![]() As my grandmother would put it, I know bupkis about Polish literature. All the unstated premises, all the undefined terms (especially ‘science fiction’). Shouldn’t I be just the person for a centenary piece on Stanisław Lem? Novelist and philosopher of technology, author of ‘Solaris’ and scores of novels, stories and essays, one of the great figures in Polish literature, the greatest non-English-language science fiction writer between Jules Verne and Cixin Liu, born a hundred years ago … The trouble – beyond the fact that I’ve dawdled beyond that anniversary – is, well, everything. I write this with those same four Seabury hardcovers on the desk beside me. With an arched eyebrow, she purchased the display copies. It was not enough that the boy be bookish: he should be the right kind of bookish. ![]() The boy wasn’t fooled: the crazy titles of the two books with ‘tasteful’ covers were enticing enough. Congress featured a drawing by Paul Klee. The other two dust jackets – for The Futurological Congress and The Cyberiad – were more restrained, looking like European art-house fiction. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s cup of tea. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Two – Invincible and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. At the booth of the Seabury Press (a publishing division of the Episcopalian Church) he spotted four anomalous hardcovers, all by an author with a peculiar name: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Futurological Congress, The Invincible and The Cyberiad. That’s to say, a lot of reference books, a lot of speciality non-fiction, and a dearth of science fiction. #Art of illusion cold war of solipsism download full#The convention hall’s exhibition booths featured lots of plastic slipcovers and display racks, as well as tables full of books from publishers that relied on library sales. She was a trustee of the Queensboro Public Library, with comp tickets for a regional conference of the American Library Association he was a 15-year-old science fiction fan. A boy and his grandmother travelled on the A train to the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle. ![]()
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