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
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Home
An artist endeavours to bring the Moon down to Earth in a ritual of yearning
5 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
video
Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes