With over 27,000,000 copies of his books in print, it's not like Lvov, Poland's biggest star Stanislaw Lem is some "obscure" writer. But you couldn't prove it by the American chain bookshops. If you try explaining that he's only the most widely read science fiction writer in the world, maybe a few light bulbs will go off — at least when the stockboy does a search on his name. But then, maybe not. Most sci-fi people consider him a snob, or just a little too... well, maybe he's just not optimistic enough about the techno-utopia humanity will deterministically arrive at as a process of natural selection and the progressive evolution of society. In other words he's not a drooling fucking idiot.
This book concisely illustrates why Lem is overlooked by most genre-lickers in the science fiction domain, and yet has been noticed and widely discussed in European literary circles for a long time. This distinguishes him from Dick in the sense that only comparatively recently has Dick earned some respect in his home country. We'd love to say Lem's critical praise of Dick and virtually no other sci-fi writer helped facilitate this, but really it's because of Hollywood and the faux-academia that only then notices brilliance — after the Euros have said a few good things about the writer and someone in L.A. squeezes a film out that's "based on" said writers ideas. Hollywood then immediately spews out twenty other shit lozenges trying to cite Baudrillardian themes in their PR statements. Pricks.
Some people complain of Lem's snobbery, but it doesn't take a PhD in world literature to notice that a book like A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of reviews of non-existent books, is more akin to Borges than Heinlein. You either love that fact or hate it.. and move on. For people who love it, let us tell you that APV is a book filled with ideas — in the form of compacted micro-books. The devise of using faux-literary criticism for the launching of bold philosophical queries in miniature is novel, if not utterly brilliant. The execution is deadpan, believable, and totally hilarious — maybe even monsterous as the narrative tone dovetails with the content of the pieces and serves to amplify their ramifications a hundredfold. We won't go into the actual subject matter, but leave that to you to experience on your own. Suffice it to say that the reason you couldn't classify this as anything but science fiction is because of the scale of the ideas presented. Modern lay philosophy has simply fallen too far into a deep post-existentialist nightmare to have cosmological considerations such as the Silentium Universi showing up even as a blip on its radar. It's too scary. As moderns, for all our hard ass godless realism most of us still need "hope" (in the future) to get out of bed in the morning. Well, it's true... no wonder so many have a hard time with Lem. He's an idol smasher. The hope-clingers would kill themselves.
No worries, mate. As modern philosophy plods on aimlessly, sniffing and licking the anus of the rabies-deranged pit bull of scientific materialism, we still have Lem the lowly science fiction writer to actually consider the human situation with honesty and insight. As a philosopher of science pretending to be a novelist, it seems that he almost singularly has the courage necessary to see past certain human projections and self-deceptions, deeper into the actual darkness - why not take a peek into the void with him? With Lem's wit and genius as your usher, you've got one hell of an unforgettable ride ahead of you.