{"id":420,"date":"2006-03-27T22:48:42","date_gmt":"2006-03-28T03:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=420"},"modified":"2008-01-25T12:07:47","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:07:47","slug":"stanislaw-lem-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=420","title":{"rendered":"Stanislaw Lem is dead"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>BBC News has a short notice that Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem has died. <a href =\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/europe\/4851496.stm\">Link<\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t know his work, Lem is probably best known for his novel <em>Solaris,<\/em> a story of a planet-wide intelligence trying to communicate with human beings by dredging up painful memories from their individual subconscious minds, a book which became well-known after it was made into an English-language movie. But I remember Lem best for three other books: <em>The Star Diaries,<\/em> the adventures of eccentric genius Ijon Tichy; <em>The Cyberiad,<\/em> tales of two robots who are inventors; and <em>Memoirs Found in a Bathtub,<\/em> a dystopian novel of a society living in an underground complex after a nuclear holocaust. It would be too easy for American intellectuals to dismiss him as some half-famous Polish science fiction writer. But he was much more than that. Lem combined sly humor with mythic story lines and an unblinking appraisal of humankind; and he managed to slip in some barbed critiques of 20th C. life and politics; and his writing was informed by his deep humanity. I will miss him.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> Good balanced obituary at the (London) <em>Times<\/em> online: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/article\/0,,60-2106311,00.html\">Link<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BBC News has a short notice that Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem has died. Link If you don&#8217;t know his work, Lem is probably best known for his novel Solaris, a story of a planet-wide intelligence trying to communicate with human beings by dredging up painful memories from their individual subconscious minds, a book which became [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[270,319],"class_list":["post-420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-culture","tag-sf-f","tag-stanislaw-lem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}