I have read this book twice, once several years ago and again very recently. It's a bit more viscerally exciting and not nearly as abstruse as the other Lem novels and stories I have read. It was originally published (if memory serves) in the 60's and so I suppose it's a relatively early work (it certainly has a strong early-60s flavor). The story concerns a powerful space warship sent to a remote planet to learn the fate of an identical ship which disappeared there. The central figure of the book is Rohan, the ship's navigator (and first officer, more or less); Lem's usual attention to the psychology of his characters is evident in his excellent treatment of Rohan's uneasy relationship with his commander and his observations on the scientists and spacers who make up the crew. However, the book is not as psychologically complex as the other Lem novels I have read.

The tone of the book starts out in a very '60s hard-sf vein, veers towards horror a bit in the middle, then eventually focuses on the technical and moral dilemma faced by the crew as they try to avoid their predecessors' fate. The main theme of the book is the futility of humans' hubristic attempt to conquer (or at least understand) the universe which surrounds them; the quality of the writing (just) saves it from being heavy-handed.

It's a pretty good read and more approachable than some of Lem's other books (an interesting contrast for fans, I would say), such as _Solaris_, which draws on some of the same ideas. Try to find a version which was translated directly from Polish if you can (one US edition was translated from an earlier German translation!). Might be a good book to get someone with an interest in hard sf into Lem's work.

and I must say that it's a good book. It was also my first and
last Stanislaw Lem book. Mr. Lem has a spaceship stranded on a desert planet with most of its crew dead. How
did it get there? Nobody knows. The reader's left in the dark.
Of course, the book's a short one. It's only 100 pages long.
Still, if you want a good introduction to foreign science fiction, this is the one for you.

This is a great book by the famous eastern European sci-fi author Lem. An Earth spacecraft explores a previously unknown world and finds a very alien presence. Lots of science here, and evolutionary theory applied in an unusual manner, as humanity tries to understand the exotically alien universe (a major Lem theme throughout his works). A good adventure story as well. I read it as a teenager and occasionaly reread it- it was a mind-expander.

The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem are a fascinating combination of science fiction stories, cleverly disguised social criticism, and a unique sense of humor. It is one of the few books I never tire of reading, again and again.

My understanding is that the three books featuring space traveller Ijon Tichy were originally published in Polish in a single volume (THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS, THE STAR DIARIES, and MEMOIRS OF A SPACE TRAVELLER). If so, I would insist that that has to be one of the ten greatest science fiction books ever published. The highpoint of the Tichy tales is THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS, which is published as a separate book in English, but the stories in THE STAR DIARIES are very nearly as good (the remnants were published in the MEMOIRS). Essential reading. They come across as some demonic blend of Italo Calvino, Escher, and Groucho Marx. Most sci-fi writing is deeply derivative from previous writers, but Stanislaw Lem is possibly the most original sci-fi writer of the past forty years. I am one of those who believe that Lem should have received serious consideration for a Nobel Prize.

If you like Lem, this is one of his best. It's not really science fiction, it's the discharge of neurons in a fireworks display.

Short and bit outdated attempt to look into future of star travel and related consequences (including fate of the Earth). When you will check the date of first publication you will be amazed by the contents. For me it's like a classic work - it was one of books, which built foundation of my perception of the future. If you ever read anything of Lem, you definitely should check this one. If not, this book could be a perfect introduction into Lem's world (and possibly ours).

This is one of those books that you read, put down, read again and then find something that is scarily predictive of not the far future, but of recent times. Very odd indeed.

The plot of "Return from the Stars" is just that: space travelers from Earth return, but much time has passed. They are essentially visitors to their own future. But the Earth has taken trendy ideas such as non-violence and translated these ideas in ways no one could fathom. Man has not evolved, but society has evolved a way to tame Man; for example, when a man visits a woman, and the woman decides that no sexual intimacy should be the outcome of the encounter, she offers the man a drink of Britt. This substance, which is stocked in every young woman's refrigerator and looks like a bottle of milk, renders the man incapable of desire or acting upon that desire. How presumptive! Every man is a rapist. Yet, this book was written long before much radical feminist writing that asserted much the same idea.

Women dress oddly, painting their nostrils red and wearing bells in their shoes. The tiny details point out the fact that the returnees are foreigners to what was once their home and is now in no way their future, though it is their heritage.

Lem makes some interesting extrapolations. Some of them even came true in his own lifetime. This is actually one of the few Lem books that stuck with me, and it is a darn shame it is out of print. It is really a quiet masterpiece of speculative fiction.

This one is a page-turner that keeps you up till all hours of the night! It is not like some of Lem's more comedic novel(la)s but nonetheless it is still a great read. Great characterization and offers a philosophical look at the improvement of society and space travel, amongst other issues. It is precisely Lem's blending of cognitive, societal, moral, and scientific issues that leave other sci-fi writers in the dust... Without a doubt, Lem does credit to the genre.

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 slim volume isn't as much an introduction as a motley collection of interviews with Stanislav Lem, through which the author attempts to expose Lem's personal ideology. There is an overview of Lem's works - courtesy of the author, a pair of interviews (1992 and 1994), and a short essay written by Lem about his futurological masterpiece, "Summa Technologiae" (1964, essay written in 1991). The first problem the book runs into is that it's not particularly informative. I really hoped for a deeper analysis of Lem's works. In the interviews, Lem merely uses them to exemplify his beliefs. Furthemore, Lem himself comes off a bit patronizing and self-promoting. He repeatedly makes smug comments about his literary competition, several movements in philosophy, and a particular Polish critic who wrote an unduly scathing review of "Summa." Lastly, a good deal of the interviews become redundant. Lem's responses run long, and he manages to bring most to the followings few conclusions: the world can never be perfectly understood, or even fathomed; moderation is the safest philosophy - tertium datur; truth is in the eye of the beholder; language compromises any attempts at hard analysis; anyone who fails to believe that is misguided. Now that I think about it, Lem sounds very much like his GOLEM XIV. Nevertheless, he manages to make several interesting points about himself and his works: he proudly reiterates that he is most certainly not the alpha and omega of the European, or even Polish philosophical society; that his magnitude as a futurologist and philosopher is (mistakenly) overstated; and that his works are largely testing grounds for his evolving ideology.

The interviews portray Lem's faith in mankind as slight. He finds humanity as somewhat vain, and currently degenerating. An especially hard-hitting forecast of his predicts a deluge of information that will drown civilization. This examination of Lem's repeatedly frustrated attempts to bring the cosmic forces of logic to crack the tough nut of the Western civilization made me aware of just what I want from Lem as a reader: I want a book where mankind is awed and humiliated in numbers sufficient to produce a positive effect. I want the cosmos to teach man a lesson. I want an emergency exit.

A lot of information for being approx. 150 pages as every single page contains pertinent content. (In other words, there is not one single wasted line or sentence.) Very strong writing with a nice flair as it focuses on the interdisciplinary side of Lem's novels, rather than being just an ordinary literary review. The interviews with Lem are also thought provoking; since it allows Lem's "voice" to be "heard". However, it is a little dense and at some points may be difficult to decipher exactly what the author or Lem is trying to say as both use vocabulary that is not quite "layman's terms". Still, overall it does give good insight to Lem and is a useful introduction to Lem's works. In addition, the author's focus (how literature interacts with science and society)is a breath of fresh air compared to what is usually circulating around in the guise of literary criticism!

Recommended to all Lem scholars, science-fiction fans, literature lovers, and people who like to look beyond literature. I thoroughly enjoyed it even though it's not exactly Sunday reading.

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.

An impressive science fiction thriller, despite the fact that my Ace paperback edition is an English translation of a German translation of a Polish novel.

A military spacecraft lands on an unexplored planet to determine the whereabouts of a lost crew. The story resembles the film ALIENS in some ways, and also the Niven-Pournelle-Barnes novel LEGACY OF HEOROT; although this novel predates those other stories by a few decades. A better way to describe it is to call it a horror novel in a Perry Rhodan vein, for those of you who are old enough and pathetically geeky enough to benefit from that reference. It employs many elements of space opera: laser guns, antimatter cannon, force fields, atomic combat, and other such special effects commonly found in Perry Rhodan and Doc Smith's LENSMAN. But this one has a much creepier tone to it than what you'd expect from space opera.

The theme to the book is similar to that of other Lem novels, like SOLARIS and THE INVESTIGATION, where the heroes find themselves up against increasingly complex and frustrating phenomena. I liked this one better than those two, however. Recommended, but you'll have to look to find a copy.

A rather common theme in Lems writing (Solaris, Fiasco) is human encounter with an alien, fundamentally incomprehensible civilisation or "organism". In Lem's view such an encounter is likely to escalate to the level of destruction or surrender because human motives and interpretations are with necessity confined within human frames of reference, no form of closer understanding is possible. In "Invincible" an expedition shall find out the fait of a previous lost expedition. The aggressor (the result of a very particular form of evolution) this time is the alien being a deadly threat because of human presence (or rather, human technology) only. The plot unfolds with many twists and turns typical of Lem and is good entertainment for anyone liking Solaris or Fiasco.

I read this after "Eden" and found it to be an interesting book, for it deals with an alien life form which is complex and strange. As in all his books, Lem explores human understanding of a foreign world.

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.

The first thing I read by Lem was _Solaris_, which is a unique book in his canon. It's a very serious, psychological novel in many respects. _Eden_, the second book I read by him, shares the sense of total alienness that seems to be one of Lem's main themes. The ship-wrecked space traveling scientists who function as the protagonists, basically try to figure out the world on to which they've crash landed. The exploration leads to all sorts of bizarre landscapes and situations that seem to have no logic. And, again, that's the author's point. This alien landscape is ALIEN. Saying more about the book's contents would be a cheat to the reader, and my slim description of the novel's main ideas certainly doesn't do _Eden_ justice. I wouldn't recommend this as a first book for someone who has never read Lem, but his writing is well worth sampling since he has used a number of different approaches (humorous, satirical, philisophical) and can't be appreciated from the reading of just one or two novels

Much of Stanislaw Lem's writings are hampered by a wide number of translations of varying quality. The inherent problem with the translation of Eden takes place in the first half of the novel where there is a stiffness to the wording used. In the beginning of Eden the translator seems to have chosen the most obscure word or phrase possible to substitute for original Polish. Thankfully as the novel progresses so does its readability as the translator hits his stride about 1/3 of the way through.

Using the theme of alien contact, Lem's Eden is superficially similar to his classic Solaris. Scientists and crew from a ship crash land and are stranded. They survive in the midst of a strange world upon which is an even stranger civilization. The crew sets out to explore and decipher the culture of the planet and like Solaris it's not a question of misunderstanding but a more basic question of determining what it is they are observing.

Eden doesn't reach the heights of personal philosophical musings that Solaris does. And while the characters are one-dimensional they work well within the framework of a story whose central theme is less what makes us human than how that humanity shapes our perceptions. If you like Stanilslaw Lem or a fan of SF you'll find Eden a rewarding novel and worth your time.

I've only read three books by Lem counting this one and while nothing so far has bypassed Solaris as his absolute masterpiece, for me it's a step up from the strangely dense Fiasco. As in those two books the theme here is the one that Lem seems to count as his favorite, that we should not assume that because we are smart and can get into space and across stars, that we can automatically "understand" any alien life that we come across, or even start to fit what we see into established human preconceptions. Fortunately this is an excellent theme to explore and one rarely dealt with in SF, so Lem easily finds new wrinkles to explore every time he writes about it, even if the conclusions wind up being nearly the same every time. In this novel, six explorers crashland on the planet Eden and while trying to fix their spaceship and get off they find that the planet is home to a civilization that seems to make absolutely no sense. They keep coming across odd artifacts, a strange factory, a graveyard, weird villages, all of which they try to quantify through human theories that they wind up discarding anyway because they can't hope to explain what they're seeing. Most of the book is just strange, unexplainable event piled on strange unexplainable event . . . perhaps because I read it in spurts this approach never becomes wearying, or maybe it's the constant combinations of interactions between the six characters, three of which comes across as fully rounded human beings (The Captain, the Doctor and the Engineer, the only one who seems to have a proper name, oddly enough) while the Chemist, the Physicist and the Cyberneticist mostly just take up space and are there for the main three to argue with, that keeps the plot moving along and engaging. In the end there are explanations of a sort, but they seem anticlimatic and feel a bit like a cop out, a concession to readers not really prepared for the honest answer that maybe there really is no way to understand something utterly alien. All told, Lem's imagination and presentation of his argument is impressive and mostly entertaining, even if you have to read Solaris to get a better idea of what he's trying to say.

"Imaginary Magnitude"'s value as entertaining literature is essentially nil. Only occasionally does it lapse into readability - otherwise it is an undiluted philosophical treatise. To be sure, this is Lem at his most intellectual - it just doesn't lend the writing the same measure of livelihood his more straightforward pieces do. The format is quite something conceptually - a set of introductions to not-yet-written books. "Imaginary Magnitude" showcases four - plus "GOLEM XIV", which, being a separate piece of literature altogether, is included only for the sake of its similar spirit.

The short pieces themselves aren't particularly exciting. This is Lem's chance to preach his views, and he does so extensively. "Necrobes" piqued my interest with its laconic treatment of creatively-posed x-ray nudes as art. "Eruntics" was even partially plausible - it deals with evolving a genome which is, basically, word-processing software. And then the bateria begin predicting the future. The "Extelopedia" lacked any sort of real structure - it is an encyclopedic dictionary of purely prognosticated words. The introduction includes a "Proffertinc" - a prognosticated offer, and a sample page of words that begin with "prog-". The following introduction to a treatise on bitic literature - that is, books written by non-human authors - is an excellent piece of short fiction dealing with epistemological topics. The summary traces the development of artificial thinkers through several stages - from cladogenesis, where computers generate random meaningless words, through mimesis, where a computer formulates the mathematical basis of books, allowing perfect translations, and even creating entirely new works in the author's exact style, and to transhuman apostasy - works generally incoprehensible to humans - from incredibly complicated math to elaborate works on cosmogony.

Then the reader gets to "GOLEM XIV", and the book takes a nosedive. Even despite the warning, the superhuman, impersonal intelligence within the computer seems snobbish, patronizing, and the text of its lectures - overly elaborate and peppered with metaphors. Likewise, the leading points of the two lectures - on man and on itself - coincide: the evolution is an asymptotic blunder; it has reached the maximum level of complication in its creations, and further random "progress" is impossible; man has reached his potential ceiling and is drowning in his civilization, etc. Like most of Lem, taken piece by piece this is profound theorizing, but as a work of creative, non-academic literature it is ornate and unreadable.

Though it wasn't the most entertaining book of Lem's, it definitely gives the best span of his talents of any that I've yet read. We get the simply goofy in the first couple bits, and the hard-core philosophical in the GOLEM lectures. This is an excellent survey of Lem's talent, but the individual parts are not his best. The humorous bits are certainly not "Cyberiad" or "Star Diaries" quality, but they are good nonetheless. The GOLEM stuff is a bit dry, but very intruiging. Overall quite good stuff, so it gets 4 stars. Mediocre Lem though.

Whereas with "A Perfect Vacuum" Lem wrote reviews of fictional books, here he writes introductions to different fictional books. You get some of his more straightforward philosophy with "Golem XIV," typical Lem cleverness with "Necrobes" and sheer, amazing, mind-blowing virtuosity with "Eruntics," probably his single most impressive piece of short fiction. This "story" alone is worth the price of admission. Ranking near the Tichy stories, with plenty of distance between "The Cyberiad" on one side and "Solaris" on the other, on the fun and ponderousnness scales. Among his best.