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The Polish writer of Science Fiction Stanislaw Lem died this Monday in south of Poland, due to heart problems. He was 84 years old.

Stanislaw Lem was the author of “Solaris”, the book from which Andrei Tarkovsky based his movie “Solaris” (“Solyaris” is the original title) in 1972, one of my favorite pieces of timeless cinema. I remember seeing the movie for the first time when I was on my very early teens, casually stopping by the 2nd channel of Portuguese public TV of the time, in front of an old Grundig black&white TV. I could only understand the subtitles (after all the movie is in Russian). The plot was also strange and with plenty of slow moments, to say the least. But I still couldn’t let go and was never able to explain why. The idea of a planet made up of a massive ocean, likened to a conscious brain, was hypnotic. Many years later I bought the book and the questions got clearer. What is human life? Will we ever be able to recognize other kinds of life? Memories, by defining our lives, can they have a life of their own? And what about conscience?

One of Lem’s favorite themes was the impossibility of communication between human and alien civilizations (we seem to find it impossible to communicate between human civilizations too, so maybe there’s our culprit). But in some of his work he also spoke of the problems of human existence in a world where technology makes human impulses obsolete or even dangerous. This is a problem of our day and age set to worsen with time.

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