VITRIFAX:

The Polish author Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) is my favorite author of fiction. (Other people have written books I admire as much as or more than any of Lem's, but, for some reason, I enjoy Lem's work most consistently.)

Lem primarily writes science fiction, but that doesn't convey the variety of styles and forms that he's tackled. He's written straightforward adventure tales, moody extraterrestrial travelogues, satirical fables, mystery novels, psychological thrillers, hilarious pseudo-folktales set in a world populated by robots, learned reviews of nonexistent scientific monographs, critiques of imaginary artwork, lectures given by fictional supercomputers, tall tales, and novels that veer from one of the above forms to another without apparent warning. He's one of the most unapologetically cerebral writers on the planet, and has a dry sense of humor that leavens an often deeply pessimistic sensibility.

Stanislaw Lem is one of the few SF writers in a language other than English whose work is widely available (in translation) in the United States. His American fans sometimes complain that he's underappreciated here, but, really, compared to everyone else in the non-Anglophone world, and especially the former Soviet bloc, he's quite a celebrity here. Even Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novels are rarely seen on bookstore shelves, and you usually can find several of Lem's, at least if your bookstore has a half-decent SF section. He's not as famous here as, say, Piers Anthony, but nobody should be.

Many of Lem's books have not been translated into English, but those that have are mostly available from Harcourt, Brace in the US. Several people have translated Lem into English. The best-known and most prolific is Michael Kandel, who now edits Harcourt, Brace's SF line, and has written SF and fantasy novels of his own (titles include Strange Invasion, In Between Dragons, and Captain Jack Zodiac).

No doubt, the originals are preferable to Kandel's translations (readers in Poland have assured me that they are), but for an English speaker, Kandel's work is the next best thing. He has a wonderful sense of what the English language can do when stretched to the breaking point, and he has obviously labored heroically to re-create somehow the language of a writer who relies heavily on Polish neologisms and wordplay. Other translators have done creditable jobs translating Lem as well (I particularly admire Marc E. Heine's translation of Imaginary Magnitude), but when Kandel's name appears on the title page of a Lem translation, I always know I'm in for a particular treat.

As I've said, the variety of Lem's work is enormous, but there are patterns and themes that run through it. One of the great joys of reading lots of Lem (as with any author) is following these common threads. Here are some of them.

A few links to some related Web sites are scattered around these pages. Here are some more of general interest.

Here, my primary purpose is to provide highly subjective capsule reviews of nearly all of Lem's work that has been translated into English. I think I've read all of it that is currently in print. (There's a collection called The Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem that I can't find anywhere and am not sure about. And, no, as far as I can tell, Summa Technologiae hasn't been translated-- from what I've heard, more's the pity. Nor has Wisja lokalna, or the new one.)

With one exception, the only books listed are the ones I've read. I've now added publication data and ISBN for the books that I currently have on hand. All of the translated books are available in the US from the publisher now known as Harcourt Brace & Company (aka Harcourt Brace Jovanovich or Harcourt, Brace, and World), unless otherwise noted. The same translations seem to be published in the UK by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd and by Mandarin Paperbacks.

The word "vitrifax" is a neologism from Michael Kandel's translation of Fiasco. It is an imagined device for freezing people rapidly into a glasslike state for later revival--effectively, a machine for traveling into an uncertain future. Todor Stoyanov reports that the word in the Polish edition was the similar word "witryfikator", and Sveinung W. Tengelsen points out that the term "vitrifaction" is commonly used in a similar context in discussions of cryonics.

The l in "Stanislaw" ought to have a slash through it. While that character is available with ISO Latin-2 encoding, since this page is in English and you're reading it, chances are you're using ISO Latin-1 and it would come out as something else. So imagine the slash. I'll leave the issue of Polish pronunciation to the experts.

Where thematic associations have occurred to me, I've threaded the reviews with hyperlinks. I've tried to supply as many ways as possible to read these reviews. I think that the resulting tangled knot of ideas suits Lem's work well. With luck, the links back to the contents page should keep you from getting completely lost.

Please note that no two Lem fans agree completely on which of his books are better than which. One probable reason is that, as I said above, Lem has written in an amazing variety of styles, and many people probably prefer one of those styles to the others. Hard-SF fans might well like the Pirx stories, but want to throttle Ijon Tichy. Lit majors may adore A Perfect Vacuum but find the title of Fiasco appropriate.

I am probably not the best person to write Lem reviews, since I can't read Polish. Since Stanislaw Lem writes in a language that has only several tens of millions of native speakers, a large fraction of his readers encounter his work in translation, and which books have the best translations undoubtedly varies from language to language.

In some cases, a novel is available only in a double translation via some intermediate language. In English, that is unfortunately the case for one of Lem's best-known novels, Solaris. In most places, Solaris seems to be regarded as one of Lem's very best books, possibly the best, but in the English-speaking world The Cyberiad, blessed with an amazing Michael Kandel translation, seems to be more popular. I am rating the English-language editions of these works, so a translation I don't like will lower the rating. I can't completely disentangle my impression of the translation from my impression of the work. I've given the translator's name when I know it (in some cases, I don't currently have the book on hand).

Michael Kandel's translations are nearly always identified as being "from the Polish." The others almost never are; an exception is William Brand's translation of Hospital of the Transfiguration. This may or may not mean that the rest are double translations via some intermediate language. Nevertheless, whatever language they're working from, Heine, Iribarne, Ford, and Leach are good enough at writing English prose that the results turn out well on the word-and-sentence level. This is not always the case. In any event, to a remarkable extent, a single authorial voice emerges in all of these books translated by different people, one very different from, say, the one Kandel uses in his own novel Captain Jack Zodiac. So maybe translation isn't distorting these works as much as one might think.

I use a one-to-four-star rating system, familiar to movie fans. It's somewhat crass, I admit, but it does convey adequately how I feel about the various books. However, since even Lem's worst is pretty good, one star shouldn't be taken as an indication to stay away at any cost, just that this isn't what I would personally recommend for you to start with--dedicated Lem fans will probably want to read it eventually. The three- and four-star stuff is mind-bogglingly good, though.

Dating these books involves some ambiguity. The Harcourt, Brace (or Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) editions of some novels come with the date of writing noted at the end, which helps a lot. (They also note the city. Lem did most of his writing in Krakow and Zakopane, except for a period in the 1980s when he lived in Vienna, Austria.) In other, more annoying cases, the English translation only bears the translation's copyright date, which can be decades later than the original publication of the book. I've tried to indicate the approximate date of origin of the original, but it's sometimes nontrivial to do so. In other cases, with books that are collections of pieces on a common subject, the book grew over a period of years as Lem added pieces to later editions. Complicating the issue still further, in some of these cases the English-language version only includes parts written up to the point that the translation was done, and the others appear in different volumes (this is the reason for the existence of Memoirs of a Space Traveler and the "Fables for Robots" section of Mortal Engines). All in all, it's best to take these dates with a grain of salt.