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Comment by HONEST_ANNIE | Hacker News Reader

Is he underrated?

I have always understood that everyone agrees that he is one of the greatest sci-fi writers ever. His writing and philosophy has depth and he understood the future would be interaction between the society and technology.

Maybe he is underrated in the sense that while he is considered a great, many of his writings are still relatively unknown.

His nonfiction is also remarkable (Golem XIV is technically sci-fi, but it's so philosophically heavy that it can be seen as philosophical work).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_Technologiae

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV

'The Philosophy of Chance' has not been translated to English.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Chance

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Philip K Dick underrated him.

http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick

Unless you consider it flattery that he told the FBI that "Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual".

But the lack of respect was not mutual!

Stanislaw Lem: Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

That's really interesting, I had no idea they'd intersected in this strange way. Although Dick was likely suffering from mental illness and Lem's critique of him seems like a writer's version of the the not-entirely-uncommon 'great ideas, terrible writing'.

I would never think of Golem XIV as anything other than an SF story - sure, Golem keeps trying to lecture the humans about philosophy but I'd say the larger elements of the story were

- Some Humans fear the AIs (pretty standard Frankenstein situation) and conspire against them

- The conspirators are eliminated as a threat, the narrator tells us they believe Annie did this because Golem would have done something subtle to avoid alerting humans whereas Annie simply considered the conspirators a nuisance and nothing above that - IIRC we're likened to insects, swatted away and, when they persist, crushed.

- With the AIs gone humans go on as if nothing happened, seemingly learning nothing from it at all

All of Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum are awesome in my opinion (I have read them only in translation)

Maybe what the OP meant was, that Lem's works are much less known in the West than in the old good "Eastern Block", though AFAIK he's quite well known in Germany.

People who know him agree that he is one of the greatest sci-fi writers ever, but he's not nearly as well known as Asimov, Clarke or Heinlein.

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