This book is very different from any I have read. The plot is extremely imaginative, with lots of strange twists. It is also rather dark (believe me, no one wants a mother like the one in this story!!). Imagine an alien family here on earth, having very alien values, with all that implies. Imagine a race and chase through space and time and alternate realities, all written in a sort of dry, "postmodern" sort of way, as the protagonist tries to get away from a very strict mom, who has a unique way of punishing her chidren. This book is wonderful science fiction/literary candy. Having said all that, any one that really loves science fiction or fantasy should read this.

This is perhaps one of the most brutal and amazing children's books I have ever read. it starts as a simple fable about a little boy with strange powers and quickly becomes a frightening indictment of man's inhumanity to man.

Kandel's writing style is remeniscent of Hawthorne's deconstructionist narrator in "The House of the Seven Gables" - omniscient and chatty, with just the right tone of menace. In addition, Kandel makes poetry and beauty of the mathematical aspects of the story. At one point, he describes the angles of a triangle in such luscious language you want to curl up with one, just to see what it would be like.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I know it will haunt me for months..

This is perhaps one of the most brutal and amazing children's books I have ever read. it starts as a simple fable about a little boy with strange powers and quickly becomes a frightening indictment of man's inhumanity to man.

Kandel's writing style is remeniscent of Hawthorne's deconstructionist narrator in "The House of the Seven Gables" - omniscient and chatty, with just the right tone of menace.

In addition, Kandel makes poetry and beauty of the mathematical aspects of the story. At one point, he describes the angles of a triangle in such luscious language you want to curl up with one, just to see what it would be like.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I know it will haunt me for months....

On one level, this book chronicles the boyhood of famed Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. But on another level it is also a profound "Coming of Age" tale of not just one man, but of a Civilization. Lem's boyhood takes place just prior to World War II, and as he spins his tales of schoolyard politics, loss of faith in adults and the petty cruelties that young boys sometimes indulge in, it's hard not to see the connection with events unfolding in pre-war Europe; politics just as juvenile, the passing of Faith, the horrible cruelties soon to follow...Haunting and elegant book.

Stanislaw Lem's writing is beautiful in this brief work. Fans of his science fiction will surely want to read this to get behind the artifice and learn about the writer. But those who are not familiar with his work will also enjoy this as a meditation on memory, growing up in Poland, and this writer's power to evoke meaning. I read it mostly before falling asleep and it gave me wonderful dreams.

In Pawel Huelle's book of short stories, Moving House, the reader finds the Polish characters experiencing odd and often fantastic happenings in their lives in an often playful manner. However, when one examines Polish history in the 20th century, these strange incidents take on a new, often tragic, meaning.

Huelle comes from a country where borders have shifted, and the land and people have been occupied by both their 'aggressor' (Germany) and their 'saviour' (Russia). In this dizzying political climate, those who were your friends one day would be enemies the next. Collective identity is more important than individual; therefore, a German or Russian becomes threatening, due to the history of occupation. Nothing is stable, or dependable in this situation; and Huelle has created a fine book of stories which reflect a Polish viewpoint of imaginative, fantastic literature.

In the story "Table", a Polish family under Communism needs a new kitchen table. However, they cannot get a table like their old one, because that year, the Comrades building tables have decreed that tables must be triangular - which does not fit their room, or their settings. Seeking to find a woodworker who can (illegally) make them a proper table, they are at first successful, but run into problems, when the woodworker keeps delaying. He finally offers them a table - with the catch that it once belonged to a German officer. The main character's mother is furious, holding a deep-set hatred for the German people, and she wants no part of a table having belonged to one. This anger is not the only thing which comes with this furniture; the main character starts seeing a German ghost in the house. The story shows a family grappling with the very real effects of a Communist system and the memories of a Nazi occupation, all through a single piece of furniture.

A disappearing village is the mystery of "Uncle Heinrich," a story in which the main character and his Uncle go on a skiing trip and lose their way. Uncle Heinrich is an adventuresome man,given to encouraging his young nephew to forsake books and explore nature at its most rugged. On their excursion, they not only lose their way, but lose the map which has been guiding them. They come across a village where they find food and shelter until the storm is gone. The kindly villagers reveal some eccentric customs when Uncle Heinrich and nephew are called upon to act as outside judges to a town election, leaving them both with a threatened feeling. Years later, Uncle Heinrich writes his nephew, detailing his efforts to again find that village - but cannot, and cannot find any map with reference to the place. This story draws a correlation to the Baltic country of Lithuania, part of Poland before World War II, and made part of the USSR when borders were redrawn after the war. When one looks at the maps chronicling Poland's border shifts, one can see how entire areas seem to "disappear" into the USSR. The story underlines ethnic tensions between Lithuanians and Poles, as well as the uncertainty that comes with such an unstable boundary. Are those Poles who lived in Lithuania Polish or Lithuanian? Is this land the same as it was before the war? And after the fall of the USSR?

Probably the strongest piece is "In Dublin's Fair City," the final story in the book. It follows the main character as he visits Dublin, and remembers his grandfather who became an eccentric character in his old age. The narrator begins his visit in a Catholic Church, where his thoughts turn to his family, and how they survived under Communist regime. Throughout this piece, he thinks of his grandfather, who left his grandmother and lived far north in the country with another woman. But this isn't the whole story. When his grandfather dies, the narrator and his father must take the trip to retrieve the body, and find more than they expected; the grandfather was alone not to have an affair, but to build a submarine, with hopes of getting out of the country under the sea. The father and son push the submarine into the water, for if discovered, they know they will be punished as his family.

While these recollections surface, the narrator meets a young woman who accidentally hits him in her chips van, and takes him under her wing, to a party held by artists after.

The Irish in the story are all looking for a way out of their own lives, whether escaping their poverty through decadent parties, their loneliness through drink, or their very identities through play-acting. While he observes the surreal events unfolding around him, he reflects on his own grandfather's attempts to escape, and on his own - he is, after all, in a Western country.

Huelle makes a sound comparison between Ireland and Poland, for both were (and Northern Ireland contintues to be) colonized states well after most countries had become independent. The piece is richly layered, the mystery of the grandfather's activities being solved very gradually, so the reader shares in the narrator's triumph when he remembers it all, and makes the connection between his grandfather's secret and his bravery. And feels the sadness for a man who died before he could see his escape plans come true.

Moving House collects richly layered stories, intricate in their structure, complex in their theme, and beautifully written. This book is a must for those interested in Polish history and fiction, and those who take the time to read between the lines will be well rewarded.

Not for nothing did Lem named this book, and the Project, HMV. The helplesness of the greatest Human minds against an uhuman message is not at all different from the helplesness of the dog in the face of the gramophone.

A word of causion, though. Altough Lem is depicted as a "Science Fiction" author, _HMV_ is not your regular "Arthur C. Clark"-like book. Dont expect racing starships or multi-handed aliens; it's a book about mankind, and it's failures, and is even more novel then Asimov's _I, Robot_, or Lem's own _Solaris_.

A synthetic signal from outer space is detected. In Sagan's "Contact", the signal encodes plans for a spaceship; here it's not so simple. The signal seems to carry many levels of meaning, each one more bizarre and mind-boggling than the last. Lem, as always, weaves together ideas from the fringes of modern science. He also explores the human aspects of scientific research.

This book is not light reading. Many parts require a mental effort like, say, that needed to play chess. This can be irritating, even infuriating. For readers are up to the task, however, the book rewards the effort many times over.

I cannot be counted among science fictions greatest fans. While I did get my share of fun out of the original Star Trek series in the late sixties and earlier seventies, I still think that most science fiction tends to degenerate in a redressing of "old imperial tales", without making any use of the extra possibilities that the many aspects of science could add to the writer's repertoire.

Yet, while scanning the Amazon web pages for signals of intelligent life from distant galaxies, I came across this book that fully lives up to be called, let me rephrase define, science-fiction. A couple of years before the movie made it's way to a wider audience I read Sagan's Contact. While the decoding of the many levels of the "message" in this book went a long way in pleasing the Nerd in me, the story itself was flat as a pancake.

Lem's HMV proceeds Contact by many years and reflects a sophistication from a civilization that is light-years ahead of the one that produced Sagan. Written in the sixties, during the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, HMV is a work that can be read on at least two levels. Firstly, it is a critique against Cold War politics, military and political decision making, and the conduct of science/scientist. In this respect the work could be regarded as an accurate Swiftian satire. Secondly and most importantly, however, HMV is a psychological and philosophical essay on the limitations of the human mind facing the truly unknown. This second layer is in my opinion the part that makes this book so unique.

Earlier this year I wrestled my way through Foucault's "Order of Things" a post-modern classic of contemporary structuralist philosophy. Lem may not claim to be a philosopher, but by the middle of just the preface of HMV, he has encapsulated all of Foucault's arguments in one focused concise essay in clear language. Throughout the rest of the book Lem exposes the reader to many schools of philosophy, discussion of the possibilities and limitations of science and the extent to which the human mind is limited to the level of projecting itself in the analysis of an unknown subject. An argument could be made that Lem does little more than using the subtext of HMV to give a synopsis of 20+ centuries of philosophy. Yet, both the construction of this novel and the beautiful way in which Lem concludes Hogarth's account of man finding reason without answers in the post-Nietzschian world is truly impressive.

The X-files always claims that the truth is out there. While it took me over thirty years, I have finally been able to recover the part that Lem's HMV contributed to it.

Lem borrows deftly from the languages of medicine, mythology, physics, and engineering in weaving a spellbinding tale of earnest but fallible men travelling to a distant planet. As the title suggests, things go wrong with alarming and often comical regularity; Lem simply refuses to take for granted some utopian future in which everything-- machines, ideas--work flawlessly. Compared to his American counterparts, Lem strikes one as decidedly "old school:" how many works of this category portray with sympathy and understanding a soldier or a Catholic priest? The style is surprisingly polished considering the spotty quality of some of Lem's other endeavors. A book of philosophical debate as well as an adventure story, but without the benefit of character development, it almost qualifies as literature, and it is quite possibly the best science fiction novel ever written.

This is the only one of his books that I've ever read outside of Solaris and there are a lot of parallels in that book. Like that one, Lem discusses contact with an alien race and like Solaris, that contact goes against all previous sci-fi notions along those lines. Though in Solaris the alien was the planet and it was largely unreachable as an entity, which was the point, here the aliens even talk to the crewmembers though Lem still never shows what they look like. But this has some of his most interesting philosophical discussions, something we don't see a lot of in science-fiction today, or ever, for that matter. The reactions of the crew to a planet completely at war are fascinating, instead of staying out of it, they keep trying to show their strength and scare the inhabitants . . . so much for that Prime Directive. To me, the reactions of the crew were much more realistic than any other book I've read and if some people think they're extreme . . . well try to imagine yourself in the same situation. It's nearly impossible. It's a pity that this book is out of print when so many other lesser books are, but a dedicated fan can find it and if the number of reviews here inspires someone to go search it out, then hey, we've done our job.

How hard can you take it? Fiasco is the fourth and most pessimistic of Lem's "contact" novels (after Eden, The Invincible and Solaris). Humanity undertakes its first interstellar voyage in the hope of making contact with the inhabitants of the planet Quinta, but the aliens won't play ball and all the scientists can do, as usual, is present various theories which achieve little, nothing, or worse than nothing. The basic problem is a simple one (and a recurrent Lem theme): how can human beings hope to recognize, let alone understand or talk to, creatures which are wholly different in their biological and technological heritage? There's a good deal of technical discussion, concerning both the possibilities of contact and the workings of interstellar travel, which might prove difficult going; but if you stick with it the paradoxes are delightful, though hardly encouraging; and the descriptive passages are as good as anything in Solaris. The opening chapter is a stunning jou!rney through a literally titanic landscape, and although it might at first seem rather loosely related to the rest of the book, its perspective on the "heroic" protagonist is vital to the ending - another set-piece in a beautifully evoked alien landscape, this time on Quinta. Heroism, even human-ness itself, when confronted with the alien, is not just an irrelevance (as it is to varying degrees in the three previous books) but a deadly liability. Even now that it can resurrect the dead and travel to the stars, humanity still can't see outside itself. The expedition, though a miracle of human endeavour, is a fiasco. But Fiasco is a hard, ironic, sometimes breathtaking triumph.

This is a new book by one of the most important authors in the 20th century, but the above review is too slick to be trusted. Indeed, die-hard Lem fans will be thrilled by a new book and will no doubt enjoy seeing Ijon Tichy again. But this book, though magnificent on speculation and satire, will not be the one to explain to all the non-Lem fans why we Lem fans go bonkers over him. This book is for people with an acquired taste for Lem. If that's not you, don't despair. Try "The Cyberiad" or "Solaris" (his most famous book) or "Fiasco".

Ijon Tichy, our favorite clutzy hero, who has been subjected to "benignimizers," time machines, insane robots and who was responsible for creating the universe, stays a little closer to home in this mind boggling little masterpiece. Lem, although unknowingly, created a strangely prophetic story for Y2K worry worts. The idea of our quest to become more advanced, no matter how idiotic the advancements, leads to our undoing; or for the optimist, a new beginning. I'm intentially being cryptic, as not to ruin the story, but this book is definitly worth its weight in LEM.

Though not as ample in the sheer fun category as Lem's earlier outings with Ijon Tichy, this book reunites us with one of the author's most endearing protagonists in a physiological and top-secret caper. The split brain/ double Tichy dilemna somehow does not fall flat, and will make you wonder what your left hand is doing while you're busy on that mouse....

This book is great, although I'm not too crazy about the translation. Realistically though, if you're not planning on learning to speak Polish fluently anytime soon, you should get this copy. It's not that bad. Lem is a great, realistic, down-to-earthy (no pun intended) Science Fiction author. Also get Solaris,...and Fiasco.

Lem, as always, comes through. In some of his other work he takes on philosophy, science, religion, usually with a humorous strain; in this book, and its predecessor, Tales of Pirx the Pilot, he chooses to write straight hard SF. However, the image usually conjured up by 'hard' SF is Asimov, Heinlen, and so on, meaning writing anchored on scientific devices and with generally far less time spent on character development. Pirx is a welcome antidote. He is an engineer and pilot, grounded in a reality made up not of quantum-physical theories but of nuts and bolts. He's a professional and strictly blue-collar. REading this book might give you an idea of what the future REALLY will be like.

The collection of essais (forewords or afterwords) on non-existent major books of our future. Perfect food for thought, but rather bleak in reading comfort - a little bit too dry and condensed. It's not a blood thriller(s), even if dissecting thrilling matters.
Anyway, it is a must for any real SF fan. Especially after Star diaries, Futurologic congress and things like Peace on Earth and Fiasco.

Creative and thought-provoking, Lem delves into the realm of the "unwritten." Being both playful and serious at the same time, this book is very smart.

I forget when I discovered Lem - in college? -- but A PERFECT VACUUM remains one of my favorite works and I'm delighted it's still in print (it may have been out of print once). Lem packages a collections of fake book reviews of nonexistent books, written in a delightful broad array of styles and voices. His wry humor lights every page. He includes a scathing review of his own book !! Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys satires and highbrow whimsy. (If you like this, try Julian barnes: Foucault's Parrot, or,History of the world in 10.5 chapters.

With this collection of seven stories (three of which are reprints from Asimov's) Lethem continues to befuddle me. I loved Motherless Brooklyn, Gun With Occasional Music, and a short story in the Best of Crank anthologyÑbut I hated Amnesia Moon and another story in Best of Crank. While all the stories in this collection benefit from brilliant premises and Lethem's dexterous prose only the two best two ("The Happy Man" and "Vanilla Dunk," both from Asimov's) have true "endings." The other five trail off into nothingness or incomprehensible weirdness that make me wonder if Lethem's subconscious is bound by the old writer's adage that no ending is better than a bad ending.

"The Happy Man" features a dead man who is raised from the dead so he can financially support his family, the catch is that his consciousness must reside in hell part of the time. There he has bizarre nightmares that lead to an unfortunately predictable denouement. In "Vanilla Dunk," professional basketball players are issued suits giving them skills of former greats. From this interesting idea, Lethem fabricates one of the best sports stories I've ever read, as an obnoxious white kid wins the "draft lottery" and gets to be the next Michael Jordan and racial tensions ensue. "Light and the Sufferer" follows a crack addict, his brother, and the mysterious alien who follows them around New York. The humans' story ends rather obviously, but the significance of the aliens is left somewhat obscure. "Forever, Said the Duck" is about a cocktail party inhabited by clones of everyone who's had sex with the two hosts. It's promising enough at first, but degenerates into a psychedelic nonsense. The nifty notion of "The Hardened Criminals" is that convicts are physically hardened and used as bricks for a massive prison tower. Lethem seemed totally unable to make anything out of the premise, however, and when a young criminal meets his father in the wall, the result is rather forced. "Five ..." presents the mystery of a woman who has sex with a man and "loses" two weeks of her life. Unfortunately, the story implodes rather than leading anywhere interesting. The final story, "Sleepy People" is simply odd and makes you wonder why it was included.

Lethem is certainly a creative genius, however, he's still pretty hit or miss in harnessing his creativity. Sometimes he doesn't seem to know what to do with it and ends up writing himself into a bizarre corner. Still, I'll continue to read him to catch the sparkling stuff.

I loved _Gun with Occasional Music_ and _Amnesia Moon_ but this collection didn't really do it for me. _The Happy Man_ was great, I liked _And Forever, said the Duck_, _Vanilla Dunk_ was fun even though I hate sports. But like another reviewer said, no real conclusions, more like story fragments. His quirky style is great, he just needs more room to develop it.

It is the sign of a true master that none of these short stories bears any resemblance to another, yet each is in its own way outstandingly audacious.

Some worked better than others, and from reading the other reviews here it seems the selection varies from reader to reader. Yet the range and boldness of his ideas nearly staggers the imagination, and to have pulled this off -- not once, but seven times -- is astonishing.

Michael Kandel should have trusted his premise more thoroughly. If he had he would have written a great book. As it stands, "Strange Invasions" is only a good book.

What starts off promising to be an exploration of the zone between insanity and sanity, wanders into more of a farce by the book's end. Still it's worth reading for the laughs, and the beginning which features a schizotypal mental patient who has to figure out that he's not hallucinating, but is indeed being contacted by aliens.

It's worth reading and should be brought back into print.