R. I. P. Stanislaw Lem

One of the central notions of my book, The Blog Ahead, is that the blogosphere is a modern technological equivalent to Teilhard de Chardin’s more mystical notion of the noosphere.  Very few people knew what to do with de Chardin’s notions when they were first published, but one who did take the idea and run with it in his masterful science fiction was Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.  Lem believed that machines would evolve into entities indistinguishable from human beings.  His 1961 novel Solaris, which was first made into a film in 1971 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and more recently re-made by Steven Soderbergh (starring George Clooney), was about a space ship full of astronauts who come to a new planet, where the sentient being is an intelligent ocean that can read the psychologies and memory banks of individuals near it.  Lem was an exceedingly original science fiction writer, and would be much more well known had he not written in Polish.  He does have a website in both Polish and English.  A beginner’s biography of him can be found here, but it was written before he passed away.  That occurred recently in Warsaw at the age of 84.