"I was quite sure that by the time I grew up we'd be flying to Mars and the moon without a second thought. I was going to work in space medicine or as a physicist. At first I read books for young people, but Stanisław Lem was my true initiation into the genre. My favorite of his books are "The Star Diaries," about a lone space traveller and scientist named Ijon Tichy, and " The Cyberiad," a set of stories about robots and intelligent machines."
"Lem was way ahead of his time, especially on the topic of machine intelligence. He had a superb sense of humor and a unique genius for discovering all sorts of paradoxes; his writing challenges the imagination, posing the sorts of questions that are the subjects of philosophical studies. In the story "The Seventh Journey," Ijon's spaceship falls into a time loop, resulting in a swarm of different Ijons from different parts of the same day."
Fiction emphasizes the porosity of boundaries — between nations, ethnicities, fiction and reality, consciousness and dreams. Novels stage constant flux of national borders, especially in Eastern Europe, and combine supernatural and science-fictional elements. One novel portrays sleeping people whose internal worlds flare up and grow over reality like scar tissue. Several favored science-fiction writers blend the fantastical with the prosaic. Early engagement with science fiction fostered expectations of routine space travel and careers in space medicine or physics. Stanisław Lem's works, including The Star Diaries and The Cyberiad, display prescience about machine intelligence, sharp humor, paradoxes, and philosophical challenges to the imagination.
Read at The New Yorker
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