Stanislaw Lem gets animated Google doodle treatment

[Octafish]

If you know Lem, you're gonna love this.



Stanislaw Lem gets animated Google doodle treatment

Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 November 2011 05.43 EST

A spiky-haired, bespectacled animation of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem marches across Google's doodle this morning, as the search engine marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of his first book, The Astronauts.

Lem remains best known for his cult novel Solaris, the story of an incomprehensible intelligence encountered on an alien planet. It has been adapted for cinema twice, by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney, 30 years later, and was first published in 1961, during the author's most fertile period, when he also produced his most famous works including Hospital of the Transfiguration, The Invincible and Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

CONTINUED...

Wish more people in the USA knew about Stanislaw Lem.

Thanks, Google!

[Matariki]

1. cool. but wish this was posted on the day of

is there anyway to see it now?

[Junkdrawer]

2. Here

http://www.google.com/logos/

Specifically:

http://www.google.com/logos/lem/

[struggle4progress]

4. thanks! love lem!

[uppityperson]

6. Thank you, am playing with it now.

[Octafish]

7. Just found out.

I spent the past few days with Professor Corcoran's boxes.

[LunaSea]

3. Holy Squamp hunt!

That's awesome.
I certainly know about Stanislaw Lem, I probably have one of the larger collections of his translated works in the Southeast.
Thanks for posting this, Octafish.

[Octafish]

8. Anytime, LunaSea.

As few before or since, Stanislaw Lem could see precisely where things are heading.

Trurl and Klapaucius are my friends, bolts and all.

[MisterP]

5. Borges + Douglas Adams + Eastern Europe + ????!!! + awesome = Lem

http://english.lem.pl/gallery/category/24-drawings

[Octafish]

9. Did someone say Tlön?

...This was the first intrusion of the imaginary world into the real world. A chance occurrence that still troubles me led to my also being a witness to the second. It took place some months later, in the Cuchilla Negra, in a country saloon belonging to a Brazilian. Enrique Amorim and I were on our way back from Sant'Anna. The river Tacuarembó had risen, forcing us to risk - and to survive - the place's primitive hospitality. In a big room cluttered with barrels and leather hides, the saloon-keeper supplied us with a couple of creaking cots. We lay down, but the drunkenness of an unseen neighbour, who veered back and forth from incomprehensible insults to snatches of milonga - or, at least, to snatches of one particular milonga - did not allow us to sleep until dawn. As may be imagined, we attributed his persistent shouting to the proprietor's fiery rum. At daybreak, the man lay dead in the corridor. The roughness of his voice had fooled us - he was a youth. In his drunken state, a handful of coins had come loose from his wide leather belt, as had a cone of gleaming metal the size of a dice. A boy tried without success to pick up the cone. A man barely managed it. I held the object in the palm of my hand for a minute or so. I remember that it was intolerably heavy and that after I laid it aside its weightiness stayed with me. I also remember the perfect circle it left imprinted in my flesh. The evidence of a very small object that was at the same time very heavy left me with a disagreeable feeling of revulsion and fear. One of the locals suggested that we throw it into the fast-moving river; Amorim bought the cone for a few pesos. Nobody knew anything about the dead man except that 'he was from the Brazilian border'. In certain religions of Tlön, small and extremely heavy cones made of a metal that is not of this planet represent the godhead.

CONTINUED...

http://www.digiovanni.co.uk/borges/the-garden-of-branching-paths/tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius.htm

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

10. I love Lem

I especially loved his short stories in The Star Diaries, which I found to contain a sense or irony about the behavior of humans as cutting as Voltaire.

[Octafish]

11. Memoirs of a Space Traveler...

...include some voyages from that collection. All the translations and versions and who-knows mean my library has some happy overlap.

And I think I knew Dr. Diagoras before he got famous.

[MisterP]

13. also, half of Futurama's episodes come from him

[Junkdrawer]

12. Did you see that Audible just did a re-translation of Solaris?

At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.

http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B0053ZT602

I have it and it is a good audiobook.

[Octafish]

14. All your neutrinos are belong to us.

Since first reading that book, I've been able to notice the visitors even Gibarian would enjoy meeting.

Thank you for the heads-up on the new translation, Junkdrawer. Your rec is one audiobook I'm going to ask Santa for this year.