A Book Review and Critical Analysis May 2025
WARNING: This book review contains spoilers. Indeed it would be very difficult to tell anyone about a Lem book without spoiling something in it. I have gone out of my way to mark them as such, but if you are the type of person who hates having the endings of things ruined in any way, then I suggest maybe you only read the first section to get the general idea of this read, and then go check it out for yourself.
The web-posted version of this review doesn’t have spoiler tags. Proceed at your own risk.
Secondly, books often explore difficult subjects. Good books tackle some of the most difficult ones. If you’re the type who is easily rattled, then Stanishlaw Lem may not be the author for you. This review will bring up personal trauma, including harm to others and oneself. It may unmask your shadow-self and allow them to tie you to a chair, pull up a bright lamp bulb, a pile of tools, and get to work on torturing your soul in earnest. Consider yourself warned.
A Quick Note About Me, The Reader
First, there’s something I need to explain about the way I read printed books. (I feel in the age of audiobooks, I have to specify print media.) I know people who speed-read, my wife and some friends for example. For various reasons, I cannot do what they do. For starters, I don’t have the eyesight for it. Second, when I did learn to scan quickly, I found my fidelity in reading dropped a lot, and I didn’t like it. Unlike some, when I read, I have an internal monologue and every written book is like it is also playing for me on Audible at the same time. So, that’s about my reading speed – the speed of speech, or perhaps if I’m really on the ball it might be 2x. Who knows how fast my brain actually talks when it wants to?
However, for the time it takes me, I feel like it fully engages my mind at a level that other people don’t often experience. Conversations with other speed readers confirmed this, though there may be exceptions. My “memory” for a good story is almost idetic. It’s like living a dream, almost as if I was there – or it happened to me personally. So, quite often not only do the details not leave me for a long time, but the whole experience of reading a book can substantially affect my personality, sometimes permanently – for better or worse. This is something I have learned to be more careful about since my younger years. Anyway, enough about me. I just wanted to get that disclaimer out there before we begin.
My Hot Take on This Book, Formed Before I Finished Reading (Minor Spoilers)
This novel is like, um… a mix between a noir detective story, gonzo journalism akin to Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing, and a dinner party with a bunch of pretentious academics. How do these things mesh together? In my opinion not very well, but you know what they say about a bear riding a bicycle.
There’s this unexplained Die Hard action sequence in Chapter Two – which don’t get me wrong was pretty damned cool, but also uncharacteristic for the rest of the novel. By nearly the end of the book, I was still waiting to discover if this would be addressed in any shape or form by the end of the story. Would Lem really hang Checkov’s gun on the wall in Act I and then literally leave it there unaddressed for the entire rest of the story? Time would tell, but signs pointed to “prepare to get your expectations fucked with”.
Half the book at the middle descends almost completely into dialogue (as in, between two people), which I guess proves that you can do that and get away with it, even though I complain to my wife all the time how dialogue heavy her stories can become at times. It’s fair to say that my wife still strives to find her place as a writer, thus I would be remiss in not offering her proper constructive criticism. Whereas, Stanislaw Lem is not only widely regarded as one of the most prolific and among the best (if not the best) science fiction writers of our age, and thus he is basically beyond reproach, but also he will sadly not be writing any more stories for us. So, there isn’t much point in offering any critical rebuke in this regard.
In a sense, the middle of the book almost seems like it was stuffed into the center of another story that otherwise would have been too short to publish as a novella. It is a very long – sometimes morbidly interesting – excuse for lengthy exposition.
I will say getting through the middle of the novel definitely turned into a bit of a slog, but this was more a function of other people coming into the room and trying to have a conversation around me, while I was trying to read a conversation where I occasionally had to Google phrases or translations to be certain that I was still on the same page.
Keep in mind, most of Lem’s stuff I’d read up until this point was short stories, so it was a bit weird for me reading a complete novella. Thus, I was very interested to see if he would be able to bring it to some reasonable conclusion. Doctorow, who I also adore, often struggles with this; his stories tend to kinda fizzle out and the climax is that the conflict just becomes a moot point, then everyone goes home. Based on Lem’s short stories, I understood that he knows how to burn down and/or blow up a building when he needs to, so I wanted to know if he has something good planned for the end of this one.
This desire kept me reading to the end, even if the middle of the novel was a bit of a bog. I felt as it there was just enough book left for a big reveal and I was very interested to find out what it was. I guess he really had me hooked. However, I was running out of pages for it to happen that way, and I was quite fearful that it might dissolve into some kind of banal retelling of Hilbert’s Hotel or maybe a probability lecture delivered by Hari Seldon.
If there wasn’t a great twist coming, I’d have been quite annoyed. Even so, Lem wrote a lot. They can’t all be great, right? I was prepared to feel let down if necessary.
After Finishing The Final Chapters (Avoiding Spoilers)
Firstly, I felt proud of myself for seeing the ending coming long before it happened. A good writer leaves you clues about such things. Only shitty writers hit you broadside like a black SUV at the intersection. I had been paying enough attention that somehow the back of my mind was dragging me toward the conclusion. Shame on me for not believing in Lem and thinking he didn’t have the runway left to stick the landing.
Lem usually uses a lot of words, yet somehow near the end he managed to, when he needed, cram a shit-ton of meaning and plot into a only handful of words. Impossibly dense at times – like a collapsed star made of words that’s never even heard of white-space on a page – and then he pulls a rabbit out of his hat and solves everything dynamically in just a few pages. It’s almost like, idk, maybe he was being paid by the word – or perhaps maybe he had a collection of semi-related and interesting detective shorts, so he decided to stitch them together into this novel. Then he had to figure out how it ends before it gets too long, which was probably pre-determined at the start.
What can I say, the man had talent, and every once in I while I think he’d pull a stunt like this just to prove to you that he could any time he wanted to.
I didn’t realize it while reading, but my body was reacting to the tension ratcheting up. Somehow his pacing of language actually helped to shape my reaction. By the time I was done, I had to chew up two antacid tablets just to get a good night’s sleep, even though it was already 2am. Consider yourself duly warned.
Looking Back (Major Spoilers)
All through this story I kept saying to myself “Your simulation wasn’t a failure. You either have a delayed result, or it is already happening to you and you haven’t become aware of it yet.” But, I guess I am a paranoid personality to begin with.
In retrospect, the book has an interesting theme, which is basically “get used to seemingly unexplainable things happening to people on a regular basis from now on”. Apparently this is how we live now, and there’s no getting away from it either.
I am amused he kinda [albeit obliquely] makes Pfiser the villain. Oddly prescient in a world where we’re now drowning in drugs and chemicals that we only halfway understand. You have to hand it to Lem for predicting pharmacological horror 50 years ahead of schedule.
Then again, he also invented LLMs in the 1960s, so there’s that. The man was truly ahead of his time. While contemporaries were fucking around with putting Space Wars on the oscilloscope or playing Pong (I believe he called it a “TV hockey game”, lol), Lem was imagining and speculating about how we would use math and probability to stitch words together into meaningful sentences.
But did he ever address the Die Hard set piece from Chapter 2? I think so, but it was very much in a way that Lem seems to inject sexual tension into many of his longer stories, with a piece at the end where the protagonist briefly experiences fleeting desire for the girl that he saved earlier. Did the entire scene at the airport exist purely to set this up in a way that gave it more umph when the time comes? Probably. I can’t find a better explanation for it otherwise.
I see now that a lot of Lem’s characters seem to have some issues they should discuss with their doctor or else maybe an experienced therapist. Maybe they could get a prescription for some TopForm or Erectrex. Seems to be a recurring pattern for his heroes, tbh. But then again, don’t we all?
Thinking on it in hindsight, this story, in a weird way, reminded me of Banana Fish. It’s probably the connection to experimental drugs that make you kys. There’s something cold and quiet in both stories, that speaks of scientists doing unnatural things, and this destroys people in odd ways that are difficult to pin down – a shared mission of trying to make sense of a world that is already half gone to shit, while people try to take notes on the back of a diner napkin using the crayons usually left to keep our kids amused.
