Stanislaw Lem is Dead

Stanislaw Lem died Monday in his native Poland, his secretary said. He was 84.

Lem was one of the most visionary of 20th century science fiction authors. He wrote in a language other than English, and his works were translated from Polish into more than 40 other languages.

Lems books have sold 27 million copies.

His best-known work, Solaris, was adapted into films by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. The latter starred George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.

His first important novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration, was censored by communist authorities for eight years before its release in 1956 amid a thaw following the death of Josef Stalin.

Lem also covered topics that would not be unfamiliar to Phillip K. Dick, who reported Lem to the FBI in 1964 as an undercover KGB operative who was using Science Fiction to spread Soviet Propaganda, and that he intended to kidnap Dick himself. The troubled Dick was at the time having one of his "difficult" periods.

If you are to read any Lem, try tracking down either "Solaris" or "the Futurological congress" the latter might be a little hard to find in the shops, as shortsighted stockists tend to only carry Solaris due to the recent movie.

With each obituary I post on this blog, I wonder, as I keep my ear pressed to the ground for the distant rumble of genius, who is replacing these people.

The spirit of the 20th century is nearly dead, and the new millenium begins to crawl, and its newborn visionaries with it. I wait with baited breath for their arrival, tearing through our collective cultural membrane.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Chinese create Concentration Camps for adherants of Falun Gong

The Irish Falun Gong Information Centre received shocking, detailed information on Wednesday from a Chinese Communist Party insider documenting a concentration camp set up in Shenyang city, Liaoning province, expressly for Falun Gong practitioners.

"The Irish Falun Gong Information Centre received shocking, detailed information on Wednesday from a Chinese Communist Party insider documenting a concentration camp set up in Shenyang city, Liaoning province, expressly for Falun Gong practitioners. The news comes on the heels of the U.S. Department of States 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released Wednesday; the report documents continued, systematic abuses of the Falun Gong in China.

Information about the camp was relayed via audio recording from a former intelligence agent of the Chinese government. It is the first time news of the secret camps existence was disclosed to outsiders. The camp is said to hold over 6,000 Falun Gong adherents at any given time, and nobody has yet come out from it alive. According to the source, it contains a crematorium, and an unusually large number of doctors work there reflecting the camps practice of killing prisoners for their organs, which are then sold for profit.

The source tried to convey the horror of what is happening in the concentration camp: Why was a crematorium built, and why are so many doctors housed there? & The answer is something unimaginable. You must be clear that a cremator for bodies is different than a burner used for sanitation purposes. "

Have we learnt nothing from the 20th century?

Click the link above for the full horrifying story.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow