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766

Forum in English / Re: LEMIAN criticism of DUNE?

« dnia: Sierpnia 26, 2010, 03:15:30 pm »

@Q: This is me

I don't see much resemblance

@Dragon:
"Alive and iterested" would be a great song title:)
I generally agree, although you surely have noticed that we're only guessing Lem's opinion. Maybe Lem's son, Tomasz, could know something about it e.g. from talks they might have had, but I personally wouldn't go further into guesses.
My critical opinion about Dune was base on the fact that Lem rarely wrote books aimed at disclosure of humanity's shortcomings at present, rather tried to extrapolate into far future. In Dune, we start in fictional universe... That's not even humanity Like I said, it's a hard guess - would Lem be set aside by the gargantual ammount of fantasy surrounding the underlying themes of Dune - or would he appreciate the sociological-ecological-political depth of it.
Look at Lem's opinion about Tarkovsky's adaptation of Solaris. He crushed it, because Tarkovsky chose to color the story with few grains of his fantasy and emotionalism. The general correctness of the adaptation did not salvage the movie in Lem's eyes.
For that, and other reasons, I see Lem as ruthless critic, and that's why I said what I said...

767

Forum in English / Re: Guidelines For Lem-Inspired Stories?

« dnia: Sierpnia 18, 2010, 06:25:50 pm »

Alas, I still beg to differ.
Oleg gives an uplifting description of how wonderful person a good (sci-fi) writer must be: abnormally intelligent acute observer, magically tunelling his creativity into ideas never before seen, still keeping it all in agreement with contemporary (and, by projection/extrapolation) future science. All that is obviously true (though I dare say quite a few good writers fail to meet these criteria), but that's not against the point I was trying to make.
In short: creation of a story, even though Lem himself considered such task an ultimate test for AI, is still only as possible as creating AI. I too once objected the idea (of AI) but now I think that task is somehow overrated, not to say that programmers working on it are getting better - cause they still seem pretty far from it - but rather because the "I" in "AI" seems something different to me nowadays. More elusive and illusive  than ideal; an umbrella term encompassing few other, of which some recently became quite attainable, like e.g. problem solving or communication.
Besides, as proven by Lem's own 'Sci-Fi calculator', a "weak"(/"foolish") writer is not far from being a machine, merely choosing should Jack be eaten by Christmas Mechanic Gorillas or save Jean from the Aliens. So why couldn't another machine take it a little further?

768

Forum in English / Re: Guidelines For Lem-Inspired Stories?

« dnia: Sierpnia 10, 2010, 11:59:49 pm »

Well, I'm not sure. Maybe a really good algorithm with large database could try its chance