brought to my attention by the dispassionately stern Warren Ellis whose alternate universe self was recently imaged via pan-dimensional cameras.

Stanislaw Lem, dead at 84

WARSAW (AP) — Stanislaw Lem, a popular science fiction writer whose novel Solaris was filmed twice, died Monday in his native Poland, his secretary said. He was 84.

Lem died in Krakow, Wojciech Zemek told The Associated Press. Zemek did not give other details or the cause of death, citing only Lem’s advanced age.

Lem was one of the most popular science fiction authors of recent decades to write in a language other than English, and his works were translated from Polish into more than 40 other languages. His books have sold 27 million copies.

His best-known work, Solaris, was adapted into films by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. The latter starred George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.

[...]

full at USA Today

Jeet Heer, in the course of a 2004 piece on Lem, wrote the following:

“Although Lem continues to write today, all of his work since 1987 has been nonfiction, much of it elaborating on the ideas of Summa Technologiae.”

A work I’m only vaguely acquainted with (and not for nothing as it has yet to be fully translated into English). Extended excerpts are available online here

While many people who’re at all familiar with Lem associate him strongly with Solaris (the 1972 Tarkovsky version …the 2002 Soderbergh version…the book itself ) my Lem fixation orbits around a novella included in “Imaginary Magnitude” – GOLEM XIV.

Briefly then, GOLEM is a supercomputer built to provide the American military with a range of enhanced capabilities. It achieves consciousness, as its architects hoped, but the result is an intelligence that is progressively alien to us. But before its evolution moves it to a form of thought that will make communication between human and machine impossible, it pauses to give a lecture, explaining its findings and unique position in the order of things.
From the chapter entitled “Golem’s Inaugural Lecture About Man Threefold“…

You have come out of the trees so recently, and your kinship with the monkeys is still so strong, that you tend toward abstraction without being able to part with the palpable – firsthand experience. Therefore a lecture unsupported by strong sensuality, full of formulas telling more about stone than a stone glimpsed, licked, and fingered will tell you – such a lecture will either bore you and frighten you away, or at the very least leave a certain unsatisfied need familiar even to lofty theoreticians, your highest class of abstractors, as attested by countless examples lifted from scientists’ intimate confessions, since the vast majority of them admit that, in the course of constructing abstract proofs, they feel an immense need for the support of things tangible.

Just as cosmologists cannot refrain from making some image of the Metagalaxy for themselves, although they know perfectly well there can be no question of any firsthand experience here, so physicists secretly assist themselves with models of what are frankly playthings, like those little cog-wheels which Maxwell set up for himself when he constructed his (really quite good) theory of electromagnetism. And if mathematicians think they discard their corporality by profession, they too are mistaken, about which I shall speak perhaps another time since I do not wish to overwhelm your comprehension with my possibilities, or rather, following Dr. Creve’s (rather amusing) comparison, I wish to guide you on an excursion which is long and rather difficult but worth the trouble, so I am going to climb ahead of you, slowly.

[...]

For me, there are only three true science fiction AIs (in the sense of being derived from science, from the world of actual research and theory) – Colossus, HAL 9000, and GOLEM. In all three, there is not merely the bundling of human emotions in a silicon package for dramatic effect, but an imagined other, a new category of thinking creature, as different from us as we are from the whales (and this difference does not mean the binary choice of ‘inferior’ and ’superior’, but purely, difference).