NationStates Jolt Archive

Today is a sad day. Stanislaw Lem, the leading Polish SF writer and philosopher died, aged 85. In his visionary works he has foreseen much of the advancements of the 20th and 21st century. His most famous books include 'Solaris', 'the Invincible', 'Star Diaries', 'Robot Fairytales' and 'Tales of Pilot Pirx'. He was to Europe what Philip K. Dick was to the US. One of the greatest Poles has passed away. May he rest among the stars.

Truly a sad day for Sci-Fi as one of its greatest masters passes away.

Ijon Tichy! No! :( He was so brilliant. I'm going to go out for a dinner and drinks in his honor -- with Polish vodka.

Meh.
Don't know who the fuck he is and we all die eventually.

Ijon Tichy! No! :( He was so brilliant. I'm going to go out for a dinner and drinks in his honor -- with Polish vodka.
He was a credit to both his field and a Legend for geting things past the Soviet Censors.

Much Vodka in his honor.

The man was a genius. May he rest in peace.

Let him be remembered with Asimov, Heinlein, Dick and Stapledon. One of the true masters.

Today is a sad day. Stanislaw Lem, the leading Polish SF writer and philosopher died, aged 85. In his visionary works he has foreseen much of the advancements of the 20th and 21st century. His most famous books include 'Solaris', 'the Invincible', 'Star Diaries', 'Robot Fairytales' and 'Tales of Pilot Pirx'. He was to Europe what Philip K. Dick was to the US. One of the greatest Poles has passed away. May he rest among the stars.
didn't he also write the "Lensman" series?

Here is an absolute gem by Master Lem. Told you he was a genius.


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.

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, converse, 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 a squared cosine 2 phi!

S. Lem

Truly a pity. He will not be forgotten.

didn't he also write the "Lensman" series?

No, that was EE 'Doc' Smith who passed away long ago.

Ah well, as regards Lem, at least we still have his books. I even have the pleasure of still having a couple of titles by him to track down.