[ExI] Accelerando - and other recommendations, too

[Damien Broderick]

On 3/2/2010 9:07 AM, Tomasz Rola wrote:

>> >  read my book THE SPIKE. The trouble is that these once hair-raising ideas are
>> >  now commonplace

> I still have to find some time for this book. However, I've thought it is
> a good moment to mention something from myself. I am the long time reader
> of books (and other things) written by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.
> Sometimes it seems strange to me that he did not get much publicity here
> (or that he got no pub at all, actually).

Lem is well known among sf scholars, but his work is mostly too cerebral 
for the mass market readers of adventures-in-space. Kandel's 
translations are indeed brilliant. SOLARIS has of course been made into 
two movies (neither especially effective in my view, although the 
Tarkovsky is famous for its moody cinematography).

>  I consider the man one of my heroes (yep, and how many
> writers deserve to be called like this?). He wasn't explicitly extropian,
> yet if you could read his "Summa technologiae" or "Golem XIV" maybe you
> could recognise this or that.

I cite Lem at several key points in THE SPIKE, and "Golem XIV" remains 
astonishingly good as a treatment of a self-augmenting AI that 
transcends/sublimes. Alas, SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE has never been translated 
in full into English. I recall that an enthusiast started to translate 
some key chapters and put them on the net a decade or so back, but I've 
lost track of that attempt.

Damien Broderick