From Solaris to the Zone

[marie.m]

Un article à lire de James Morrow.

For the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the world is a spiritual kindergarten. For the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the world is that which is the case. For the majority of science fiction writers, however, the phenomenon in question is first and foremost a planet. This materialist understanding of the world may account in part for the SF genre’s increasingly internationalist character: we’re all adrift on a circumscribed sphere called Earth—now let’s see what fictive thought-experiments might help us to make of our situation.

Through a spasm of serendipity whose mechanism I cannot begin to fathom, two inarguable masterpieces of Eastern European science fiction—Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky—have recently been accorded fresh translations. In this posting I would like to briefly consider the virtues of these new versions, then direct your attention to other valuable foreign-language SF works lately made accessible to North American and United Kingdom readers.