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'Lemistry' is the first book that I read on my new Amazon Kindle, and I think that my choice of reading medium is in some respects appropriate. The Kindle is a futurist device in that it makes books liquid - they now take the shape and volume of their container, and therefore even the thickest volumes can slip inside one's pocket - and I like to think that the legendary Stanislaw Lem would have appreciated what ebook readers offer.

Whether Lem would have appreciated this volume of idolatry is another matter entirely. 'Lemistry' is a love letter to one of Poland's most famous literary exports, combining fresh translations of a few of Lem's minor short stories, literary essays, and short stories that spin off from some of Lem's own. Or, in the case of a pitiable effort by Brian Aldiss, who should have known better, simply some short stories that had not been published elsewhere.

The great problem here is the most obvious one: if Lem was so great, what chance his tribute band? None of the stories in this collection is particularly memorable, and some, such as the aforementioned Aldiss mess, are forgettable in the most active sense.

So, do I regret that my Kindle career got off to such an inauspicious start? Not at all. Despite the relatively low quality of the writing on offer here (and by that I am being harsh, most certainly, but readers of this volume will most likely have an idea of what Lem's writing was like, and will thus judge just as harshly themselves), it was fun to contemplate Lem's work, and there were pleasurable moments to savour, such as the journalist who travelled to meet Philip K. Dick and then took it upon himself to prove the existence of Lem. It's a shame there weren't more such moments, but you take what you can get these days.½

When I picked this book up, I thought it was a collection of essays about Stanisław Lem with a couple Lem stories thrown in. It turns out to mostly be works of fiction assembled in tribute to Lem. This genre of anthology is always a bit tricky, I think-- I remember not being a very big fan of Foundation's Friends, for example, which was written in tribute to Isaac Asimov, and the fiction in the Ursula K. Le Guin tribute 80! was its weakest part. The problem here is that Lem is in my Top Five science fiction authors and that the contributors here, well, aren't. So when they attempt direct pastiche of Lem, they come up short, and when they try to do something more oblique, you wonder what it has to do with Lem at all.

The book begins, however, with three stories by Lem-- for all of them, this is their first appearance in English. The best of them is definitely "The Lilo," about a man who starts to wonder if he's been placed in virtual reality without his consent or knowledge, and wants his psychiatrist to help him out of this dilemma, but the psychiatrist can't... or won't. Like a lot of Lem stories, this takes a strange premise to its logical conclusion with perfection.

The pastiche of the other authors is at its most direct with Ian Watson's "The Tale of Trurl and the Great TanGent," a tale of Trurl and Klapaucius of The Cyberiad fame. It's okay. It feels more random and arbitrary than the actual Cyberiad tales that I remember, like Watson doesn't quite grasp what makes those stories work so well. I was surprised that this was the only story to reuse Lem characters directly: there are no tales of (say) Pirx the Pilot or Ijon Tichy here, no return to (thankfully, I suppose) Solaris.

Some just seem to be about robots with little else that makes them obviously Lemmian, like Toby Litt's "The Melancholy." Annie Clarkson's "Toby" is about a man who married a robot woman contemplating adopting a robot boy: I'm not sure what it has to do with Lem, though I did find the central conceit pretty interesting. It just kind of fizzles out at the end, though, after an interesting start. "Terracotta Robot" by Adam Marek is just kind of baffling, about a guy, his son, a newly married woman, and her husband all on a sightseeing tour of an ancient robot factory. The guy keeps hitting on the newly married woman even though it's her honeymoon. It's more like a piece of literary fiction that has a robot in it for no explicable reason. Take the robot out and put it in a different book, and I probably would have liked it a lot; as it is, I was baffled.

Others, and these ones felt more Lemmian, play with concepts of reality. "The 5-Sigma Certainty" by Trevor Hoyle is about a journalist who interviews Philip K. Dick, who tells him that Lem isn't a real person but a Communist committee. (This is a thing that Dick actually believed.) The journalist decides to go to Poland to investigate for himself. I liked the story at first, but in the end, it didn't seem to have much to say; there's a punchline of sorts, but it doesn't justify the buildup. The best along these lines is "Stanlemian" by Wojciech Orliński, about people who gamble in a virtual reality simulation of pre-9/11 New York City. The title is mean to be in opposition to "phildickian": whereas phildickian describes situations where reality is difficult to determine, stanlemian is used to describe situations where the problem has been solved. The premise of the story is that everything goes when it comes to getting money out of the simulation back into the real world, and so the protagonist is a guy hired on behalf of a gambler to extract the money from the simulation without running afoul of the gambler's crooked girlfriend. Great ideas that develop some stuff Lem played with, especially in Summa Technologiae, but in directions I don't think Lem would or could have gone, which is surely what you want out of this kind of volume, but it rarely achieves.

Some of the stories ape the way Lem would play with genre: "'Every Little Helps' by Frank Cottrell Boyce, reviewed by Stanisław Lem," for example, is Boyce writing as though he's Lem reviewing a nonexistent story by Boyce. I like the idea, but the execution is not very compelling: you're basically just reading a synopsis of a story that seems somewhat interesting, but not interesting enough.

It's one of these, though, that's the best story in the whole book: "The Apocrypha of Lem by Dan Tukagawa, J. B. Krupsky, and Aaron Orvits, reviewed by Jacek Dukaj" reviews a book about the novels written by three different computer simulations of Lem. One was programmed with the conditions of Lem's life, one was programmed with Lem's DNA and brain scans, and one is but one of millions of people simulated in a construct of twentieth-century Europe as a whole. Dukaj is playful and inventive in the best Lem tradition; this is like the best parts of Imaginary Magnitude, but playing with Lem himself. For example, he points out that one might want one's Lem simulation to write more Lem books (naturally), but Lem decided he had said all he wanted to: "the more faithful their postLem was to the original, the less likely it was that he would write anything new." The different postLems end up suing each other for copyright over their works, and the review attacks the idea the biological Lem is the best instantiation of Lem, anyway: "Where does the certainty that Stanisław Lem, born 12th September 1921 and deceased 27th March 2006 in Krakow, is such an ideal model of Lemness, come from? Simply because he was reflected in a biological form and not in a digital one? But that is pure racism!" All the works of all the postLems together will give you the data you need to isolate who Lem really was, and why should it happen to be the one that was a physical human being? It's a very fun little thought experiment.

And then there are the ones that have no obvious reason to be here, like Brian Aldiss's "Less Than Kin, More Than Kind," which feels like he just sent the editors a story he hadn't been able to get published anywhere else.

The book ends with a few nonfiction pieces. The best was "Stanisław Lem - Who's He?" by Andy Sawyer. I didn't expect to like this, since I thought I knew already, but Sawyer provides a nice overview of Lem's fiction and its major themes, and I especially liked his consideration of Lem's place within the genre of science fiction itself, given Lem's disdain for the genre.

The book has its highlights, but it really does illustrate the peril of its own project: Lem is too good at what he does for most others to be able to touch him. The few good stories show it can be done, but most of what's here reveals what an immense achievement it was to write and think like Stanisław Lem.

This collection features short fiction, each with a theme of a significant scientific discovery. The idea is to tell a compelling story, yet be more realistic about the 'eureka moment', without resorting to the frequent (but false) trope of a lone genius being gifted with a stroke of insight by the universe. Each story was written in consultation with a scientist in a related field (sometimes the story subjects themselves!), who have also contributed afterwords. Unfortunately, in my opinion, many of the stories miss the mark and some of the afterwords are more compellingly written.
+ means hit, - means miss:

+ The Pitch by Frank Cottrell Boyce, aftw by Kathryn Harris
Jeremiah Horrocks observes the transit of Venus.
- Patience by Jane Unsworth, aftw by Dr Zoe Schnepp
Mendeleev realizes that a pattern with gaps fits best.
+ Swan, 1914 by Sean O'Brien, aftw by John Clayson
Electric light by trial and error of Joseph Swan.
- The Special Theory by Michael Jeks, aftw by Prof Jim Al-Khalili
Special Relativity and family tragedy.
- Everything is Moving, Everything is Joined by Stella Duffy, aftw by Dr Robert Appleby
Herman Minkowski, his space-time and the romance of his parents.
+The Woman Who Measured the Heavens with a Span by Sara Maitland, aftw by Dr Tim O'Brien
Henrietta Leavitt's pioneering work on Cepheid variable stars.
- What Kind of Dog by Annie Clarkson, aftw by Dr John Wearden
Pavlov and his dogs.
+ Crystal Night by Zoe Lambert, aftw by James Sumner
Lise Meitner and the fission of nuclei, as well as that of human dignity.
- Morphogenesis by Jane Rogers, aftw by Dr Martyn Amos
Alan Turing's idea symmetry breaking in biology via chemical signals.
+ The Heart of Denis Noble by Alison MacLeod, aftw by Prof Denis Noble
Beating hearts and salacious legal proceedings.
- We are all Made of Protein by Tania Hershman, aftw by Nick R. Love
Squeezing jellyfish for Fluorescent Green Protein.
+ In Search of Silence by Adam Marek, aftw by Dr Tim O'Brien
Cosmic Microwave Background discovery as a children's science project.
+ Living with Insects by Maggie Gee, aftw by Dr Matthew Cobb
W.D. Hamilton and altruism: fitness is more than survival.
- Bride Hill by Kate Clancy, aftw by Sarah Fox
The hippocampus, memory, Alzheimer's.
+ What If? by Christine Poulson, aftw by Dr Angharad Watson
Polymerase Chain Reaction and the eureka moment of Kary Mullis.
- Monkey See, Monkey Do by Trevor Hoyle, aftw by Prof Giacomo Rizzolatti
Mirror neurons, from a primate point of view.
- That is the Day by Sarah Hall, aftw by James Higgerson
AIDS, today and yesteryear.½

An enjoyable, quirky collection.

Stanislaw Lem - The lilo

Nicely paranoid story about a wealthy man who will stop at nothing to prove reality real.

Stanislaw Lem - Darkness and mildew

An accident destroys a really nasty weapon...

Stanislaw Lem - Invasion from Aldebaran

A drunken hick has a strange encounter on a dark night...Hilarious

Stanislaw Lem - Every little helps

A review of Frank Cottrell Boyce's "Every little helps"

Adam Roberts - Pied Piper

A modern day moralitiy tale about the dangers of getting what is wished for.

Toby Litt - The Melancholy

Very short story about Application 13-13, an artificial intelligence used to run a series of machines on inhospitable planets, who suffers one too many changes....

Ian Watson - The Tale of Trurl and the Great TanGent

Hilarious tale of an encounter between the all powerful constructor robot Trurl and the Great TanGent, a 'logic chopper'.

Trevor Hoyle - The 5-Sigma certainty

A journalist sent to interview the author Philip K. Dick discovers something verystrange about the author Stanislaw Lem.

Piotr Szulkin - Snail

Rather overlong diatribe about life delivered by an Inspector to a lone caretaker on planetoid Australia 258.

Sarah Schofield - Traces remain

Humans are slowly being replaced by 'actroids' who resemble humans and on the Moon a bureaucrat notices something different about one of them...

Wojciech Orlinski - Stanlemian

A group are sent into a virtual reality New York to gamble but some have other plans...

Adam Marek - Terracotta robot

An aging rock star looking after his problem child joins a tour party visiting a factory making terracotta 'gladiators'. Romance ensues...

Sean O'Brien - Ex libris

A man of literature finds himself adrift in a sea of books, but is rescued by Dr Johnson and Boswell...A very literate nightmare ensues.

Jacek Dukaj - The apocrypha of Lem by Dan Tukagawa, J.B. Krupsky and Aaron Orvits

A thoroughly bizarre yet apposite tribute to Lem posing as a review of the 'posthumous works' of future Lems, created by various artificial means.

Andy Sawyer - Stanislaw Lem - Who's he?

An academic review of Lem's career as a writer

Dr Sarah Davies - Of insects and armies

An academic view of the potential for military nanotechnology

Professor Steve Furber - Building reliable systems out of unreliable components

The potential for using biological models in computing.

Professor Hod Lipson - The spontaneous machine

Raises issue of how to introduce curiosity and creativity into machine thinking.

the few stories by Lem are great as always, but the rest of the authors who try to emulate him are not worth the money

The editors of this anthology asked contemporary authors to read Freud's 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche", translated as "The Uncanny", and then to write "fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century."

If interested, you can read Freud's essay here

This anthology won the Shirley Jackson Award last year. I recognized about half of the authors in this anthology and of those, I had read other work by them. These stories are not ones of overt horror stories, but are meant to give one some unease or "the creeps". While I certainly enjoyed some of them, others were kind of meh.

Favorites were: A. S. Byatt's "Doll's Eyes" a delightfully subtle, creepy tale about what happens when a woman gives her lover one of her precious dolls from her collection only to see it turn up on Antiques Roadshow. Jane Rogers' "Ped-o-matic" tells the story of one young mother who is leaving her infant for the first time to return to work. On a business trip to Paris she stops in the airport for a foot massage...but the machine won't let go of her feet when she needs to leave.
Etgar Keret's "Anette and I are Fucking in Hell" - which is not much more than a page long - is a creepily funny sex scene in hell. And In Christopher Priest's "The Sorting Out," a young widow and ardent bibliophile, who is in the process of ending a relationship, returns to her home to discover it has been broken into. The story is suspenseful as she must go through each of the rooms of the house oen by one, but interestingly, the only things out of place are a few books here and there --- the authors' names all begin with "D". What does it mean?

It seems to me that I responded best the stories where the creepy element is sort of a manifestation of or connected somehow to the character's internal conflicts. There were other stories that were interesting and imaginative but didn't seem to make an emotional connection. Still, this is a worthy collection to explore if one is interested in the elements of unease in fiction (fiction like other 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Winners like [Disquiet] by Julia Leigh and [The Diving Pool] by Yoko Ogawa)½

Described here: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/492993/s/16c42c60/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cbl...