Dear old warm fuzzy capacious Stanilslaw Lem is the last of the great writers. Since Nabby (Nabokov), no one has approached his ingenuity or originality. Lem is the ne plus ultra of a genre of writing as certainly as Bach was the ne plus ultra of a Baroque musical idiom. What is surprising, and in various ways remarkable, is that Lem has proven to be, for the last half-century, the last writer of fiction on this planet who even remotely deserves the epithet "great." I guess that it is almost as much a surprise to Lem himself as it is to me that the last great writer of fiction on this earth, the last in a succession of Pushkin-Gogol-Dostoievsky-Tolstoy-Flaubert-Chekhov-Proust-Kafka-Joyce-Nabokov (a false "succession," of course), should be, of all things and people, a science-fiction writer named Lem. I sometimes wonder how lonely it must be at the top for Lem these many years; I sometimes imagine the less-than-welcome surprise it must have been to Lem to find his youthful "devil" now stuck in the role of "saint." Lem’s plea for more intelligent science fiction would remind me of Gogol’s plea to his friends for help on the Second Part of Dead Souls (a pathetic story) if I did not know Mr. Lem’s amazing talent for dissimulation and role-playing. You’re an astonishing fellow, Mr. Lem. Idioms of art and of thought come, are exploited, are mined out, and go. But I have begun to fear that Earth may not not see your equal again for millennia.