The plot is almost non-existent, and entirely plausible there are no weird creatures, no space travel. My introduction to the Pole’s work was His Master’s Voice, and, on the basis of that novel, I could see why he considered himself as a kind of outlier in the Science Fiction community. First of all, Lem himself was not particularly enamoured of the genre, he thought the majority of it too reliant upon the adventure story formula.
This is, I guess, where Stanislaw Lem comes in. The writers and books I most enjoy are ones that I believe contain insights about human nature, that help me come to terms with who I am and how my world works. I found it difficult enough to get my head around the behaviour and motivations of humans, I had enough problems understanding my own world, that the possibility of engaging meaningfully with aliens struck me as, to all intents and purposes, impossible.įor this same reason, I have never been particularly drawn to Sci-Fi. While I too wanted to somehow escape the situation I found myself in, the prospect of other worlds or beings never fired my imagination.
I guess that for my dad – who did not have a partner, whose children were emotionally, if not physically, estranged from him, and whose job was not exactly stimulating – the promise of other planets and other species, of being whisked away from his humdrum life, must have been pretty appealing. In fact, I sat through so many of these that I started to have nightmares about bug-eyed extra terrestrial beings entering my room at night. He made me and my brother watch endless episodes of trashy American documentaries about sightings and abductions. When I was a kid my dad was obsessed with the idea of UFO’s and alien contact.
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