The Star Diaries

Finished the majority of Stanislaw Lem’s incredibly episodic The Star Diaries. Clocking in at a densely packed 319 pages, these dozen tales require quite a bit of effort, but any energy put forth is rewarded exponentially. They simply fascinate and surprise at every turn of the page. What ideas! And big ideas, too! This is true-blue science fiction, SF at its most ideal. Each “travelogue” of the collection is equal part societal critique, rockets and blasters space opera, and “what if” wonderings brought to their strange but logical conclusions.

Lem (1921 - 2006) was a much-lauded Polish writer, primarily of science fiction, who arguably did his best work from the 1950s to the 70s. Not overly familiar with his work, but I do remember attempting his Pirx as a little one (a rare mistep – way way over my head). I did see the Soderbergh-Clooney version of Solaris, for whatever that’s worth. But I’ve read that within the framework of science fiction Lem has many voices. Here he’s best described as a quirky, good-natured satirist. Even more genuinely refreshing than the head-slapping turns each tale takes are the burst of laugh-out-loud humor found every couple of pages or so. Douglas Adams is probably the funniest writer I’ve ever read; Lem is Adams through a translator. But where Adams is a comedian using SF motifs, Lem comes across more as a Renaissance scientist-philosopher with an incredibly sharp sense of humor.

What type of “ideas” am I talking about? Well, if you plan on ever reading this work and want the pleasure of genuine surprise, you may want to skip the rest of the review. If not, let me suggest the following:

- An astronaut stuck in a time loop who meets different versions of himself over a 24-hour period

- A renegade navigational computer that starts a robotic society which speaks Chaucerian English – because that’s the only database available to it

- An alien species who voluntarily eliminates individuality – indeed, the punishment for most crimes is to be sentenced to individual identity – and bizarrely attains eternal life

- A man forced into the 27th century with the task of reconstructing the history of the earth, only to have everything gloriously go wrong despite all his best efforts, resulting in, well, the earth as we know it

- A device which slows down or speeds up time, which our hero uses to keep his head in a very violent feudal society

- A planet that suffers from extremely devastating meteor showers to the point where its not uncommon to lose your life – well, one of them, at least – at any given moment

And lots more. Often, each story contains multiple themes and storylines, and often they’re tied together at the end in unexpected ways. I particularly liked the details Lem inserts – such as that robot race’s term for living creatures: mucilids – and though the names of planets or people tends to be very hokey space operish, I take it as tongue-in-cheek homage to the pulps he no doubt read during the Bronze and Silver Age of SF.

A note about translation: Don’t be scared! Lem obviously wrote in Polish, so this work here is translated by a man named Michael Kandel. Don’t know nuthin’ about him, save for the fact that he must be brilliant in his own right. Not only is he faced with the task of simply transcribing words and sentences from Polish to English, he must get the whole “spirit” of the work right. In Lem’s case, that’s a certain lighthearted humor, and Kandel manages to accomplish this. He also gets special kudos from me for “The Eleventh Voyage” because he has the additional chore of translating Polish into the 14th century English of Geoffrey Chaucer, and that he has to make legible – and funny – to 20th century readers. A daunting task that I thought was well-done. Before delving into other Lemian works, I plan on making sure Kandel is the translator.

The stories vary greatly in length and depth, but the grades I gave them fluctuated only in the narrow range from B-minus to A-plus. Overall, I give the collection a solid A. Find it and read it if you are a serious SF aficionado.


PS - the caption at the top of the picture of The Star Diaries above has it exactly right: Lem is very, very much reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges.