The Polish author Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) is probably finest recognized for his novel Solaris (1961) – a visionary work of ‘first contact’ science fiction later tailored for movie by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, and once more by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. Nevertheless, as this video essay explores, Solaris represents only one small piece of Lem’s sprawling and prolific profession as a author of each peculiar and imaginative works of science fiction, and of speculative works of philosophy that anticipated most of the applied sciences and anxieties of the trendy world. Tailored from an essay for the London Evaluation of Books by the US author Jonathan Lethem, 5 Lems distills a protracted profession into 5 distinct classes. In doing so, it explores Lem’s insights into the human situation, in addition to how his imaginative ‘fairy tales and folks tales for the long run’ supplied an antidote to the ‘technocratic triumphalism, manifest future, libertarian survivalist bullshit’ of American-dominated mid-Twentieth-century science fiction.
