Microworlds

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It was toward the end of the 1960s that I began corresponding with Stanislaw Lem. I had been a voracious reader of science fiction for many years, although I disliked most of what I read and saw it as a waste of the form’s potential. Perhaps it was this similarity in our views that Lem found attractive.

Science fiction differs from other popular genres in that its readers are frequently articulate, eager to meet and talk with other science-fiction fans. There is a whole science-fiction subculture, with hundreds of amateur magazines, or “fanzines,” devoted to science fiction, its authors, and its audience. These magazines, most with a circulation of only a few hundred copies, are found not only in the United States, where they started, but all over the world, even in Communist countries. Since the early 1960s I myself have edited such a fanzine, called Quarber Merkur; it is devoted to the analysis of science fiction and fantasy writing and is rather critical of them. At that time I knew of Lem, but I considered him only one science-fiction writer among many, though perhaps the most important in Eastern Europe; I had read very little of his work. In Germany he was little more than a name; few of his books had appeared in German, mainly in East Germany. His first science-fiction novel, Astronauci (1951; The Astronauts), had been widely translated, and a few other works had appeared in France and Italy, mostly in atrocious translations. That was all.

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