Stanislaw Lem: Robots in Science Fiction
An Australian zine edited by Bruce Gillespie, SF Commentary features interviews with and republished articles by prominent science fiction writers. This issue, dedicated to fellow Australian fan writer John Foyster, contains the article “Robots in Science Fiction” by Polish author Stanislaw Lem. Lem is probably best known for his novel Solaris, which has been adapted into film several times including in 1972 by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. Lem also wrote Cyberiad, a series of short stories about robots, and the non-fiction Summa Technologiae, which includes a section on “Intellectronics,” which is his term for artificial machine intelligence.
This article addresses the creation of robots, or artificial humans, as framed by a society’s wider mythological and religious structure. Based on popular science fiction, Lem sees robots serving as either allegories for “a world in which all possible kinds of work have become automated” or an exploration of “scientific facts” that is intended to be a “futurological prediction” of a “social, psychological or an anthropological problem.”
Bruce Gillespie.
SF Commentary 19, Stanislaw Lem: Robots in Science Fiction
A version of this text has been digitized and is available through The FANAC Fan History Project.