Obituary For Stanislaw Lem

[dirac]

Stanislaw Lem, the author of “Solaris” has died, age 84. I can’t say I’m a big science fiction fan, but I liked that book very much.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/books/28lem.html

In "Solaris," a densely ruminative novel first published in 1961 — and made into films by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002) — contact is made with a dangerous and unknowable alien intelligence in the form of a plasma ocean surrounding a distant planet. As they attempt to understand the organism, astronauts aboard a space ship are plagued by hallucinations drawn from their own memories.