The Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) is perhaps best known for his novel Solaris (1961) – a visionary work of ‘first contact’ science fiction later adapted for film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, and again by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. However, as this video essay explores, Solaris represents just one small piece of Lem’s sprawling and prolific career as a writer of both peculiar and imaginative works of science fiction, and of speculative works of philosophy that anticipated many of the technologies and anxieties of the modern world. Adapted from an essay for the London Review of Books by the US writer Jonathan Lethem, Five Lems distills a long career into five distinct categories. In doing so, it explores Lem’s insights into the human condition, as well as how his imaginative ‘fairy tales and folk tales for the future’ offered an antidote to the ‘technocratic triumphalism, manifest destiny, libertarian survivalist bullshit’ of American-dominated mid-20th-century science fiction.
video
Philosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes
video
Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
video
Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
video
Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
video
History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
video
War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
video
Political philosophy
Beyond the veil – what rules would govern John Rawls’s ‘realistic Utopia’?
6 minutes
video
Stories and literature
To capture grief in poetry is to describe the ineffable. Here’s why Tennyson did it best
8 minutes