So the analogy would be closer to watching a goldilocks planet from the edge of the event horizon of a black hole.
Edit: Here is a snippet in which Klaupacius challenges Trurl's latest invention, the electronic bard, to compose "a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics," and gets a response: https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jbuhler/cyberiad.html
FWIW by favorite Strugatsky novels were Hard to Be a God, and The Doomed City.
For another example along these lines, there's David Brin's "Sundiver": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96472.Sundiver
Hm, interesting. Still impressive since he had to write the poem.
https://mwichary.medium.com/translating-a-stanislaw-lem-stor...
>Marcin Wichary: This is a backstory of why I translated Stanisław Lem’s short story One hundred and thirty-seven seconds.
>Translations of [Lem’s] works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns. — Wikipedia
https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec...
>One hundred and thirty-seven seconds: A short story by Stanisław Lem published in 1976, translated from Polish in 2015 by Marcin Wichary
>Translator’s note: This is my first translation of a Stanisław Lem story. I tried to stay true to the spirit of the original as much as possible, which means original occasional odd idioms, mismatched units, and kilometer-long sentences. The story was published in 1976, and predates desktop publishing and the Internet. To the best of my knowledge, Lem has never visited America. If you are interested, read more about why I translated this story and the translation process.
Marcin actually stalked Stanislaw Lem in person when he was a boy:
>Memoirs of a train traveller: The day I stalked Stanisław Lem
>[...] It must’ve been early 1990s when I read somewhere that Stanisław Lem actually lives in Cracow and quickly, with a naïveté characteristic of a 14-year-old, I formulated a plan — I would go and visit him while we were there.
Then he went on years later to create the Lem Google Doodle! (Not to mention the PacMac one too!)
Stanisław Lem on Google’s homepage:
https://mwichary.medium.com/stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepa...
60th Anniversary of Stanislaw Lem's First Publication:
https://www.google.com/doodles/60th-anniversary-of-stanislaw...
Interactive Lem Google Doodle:
https://www.google.com/logos/lem/
Stanislaw Lem Google Doodle Album:
https://get.google.com/albumarchive/113565878895173133979/al...
I have always wanted to ask Michael Kandel how he translated the poetry of the Electric Bard from The First Sally of Cyberiad.
Especially the one that is "A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
I was curious to see that poem in the original Polish, even though I don't know that language, just to compare them. I'd much appreciate hearing from a native Polish speaker how they compare.
Wonderful Poems:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/WonderfulPoems.h...
Horrible Poems:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/HorriblePoems.ht...
I asked Marcin about it, and he linked me to the original Polish version of the Electric Bard -- try translating it to English with google translate to appreciate how astronomically more excellent Michael Kandel's translation is than a machine translation. I really wish I could read and appreciate it in the original Polish!
https://web.archive.org/web/20190814065711/http://niniwa22.c...
Michael Kandel's Wonderful Translation:
This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:
The Petty and the Small
Are overcome with gall
When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
Klapaucius too, I ween,
Will turn the deepest green
To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.
Trurl was thrashing here and there, suddenly something crackled,
the press and the machine very matter-of-factly, calmly, declared:
Envy, pride, egoism forces us to be petty.
He will experience this by desiring to go with Electricity
In competition, a certain simpleton.
But Klapaucius
The giant will overtake the spirit like a turtle in a car.
Stanislaw Lem has finally gotten the translations his genius deserves
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stanislaw...
>Lem’s fiction is filled with haunting, prescient landscapes. In these reissued and newly issued translations — some by the pitch-perfect Lem-o-phile, Michael Kandel — each sentence is as hard, gleaming and unpredictable as the next marvelous invention or plot twist. It’s hard to keep up with Lem’s hyper-drive of an imagination but always fun to try.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...
Here are some of Lem's drawings:
https://english.lem.pl/gallery/lems-drawings
And Daniel Mróz's covers and illustrations:
https://english.lem.pl/gallery/mroz-drawings
And some fantastic cover art:
https://english.lem.pl/gallery/covers
And Lem's photo album:
I like my SF very hard ("Incandescence" by Greg Egan is roughly where I'd say I'm comfortable, a plausible mechanism by which a pre-industrial civilisation might discover general relativity, that novel made me cry at the end) but even when he's being totally whimsical I really enjoyed Lem.
Prawda?
Googling around isn't helping...
Anyone know?
Most anyone would have just broke down and changed jobs.
Ah, the man I want. Tell me, is "Ijon Tichy" a joke on "tachyon", or something else?
(noticed that years ago, been wondering it could not possibly be accidental, not Lem ...)
It was part of The Invincible and Other Stories according to wikipedia [0]
[0] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niezwyci%C4%99%C5%BCony_i_inne...
The word 'tichy' means 'silent' in Czech/Slovakian, and maybe in some smaller Polish dialects.
Though http://encyklopediafantastyki.pl/index.php?title=Ijon_Tichy claims that "the ancestor of Tichy was called Cichy (the silent one in Polish), but the official putting down the name in the official register was lisping"
My favorite book is "Wizja Lokalna", the title has been translated to English as 'Observation on the Spot' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observation_on_the_Spot). It's a wonderful allegory of problems related to the concept of the 'world of abundance' vs 'communism/authoritarianism'. The presented problems (ethico-sphere, abundance of material thing) are serious and well researched and described, even if in a humorous fashion.
“Aren’t you a star any longer?” asked Lucy. “I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu...
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of." [--Ramandu]
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader"
Likewise, for example, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is best in those translations that don't try to be literal but are done by witty translators.
That aside,
I just have a regular understanding of most fields in science. I know a bit here and there. More astronomy.
My field is computer science, so I have some knowledge there.
What I wonder about is if the average scifi reader expects or even could tell if something is "science" and not fantasy. Huge absurd things of course.
I have read so many different descriptions on how FTL works. I dont think (ignorance on my part) that we have a solid theory for how it can be done.
- Warping of space/time (or higher dimension),
- "portals" left by "an ancient civilization"(that sort of evades the issue)
- wormholes
- "Taming a god"
- through special cracks in space/time that only a special navigator (species) can feel.
- improbability drive (I do love Douglas Adams).
and many more.
When you read can you take the existence of FTL on just being there, do you reject the ideas fully, or do you judge it on its merits if the description extrapolates current knowledge into a future where we can FTL? (if ever)
I think hard sci-fi requires that the book universe has consistent rules and the book focuses on their consequences, while soft sci-fi focuses on stories and the rules are unspecified or don't drive the plot.
The rules don't need to be what we currently think about our universe for the book to be hard sci-fi.
This is genre fiction, and genres have rules. For example, Romance is a genre of happily ever after endings. If you write what is ostensibly a Romance novel, but the heroine realises six pages from the end that her new lover is cheating on her and so she walks away unhappily and that's it, that's not a Romance novel, a Romance imprint would reject it, if you're a big name author they'd tell you to take it to a literary fiction house - otherwise go away and rewrite with a happy ending.
In SF the rule is "What if ...?", so you absolutely can have anything, unicorns, magic spells, faster than light travel, God can be real, but the story is about what else if that was so? That's where science comes into it. OK, so there are unicorns, what's special about them, just horses with a weird horn or anything more? Do people... ride unicorns? Eat them? Or maybe the unicorns eat people.
A fantasy kingdom with a rich gold mine can be dirt poor and yet money is somehow measured in gold, the thing they have plenty of, in fantasy you needn't explain, but in SF that's either a massive error or the core thesis of a novel.
On FTL specifically. I'm not a fan for reasons Charlie Stross explained when he gave up on writing a sequel I'd kinda wanted to read some day in a setting where he'd tried to tame FTL. FTL is time travel. So, you need to either embrace that, and have arbitrary time travel in your story (good luck producing a narrative you can write down) or come up with a water tight reason nobody ever does this. That's just a high cost it usually isn't worth it.
That said, the Clockwork Rocket series by Egan does just do time travel, but it also has different spatial dimensional layout, it's set somewhere way stranger than the setting for Incandescence, which is our universe albeit not somewhere humans could ever go. Still, I wasn't enormously happy with the outcome, time travel still ends up being sort of cheating even in the framework Egan creates. They do, as hoped, solve their impending disaster by going very, very fast though. Also they fix the patriarchy, which is way harder in a world where women inherently die during the equivalent of childbirth...
I also see here some characteristic traits of Lem's plots: something we are close to but can't hope really attaining (like personally traveling inside a star), the lack of understanding from well-intentioned lay people, and the idea that there are things we try hard to understand but really can't yet by far, like an ancient Greek, even well-educated, won't understand a quantum-mechanical problem.
This, and great storytelling, as usual. I find this translation quite well made. (I wonder though how would the translators wrestle with Lem's word games, like in "Observations on the spot" or "Futurological congress".)
Also, if you feel like more Lem after reading this, I heartily recommend the '72 Solaris film if you haven't seen it. Probably one of the greatest directors (Tarkovsky) of all time filming off of one of the greatest sci-fi authors of all time. Tarkovsky likes long, slow shots the style of which is all but absent from Hollywood today, where they cut like a microtome, so it might seem dull and strange at first, but give yourself a chance to get used to his pacing.