Quote:
Originally Posted by Darqref
For my contribution, I really dislike Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. I read it as part of a class many years ago, and found both the book's concept and execution intensely depressing. It's possible that the execution was an artifact of the translation, but when I read it, I didn't even realize it was originally written in a different language. I've never been able to bring myself to read anything else by this author, even though he's considered one of the classic Eastern European SF writers. I just shudder, and put it down again.
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I'm reading his books in Polish, and Solaris was originally depressing. It's written in the attitude of the most books written in socialist Poland. But many of his books aren't so depressing - I recommend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
A collection of short stories, philosophical and humorous. I hope stories from earlier 'Robots' Fables' collection are also in this one, as I don't see if the earlier collection was translated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries
Also a collection of short stories, in similar taste.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Investigation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katar_%28novel%29
Detective stories. Very good in my opinion, and I read many of those - but they remind me more of Larry Niven's detective stories in the near future, than of typical mysteries. Also philosophical, like all his books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Mas...ce_%28novel%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible
Well, the descriptions are better than I could put together, I just chose them as those are two books I could re-read again and again, which I wouldn't say about many of his other books. His Master's Voice may be a bit depressing like solaris though.
I can't say if any of those weren't horribly translated though, I read them all in Polish.