Lem: Like Shalespeare to Heinlein?
7th May 2006
This writer I think overstates Stanislaw Lem’s influence on R.A.H.:
Funny thing, then, that the best science fiction writer in the world, the least predictable and most innovative, the writer who is to Robert Heinlein and Roger Zelazny what Shakespeare is to, say, Stephen King and Rod McKuen, was Polish. He’s never been particularly popular in America, but much of the world, especially Europe and his native Poland, knows Stanislaw Lem as the genius his work so clearly proclaims. He was often curmudgeonly in his openly disdainful opinions of his peers, but his work reveals many more sides of a mind that explored science, philosophy and fairy tales with equal abandon.
May 10th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
I suspect that what he means is that Lem is so insuperably superior to all the other rifraff who pen that sci-fi junk that no comparison is possible.
It can be noted that the Lem affair came about because although Lem said he wanted to raise the literary level of these Yankee sci-fi writers, he appears to have made no effort to actually write or otherwise communicate with SFWA until the (possibly hyped) article expressing disdain which so ired the members of SFWA.