In memoriam: Stanislaw Lem

This has already been a sad year for sf, with the loss of Octavia Butler, and now Stanislaw Lem, who died yesterday at 84.

It is sad that so many of the references to his passing cite him for only the most visible, mass-market part of his work, Solaris. I want to remember and celebrate one of his later collections of short fiction, Imaginary Magnitude, which is as close to true literature as anything sf has yet produced.

In this collection of summaries and introductions to future texts, Lem approaches a perfection of form and function in sf storytelling. They are clean, spare, uncluttered with exposition and infodump, and yet unutterably dense, compelling visions of intensely imagined futures, narrated entirely through artifact (in a way very reminiscent of another of sf's great literary works, LeGuin's Always Coming Home.)

One of the key stories features a description of AI-written stories, "bitistic" literature, where, once the computer has intuited the splines and textures of an author's oeuvre, it can continue to produce the works which the author never lived to complete. It is a great shame that we have no such device to see what else might have come from Lem's great mind. I'll miss his vision, and so will science fiction.