Investigating Stanislaw Lem

A few months ago I came across the Twitter feed of Rachel S. Cordasco. The name was familiar to me but I couldn't immediately place it. After some searching, I discovered that she was employed at the Wisconsin Historical Society for at least some of the time that I was there. I had no idea back then that she translated Italian speculative fiction into English and ran a website called Speculative Fiction in Translation.

October is Polish-American Heritage Month and Cordasco featured Polish speculative fiction writers this year. The only one I had even heard of was Stanislaw Lem. I read his novel Solaris long ago after having seen the Andrei Tarkovsky's film based on it but didn't read another one of his books until this past summer when I read The Futurological Congress. It served as the basis of the Ari Folman film The Congress starring Robin Wright.

It was a blatantly surreal trip and, while I enjoyed elements of it, the surrealism was overly scattershot for my taste. My next taste of Lem's oeuvre will be The Investigation, ostensibly a mystery/police procedural that takes a left turn into metaphysical realms. Should be interesting.