on an astronomical or biological scale (because evolution takes hundreds of millions, if not billions of years). According to initial calculations, in half a million years, Solaris would gradually move less than half an astronomical unit from its red sun, and then another million years later it would fall into that hot bottomless abyss. But just over a decade later, it was discovered that Solaris' orbit did not show the expected change, but seemed to be constant, as stable as the orbits of the planets in our solar system. So people re-observed and calculated, this time with great precision, and the results confirmed only what was known: Solaris' orbit should indeed be unstable. ”
In addition to the blue ocean of Solaris Star, the unique mechanical insects in Invincible, and the aliens in Eden who live in despair and fear, etc., but these alien beings are completely different from humans, and we cannot expect any benefit from such exchanges, as well as for foreign beings.
Lem's novels, whether long or short, always have an appealing plot. Lem likes to place the protagonists of his novels in a novel environment, or travel back and forth in a different time and space, or a world of machine rebellion, or a planet crowded with strange creatures. But he was fond of these programs not because he believed in the scenes depicted in such narratives, but because he wanted to use them to construct and test his own "literary model"; he had no intention of depicting a "real future", but only of outlining its model, which he could use to express his view of the whole world and of mankind.
Due to the limited cognitive experience, in the face of other civilizations, human beings have nothing to gain except to recognize their limitations and have to rely on themselves again. Lem describes human contact with foreign life, mainly to explore human nature, and he concludes that human beings have many weaknesses and limitations, but only when we encounter an identity crisis can we clearly recognize these weaknesses and limitations.
In order to further introduce this science fiction master who "touched the boundaries of human cognition with poetic brushstrokes and profound philosophical thoughts" to Chinese readers as a whole, Yilin Publishing House published this set of "Lyme Collections". The translated version of the "Lyme Collection" is recommended by the current Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to China, and the outline shows Lem's charm and foresight, pointing out that the most thought-provoking aspects of his works are not only the imagination of the material and technical aspects, but also the profound thinking on the moral level. "The various predictions and intuitive judgments that Lyme made in the 1960s and 1970s have become part of contemporary real life," he said. However, the most thought-provoking aspect of his work is not the material and technical imagination, but the profound thinking on the moral level: How far can human creativity reach? Where are the boundaries of machine permissions? What will be the moral benchmark in a world where machines and humans coexist? These are the answers we are looking for as the technology of today's civilization evolves. Lem looks to the future with curiosity and calmness. As a brilliant futurist, he was able to guess what awaited humanity in the near future. This is why his work is worth revisiting again and again. Many works, though written decades ago, still highlight their foresight today. ”
The Futurology Congress in this "Lyme Collection" tells the story of Ijan Tich who went to the Eighth Futurology Congress to discuss how to solve the problems facing human beings, but unexpectedly took hallucinogenic drugs by mistake and crossed into a vision of the future. The people there have eradicated poverty and disease and lived in peace and joy, but Tich always felt that something was wrong...
And "The Voice of its Lord", a story that revolves around mysteries, is more gripping than many adventure novels, especially the battle with the unknown, which stimulates thinking about the nature of the world, human nature and why life is flawed: by chance, scientists have discovered a neutrino letter from outer space, perhaps this is the symbol of intelligent life. We don't know who the sender is, so how do we interpret the contents of the letter? What if we can't even be sure if there is a sender?
In addition, "Eden" can be said to be one of Lem's masterpieces, describing a creepy but familiar alien civilization: because of a flight accident, six astronauts forced to land on Eden, a beautiful but strange planet. In the confusing labyrinth of architecture, there are pictures of death everywhere: mass graves, corpses in ditches and wells, clusters of ovate structures filled with bones... "Fiasco" tells the story of Quinta's surface covered with strange mounds and spider web-like objects, but human scientists detected that the Quinta civilization may have advanced technology, so they sent the Eurydice spacecraft through the long universe to make contact with it. Faced with an alien civilization, the human expedition gradually forced it into a desperate situation, out of fearlessness or ignorance. In addition, "Invincible" depicts an alien world outside the realm of human cognition: the space cruiser "Invincible" is sent to the planet Regis 3 to find out why the sister spaceship "Vulture" suddenly disappeared...
It is worth mentioning that the overall binding design of the "Lyme Collection" is led by the famous designer Fu Yulin, and the cover elements of each book are carefully taken from the main plot or core imagery of the book, and abstracted to highlight the modern sense. For example, the cover of "Solaris Star", with the blue ocean as the background color, presents the alternating picture of the red sun and the blue sun, and uses the hot silver polyline to show the brain waves sent into the ocean. (Readers' Daily All-Media Reporter He Jian)
Editor: Wang Xin Responsible Editor: Dong Xiaoyue Review: Zhou Hua