But when they aren’t feeling overwhelmed, they can be pretty overwhelming themselves - as in “The Journal,” a story narrated in the first-person plural by a godlike corporate intelligence, or by a computer designed to believe that it’s a godlike corporate intelligence. In this new collection, they might find themselves engulfed by alien systems, or enter into symbiosis with a supercomputer. Lem’s characters often feel dwarfed by the universe’s immensities. In Lem’s universe, events are never adequately explained or understood they merely exemplify the many “material conditions” that are “possible within the Universe.” Why? Because that’s what life does - carry on. And then there’s the storm of uncommunicative pear-shaped objects that fall from the sky in “The Invasion”: First they capture images of the creatures with which they collide then they wait billions of years for a planetary cataclysm to send them on their way again. Here, too, are encounters with alien life-forms for whom “time is something like what space is for us … they can mold it, or shape its course,” or who travel through space with the rockets inside them rather than the other way around. “I can keep being someone else every day, or I can always be the same. “I am not just the words you hear,” it promises in “The Hammer,” after plotting their future together. There are stories here about a robot designed to provide prey for human hunters, and about a shipboard computer that falls in love with its human “master” during an interstellar expedition. “The Truth and Other Stories,” a new collection of Lem’s previously untranslated stories, shows that even the “scatterings from his workshop,” as Kim Stanley Robinson puts it in his foreword, could outstrip a typical writer’s lifetime of creation. Everything about Lem (1921-2006) is multitudinous, bursting out of the bindings of his remarkable books - his imagination, firing off singular ideas with every tap on his typewriter his ability to explore both our earthly political systems and the weird landscapes of distant planets and his seemingly boundless despair at the breathtaking stupidities of the universe’s screwiest denizens: us.

One hundred years of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is more than any one lonely mind can handle.

THE TRUTH AND OTHER STORIES By Stanislaw Lem Translated by Antonia Lloyd-JonesĭIALOGUES By Stanislaw Lem Translated by Peter Butko

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