Stanislaw Lem Dies in Krakow 296
1Eye wrote to mention that well-known SF author Stanislaw Lem passed away today. The Polish author was 84, and was probably best known for the novel 'Solaris'. From the AP article: "Solaris, published in 1961 and set on an isolated space stations, was made into a film epic 10 years later by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and into a 2002 Hollywood remake shot by Steven Sodebergh and starring
George Clooney."
More than Solaris (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the first science fiction authors to truly show us that science fiction is more than just a genre of space novels, it's a way to place one's self outside of reality so that it can be safely analyzed and commented on from a distance.
Rest in peace. I eagerly await the day you raise to the ranks of Asimov & Tolkien when the world will remember you as more than "that guy who wrote a story for a George Clooney movie."
I know it will happen.
Re:More than Solaris (Score:2)
Yeah, I really enjoyed a lot of the Sci-Fi series that did this, too. Too bad Hollywood hasn't caught onto this.
Take a wonderful book with an underlying subtext about politics and military mentality and turn it into a teen flick full of guts and gore.
Who ever wrote that s
Re:More than Solaris (Score:2)
This is highly subjective, but a lot of people think that movie is a brilliantly campy satire of the book... which was itself quite possibly meant as something of a satire of a fascist military mentality. I'd agree with this, myself.
I saw the movie first and thought it was unnecessarily cheesy and wasn't a big fan. A couple of years later I read the book. I was pretty blown away by a) ho
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, not really. There's not a scrap of irony in the whole book. If you want some irony and satire, try The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which is also his best book), or Job, A Comedy of Justice. Starship Troopers was written as a polemic in response the ending of nuclear testing by the U.S., and it's meant 100% seriously; it also has nothing at all to do with fascism. Check out the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] if you want to
Re:More than Solaris (Score:2)
Re:More than Solaris (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More than Solaris (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Insightful)
well, there was that movie (and I mean the original, not the remake). I saw it back in college and loved it...got it at home but haven't gotten around to watching it yet. (I also have the clooney film, was a $5 xmas gift, just for completness' sake).
Anyway, could part of the problem with Solaris be that the translation isn't as good as his others? As far as I know, the only English translation of Solaris was based on a
Re:More than Solaris (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, having read both in the splendid Spanish translation, direct from the Polish (Minotauro, Argentina), I respectfully disagree.
"The Ciberyad" is, as you said, delightful, but "Solaris" is deep.
It looks like the (in)famous English translation was horrible indeed, because "Solaris" is appreciated very differently by English and non-English speaking
Re:More than Solaris (Score:2)
Rest in peace. I eagerly await the day you raise to the ranks of Asimov & Tolkien when the world will remember you as more than "that guy who wrote a story for a George Clooney movie."
You mean, like how most of the world probably thinks Asimov is that guy who wrote a story for that Will Smith movie?
Re:More than Solaris (Score:2)
Though you may think that's bad, had that movie not been made, it would have been, "the guy who wrote the story for Bincentennial man".
Robots that want to feel and screw girls. Human emotions = special is the worst kind of science fiction.
Re:More than Solaris (Score:2)
Card... (Score:2)
My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:5, Interesting)
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:5, Interesting)
What really blows my mind is that Lem presumably wrote that poem in Polish, and Michael Kandel translated it (and other poems and stories) to English.
It's astounding how well Kandel translated the poetry, so it still rhymes, scans well, and makes perfect sense (unlike most other poetry). Kandel also translated a lot of Lem's other stuff ABOUT words and language, in Cyberiad and other books.
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:2)
Rest in Peace. Trurl and Klapauzius, Ijon and the machine that could build everything starting with n, you'll be his voice for ages for to come. May you continue to enlighten us.
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:2)
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:2, Funny)
Re:My favourite Lem novel was "The Cyberiad" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
I've never read the book, but the George Clooney Solaris movie is one of the best films ever made. I'm quite sure of this since everyone seems to hate it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
Solaris, the George Clooney version, is an amazing movie. It was suffocating, caustrophobic, intense.
I remember in the end, when he thinks about the reincarnation of his wife on the space station, and he makes mention to, "remembering her wrong". It was this harrowing idea of living in our own heads, utterly unaware of the truths, the realities of those even closest to us. This woman, whom he professed to love above all, and he didn't even remember her as s
Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
Or, as Stanislaw Lem himself put it in an interview: I didn't write a novel about the sexual problems of humans in zero gravity.
Re:Solaris THE BOOK is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
the only works of lem i really like are about pilot pirx. and maybe futurological congress
Re:Solaris is a masterpiece of fiction (Score:2)
The old guard passes away... (Score:5, Interesting)
He had very little respect for the Golden Age writers, calling their works "kitsch." Most of his attitude toward the gigantic American SF oeuvre was no doubt attributable to the fact that, writing in the Soviet bloc, he had to use great care in expressing his ideas lest he be subject to government censorship, and thus thought the "frivolous" nature of American writers was wasteful of time and print.
He was greatly admired by writers such as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Harlan Ellison, however, and his works are widely available in good English translations today.
Re:The old guard passes away... (Score:3, Interesting)
If by "greatly admired" you mean "reported to the FBI"...
"Speed: It will turn you into your parents." -Frank Zappa
And the admiration was mutual: read "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case - with Exceptions" and "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans [depauw.edu]", from Microworlds [art.net].
From Stanislaw Lem's [www.lem.pl] web site:
On September 2, 1974 Philip K. Dick sent the following letter to the FBI (Please keep in mind Mr. Dick was most probably suffering from schizophrenia):
Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2,
Re:The old guard passes away... (Score:3, Funny)
That kind of paranoid conspiracy crap sounds like a Philip K Dick novel. Oh wait, we ARE discussing Philip K Dick's writings -- to the FBI! Not a novel exactly, but certainly one of his more interesting short stories.
The ranting anonymous cowards seems to have a few good points about The Party running things here in the United States... Until he gets to the part about blaming Michael Moore for the fact that we're losing our constitutionally protected freedoms and going to war based on lies...
Iraq is
Re:The old guard passes away... (Score:2)
So, I guess he was just a Philip K. Dickhead.
Re:The old guard passes away... (Score:2)
Re:The old guard passes away... (Score:2)
PKD must have had confused Stanislaw Lem with the collective communist conspiracy that is AntiORP [everything2.com].
-Don
A Very Impactful Author (Score:2)
Re:A Very Impactful Author (Score:5, Informative)
There's a story behind this. Tarkovsky was allowed to leave Russian to attend the World's Fair in Japan (a *remarkable* achievement for that period of Iron Curtain history!). He had hoped to film futuristic scenes from the fair, but due to delays with passports and importing their film equipment, they arrived too late, missing the event! Rather than go home from this hugely expensive (both in terms of money and political capitol spent) trip empty-handed, they filmed highway scenes with a hand-held and added sound effects. Your friend is correct. To the average Russian, the "modern" Japanese highway system (not to mention it's automobiles) would have seemed very futuristic. In the same way that the Modified Ford Taurus police cruisers from 1984's Terminator now seem dated, so does this scene.
Re:A Very Impactful Author (Score:2, Interesting)
He will be missed! (Score:3, Informative)
Great author (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great author (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, actually neither is most American SF. True, this was a staple of a great deal of American film SciFi (read "sciffy") of the 50s and early 60s, but then most B-movies were corny and cliche' no matter WHAT the genre.
For all the Euro-elitism, American SF has always been of uniform high quality, if only because there was so much of it.
FWIW, can you name ANOTHER well-regarded Polish SF writer?
Re:Great author (Score:2)
From the search on Amazon it seems like english speaking world don't have a chance to read anything of his yet. ('The Hexer' based on his stories may have english subs but it is one really bad movie)
Re:Great author (Score:2)
Re:Great author (Score:2)
Princesses in Space? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sturgeon's Law (Score:2)
"Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud. That's because ninety percent of everything is crud." -- Theodore Sturgeon
who? (Score:2)
You're contradicting yourself. "Of uniform[ly] high quality" means "there hasn't been any bad American SF". But you just said that there has been (and there obviously has been).
What you probably meant is that there is a lot of good American SciFi, which is true. Nevertheless, I can't think of a US author that I would rate more highly than Lem: Lem combined technical insight with humor an
Re:Great author (Score:4, Insightful)
about interesting authors past and present. Most of them haven't been translated
to English, yet some of them surely will be.
If we talk about Iron Courtain authors, Janusz Zajdel (died in 1985) is a must.
He's novels like Limes Inferior or Paradyzja show great deal about falsehoods of
governments, absurdities of total crontrol, etc. Much like Aldus Huxley's Brave
New World, yet written from within iron courtain. A must. Translated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_A._Zajdel>
From current authors I would recommend Jacek Dukaj. His all books are original and
different from eachother, he combines Gaiman's atmosphere with Dick's imagination
and Zelazny's plot making... Yhh, well, highly original author, each and every
book is a delight. A definite must read. Don't know if he's been translated (and
the translation would be hard, as he, for example, uses special grammar for post-human
beings (think: Brinn's uplift saga, only it's not vocabulary but grammar).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukaj>
And finally, Edmund Wnuk-Lipiski with his Apostezjon trilogy. One of the best things
I have read. It moved me deeply, as it brought deep insight on religion (among other
things), given from the sci-fi perspective...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Wnuk-Lipi%C5%
Oh, and it's also worth to mention that Andrzej Sapkowski is one of the most known
world-wide Polish authors, though it is not a sci-fi, but a fantasy and as such it
has a bit different ideas and features to work on. It is good, but in my opinion
if you are looking for something which does The Thing like Stanisaw Lem's work did,
you should rather look for the former three authors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapkowski>
Re:Great author (Score:2)
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Return from the Stars (Score:2)
He certainly could tell a good tale, I'm sure he'll be missed.
Re:Return from the Stars (Score:2)
Which SF writers changed the way you view things? (Score:5, Interesting)
John Brunner (the internet, in the mid 70s, with privacy concerns for all. OMG)
Philip K Dick (mad as a bag of hammers)
Ray Bradbury (mostly for his non-SF short stories, funnily enough, but for Farenheit 451)
Robert Heinlein (just for the idea that when you don't know what to do, keep the readers on their toes by saying "the door dilates". Got to love that)
Fredric Brown (short stories about time travel that work)
Neal Stephenson (real geeks, real simple (lousy endings though... ))
there are many more, these are the few I can think of off the top of my head.
Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing (Score:2)
I can't watch any news about the western world's increasingly paranoid and delusional wars any more without being reminded that, in warfare, the biggest danger is of becoming indistinguishable from your enemy.
Oh, and Eric Blair. Not a science fiction author, but wrote a certain book which is still a brilliant work of science fiction in my eyes. Of the Ballard-style observation of a civilisation readjusted in some horrifically plausible manner...
Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing (Score:2)
I bought The Algebraist in Paris during US embargo, and it did ruin some of my trip by keeping me up all night reading it. But it seemed too long per plot twist delivered. Don't get me wrong, I live for books that surprise me. But a lot of that was unreliable narrator, and the cosmology seemed direc
Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing (Score:2)
Jedidiah.
Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing (Score:2)
You left out the guy who pointed that out and analyzed that.
Samuel R. Delany; bear with the introduction.
From Triton (now apparently called Trouble on Triton), Bantam, 1976 (1976!) page 333:
Norman Spinrad (Score:2)
Re:Which SF writers changed the way you view thing (Score:2)
Re:Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge (Score:2)
Lem was a truly amazing writer (Score:5, Interesting)
Lem was my favorite writer [art.net], and I'm sad to hear he's gone.
SimCity was inspired by one of the stories in Cyberiad (about the despot for whom the constructors made a si mulated kingdom for him to rule over, that broke out of the box and took over). Nobody can figure out how he writes in Polish, yet the English translations of his books are full of brilliant poetic puns and neological phonetic jokes. He's got a great translator, Michael Kandel, to say the least. In memory of Stanislaw Lem, here are some of my favorite poems composed by the Electronic Bard from Cyberiad:
Klapaucius [art.net] witnessed the first trial run of Trurl's [art.net] poetry machine, the Elecronic Bard. Here are the some of the wonderful poems it instantly composed to Klapaucius's specifications:
This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:
This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!
A poem all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the Headless ... (the description and the poem are unfinished, thanks to the quick intervention of Trurl.)
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.
Femfatalatron 1.0 Product
Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer (Score:2)
Russian. The Russian version of poem in 'g' made more sense:
Gruzniy Gen'ka generator
grozno gryz goroh gortsyami
In general, the feel is different. My guess is that the beauty of Lem was the fact
that his writing was universal yet allowed for fine tuning to any culture
via translations. I think he was the greatest SF writer ever, but all
the same my hat is off to his translators.
Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer (Score:2, Interesting)
Still, the underlying ideas and visi
Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer (Score:4, Informative)
While the English translations are trully brilliant, Lem should be read in a Slavic language [wikipedia.org] to be fully appreciated. He constantly plays with words and makes up new ones, which IMHO are not translatable to English.
It is difficult to explain - a language expert would do it much better than me. In English Lem is still interesting and funny, but something subtle is missing. It bugs me that there is no way for English readers to ever fully enjoy it.
In all honesty I don't speak Polish, although I can understand some, but I have read Lem in Bulgarian, Russian and English.
Re:Lem was a truly amazing writer (Score:2)
One correction for the story about the king and his mechanical kingdom. Trurl encountered a deposed tyrant and built for him this model kingdom to rule over. Only he made it too real. The characters were done so faithfully and realistically that their suffering under the tyrant's rule was no longer simulated but became real. This is why the story is subtitled, "how Trurl's own perfection led to no good". It was one of the first explorations of thi
Automatthew's Friend (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the beginning of Lem's short story "Automatthew's Friend," 1977, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel.
Farewell to a great thinker and writer (Score:2)
Memoirs is essentially a satire about a society with too many self-deceptions, and how reality has a way of unraveling even though society refuses to notice or acknowledge any problem. Vacuum is a collection of book reviews -- reviews of books that never existed; in fact some could not possibly exist. These brief descriptions don't do Lem's books credit. Read them yourself; they're devilishly clever.
The Matrix owes a lot to Lem (Score:2, Interesting)
His Master's Voice (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solaris in English (Score:2)
I'm guessig both: Polish Solaris > French Solaris > English Solaris;
Fan sub, anyone?
Lem on Isothemes and Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
Lem defined Isothemes:
Lem predicted Wikipedia (an encyclopedia so up-to-date, it can predict the future):
I'll remember him not for 'Solaris' (Score:4, Interesting)
Some great books (Score:2)
Re:Some great books (Score:2)
The whole space was dominated by various robotic species and the two Great Constructors were no exception. Only some forgotten corners still contained mostly forgotten and despised (and very rarely mentioned) protein-based 'wet and splashy' lifeforms.
The Alienness of the Alien (Score:3, Insightful)
I always loved that about his stories. I'm sad he's gone.
Rest in peace (Score:2)
A couple of links to bibliographies and excerpts:
http://www.lem.pl/cyberiadinfo/english/dziela/dzie la.htm [www.lem.pl] (his official site)
http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/lem/lem.html [rpi.edu]
Some of my favourite works are The Cyberiad [www.lem.pl], The Futurological Congress [www.lem.pl], and of course The Star Diaries [www.lem.pl]. I have a
Let's interview Michael Kandel (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey Editors, let's interview him!
(To be honest, the translations are so good that I always kind of thought Lem just wrote in English... even though the Kandel's name is right there in the book)
Re:Let's interview Michael Kandel (Score:2)
No matter what, if you won't catch the meanings behind "Trurl's consultation" (one of the humorous travels of Trurl and Klapaucjusz) if you're not a Pole who lived in Eastern Bloc. Just impossible.
Re:Let's interview Michael Kandel (Score:3, Insightful)
most incredible short story by S. Lem (Score:3, Interesting)
An extremely thought provoking story it reminds me of the comment in Time magazine that S. Lem "is the best writer, in any language, of science fiction in the 20th century".
The level of his discourse is so far above that of other writers that I hardly consider them in the same breath. He never considered science fiction as being just adventure stories set in the future but rather as an avenue to explore new worlds of thought.
May he rest in peace.
One of the very best (Score:2)
He was definitely one of the few authors with whom you had to constantly explain to people: "I know it's SF, but it's also 'real' literature!"
SOLARIS (Score:2)
Lem was one of my most favorite authors, it is too bad that he never saw a movie made from SOLARIS that he liked. Tarkovskii was too family oriented, Hollywood was completely off base. The point of the book was quite simple, really, we cannot expect to be able to really commu
SLOWLARIS (Score:2)
I think you may have confused Lem's book "Solaris" with an operating system named "Slowlaris". They are totally different.
-Don
Arthouse movie, Hollywood budget (Score:2)
Here's some box office data [imdb.com] from IMDB. While it isn't too easy to interpret, it looks to me like it grossed well under its production cost (perhaps about 1/2 to 2/3.) The return to the movie makers will be a fraction of that.
Re:Arthouse movie, Hollywood budget (Score:2)
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Score:2)
I started with Futurological Congress, loved the Cyberiad and Fiasco,
but Memoirs Found in a Bathtub stuck with me most. Creepy and twisted,
but when life gets to be creepy and twisted you will recall this one...
Also - don't forget One Human Minute. Probably a good first Lem book...
with apologies, a quote from Calvin (Score:2)
/goodnight, funny-man
Stanislaw Lem: a communist conspiracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Being Polish, I grew up with Lem's prose. A lot has been said on that already here, so I'll make it short. Lem's prose was unbelievably diverse, ranging from "classic" SF stories in the archetypic SF setup (rockets, pilots, robots etc. in the Pirx series) through grotesque and postmodern, humorous and twisted stories about the Ijon Tichy, to the utterly fantastic Cyberiade, the XX century version of the Grimm tales; don't forget the critiques on non-existing books, which remind me so much of Jorge Luis Borges.
However, not only the forms were diverse; Lem pondered upon a whole lot of subjects. Just to name a few examples: he envisioned VR technology in the early sixties, and analysed its impact both, seriously and in a very hillarious manner. He belonged to the first who recognized how our society relies on information storage, and the motive of a civilisation collapse due to the destruction of the information storages (paper, in his early works, and computers / networks later on). His thoughts on the possibilities on communications with aliens (or, lack of such possibilities) are unique and very intelligent.
His last book, printed in 1989, is called "Fiasco". The story follows the lines of one of the first books by Lem, called "The Magellans Cloud" -- an optimistic, communist utopy, which ends in the first contact between humans and aliens. However, "Fiasco" (the title says it all) is utterly pesimistic, and its bottom line is that we cannot really communicate not only with the aliens, but even with each other. The book contains several plays on earlier prose of Lem, including fragments of his early stories; moreover, the bold Pilot Pirx is killed in the first chapter.
Lem never went back to writing prose. Personally, I think that with "Fiasco" he conveys the message that everything he had to tell he told us; but the communication with us, the readers, the aliens, was a Fiasco after all.
Cheers,
January
Theme of the insurmountable communication gap (Score:3, Interesting)
POPE JOHN PAUL II (Score:3, Interesting)
Odd how different paths inetersect...
From: "Stanislaw Lem" page on "Celebrity Atheists" website, last modified 19 Jun 2005 (http://www.celebatheists.com/wiki/index.php?title =Stanislaw_Lem [celebatheists.com]; viewed 24 August 2005):
Trained to be a physician, and "brought up with the scientific outlook" by his father who was also a physician, he subsequently "spent many hours over coffee arguing about God" with his friend Karol Wojtyla who taught theology in Cracow and who is now better known as Pope John-Paul II. In an interview, Lem indicated his thinking on religion: "for moral reasons I am an atheist -- for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally" (L. W. Michaelson, "A Conversation with Stanislaw Lem": Amazing (Jan. 1981): 116-19. Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, 7, 2 (1984): 218-37. Also see Raymond Federman, "An Interview with Stanislaw Lem," Science-Fiction Studies, 10 (1983): 2-14).
Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago (Score:2)
Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago (Score:3)
Re:Uh... Octavia Butler died a couple weeks ago (Score:2)
Because you were to lazy to post?
Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ? (Score:2)
You're also trying to take Mickiewicz from them knowing that he's considered Poland's foremost writer and poet who helped maintain the spirit of the nation during some very trying times (Russia/Prussia/Austria 19th century annexion). FYI Lithuenia was in
Re:Wasn't he Ukrainian instead ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mickiewicz wrote "Lithuana, my fatherland", making it doubtful.
Sklodowska-Curie after marrying Curie wasn't so much Polish.
Chopin could be considered french with a bit of stretching.
Copernicus being Prussian was Polish just the same as Texan is American. (Poland is a country binding several regions)
But no matter how much you try to twist facts, Lem was Polish, considering himself Polish, being born in a Polish family, spending great most o
Re:About time! (Score:2)