[I find Stanislaw Lem] a master of utterly terminal pessimism, appalled by all that an insane humanity may yet survive to do.

We are pollution.

He wants us to feel no pity for Homo sapiens, and so excludes appealing women and children from his tales. The adult males he shows us are variously bald, arthritic, sharp-kneed, squinting, jowly, rotten toothed, and so on, and surely ludicrous—save for his space crewmen, who are as expendable as pawns in a chess game. We do not get to know anybody well enough to like him. If he dies, he dies.

Nowhere in the works of Jonathan Swift, even, can I find a more loathsome description of a human being than this one, taken from Lem's "Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal," one of a dozen fables for the Cybernetic Age in his The Cyberiad …: "Its every step was like the overflowing of marshy vats, its face was like a scummy well; from its rotten breath the mirrors all covered over with a blind mist. When it spoke, it was if a pink worm tried to squirm from its maw."…

[Lem] gives me no reason in this or any other story I have read to feel regret when a human being is killed. The one in this particular fable is butchered and stuffed by the robots, and put into a museum.

I do not think Lem would have as many readers as he does … if he did not go to such lengths to say, in effect, what bitter night club comics often say: "Only kidding, folks." When he predicts that our reason will soon be destroyed by mind-altering chemicals in careless hands (The Futurological Congress …) …, or that, when we venture into space, we will become destroyers of all we cannot understand (The Invincible …) or that our machines will soon be more intelligent and honorable than we are (the theme of tale after tale), he must be kidding, since, as LeGuin says, he is so "zany" all the time. I am moved to suspect now that most of our finest humorists, including Mark Twain, may have been not especially funny people who painstakingly learned their clowning only in order to seem insincere when speaking dismally of the future of mankind….

So we can expect to have many more tremendously amusing writers like Stanislaw Lem. Few will be his peers in poetic exposition, in word play, and imaginative and sophisticated sympathy with machines.

A technical matter to be dealt with here: It is absolutely impossible to write a good story that does not have at least one sane and respectable character in it, someone the reader can trust. Lem gets away with such stories again and again, seemingly but not really, for he himself is never invisible. He himself is that solid character without whose presence we would not read on….

I will guess that he is at his funniest when he has looked so hard and long at hopelessness that he is at last exhausted, and is seized by convulsions of laughter that threaten to tear him to pieces. It was during such a fit that he wrote The Futurological Congress, I am sure…. And anyone wanting to sample Lem, hoping to like him, should probably start with that book. The hotel sheltering the congress is reduced to gravel by rioters and police, and the surviving futurologists wind up with the hotel staff in a sewer.

Laffs aplenty. Why not?