/lit/ - Literature

How is the 1970s English translation different from the newer translation? I know the older one was originally translated from Polish into French and then the French was translated into English, and the newer one is straight from Polish to English, but are the effects on the reader really that different? I got a strong feeling of melancholy from the 1970s edition (haven't read the newer one) which I honestly really liked and found to be really quite gratifying, and I'm not sure if I want to read the newer translation if it's going to be way more focused on the technical side of the novel (which honestly I felt there was enough of in the older English translation) and thereby ruin it for myself. Thoughts?

I'll rec Solaris by Lem as it's the last book I read as well as Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro since I'm reading it right now.

Fucking based scifi books only

This book is immensely poignant.

Post the current book you're reading followed by the previous 4 you read and a short review

>Solaris in expectation of the /sffg/ reading month
It's uniquely disturbing, I can't remember the last thing I read/watched/played that struck me with this level of uncanny surrealism
Reminds me of Lovecraft's better stories but better articulated
>The Voice From the Edge Vol 1
I got into it only for I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream but goddamn if I didn't stick around for the rest of Ellison's work, I don't know why I hadn't ever read any of it before
A Boy and His Dog and Grail were particularly good
>Accelerando
Wack ass fucking book, absolutely loved a lot of it and how it was kind of a deconstruction of boundless transhumanism
The sentient corporations and economics beyond human understanding particularly fucked me up
>New York: 2140
Classic KSR, might be my favorite by him so far, if not in setting, at least in the storytelling style
All of the characters were really intricate and aside from ONE I really liked them
>Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said for last month's reading
Was slightly more grounded than the other PKD stuff I've read, but the explanation at the end was really unneeded
Liked the Epilogue though

Why do printing labels stop using old covers like this, and replace it with minimalist garbage? Covers like these make me sad that I will never be able to obtain a copy

>>9455281

51 "Solaris" 64 "Journey to the Center of the Earth"
97 "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"
98 "We"

There are only four non-English book in the entire Top 100, and two of them are barely just hanging on (Polish, French, French, Russian).

Just on principle, I support bumping all four of those novels.

Want to either way
Johnston translation tho

>>8317090

Stanisław Lem will be of interest
for novels, see pic related
for short stories, The Cyberiad

>>7979140

>>7968956

>>7937364

Puzzling that Solaris hasn't been mentioned yet, especially given the premise of this general.

Call me a nerd but I think 1970s sci-fi paperbacks have the most beautiful artwork I have ever seen.

They almost never have anything to do with the actual book though, but I am fine with that.

>>7400540

>>7161557

>>6520940
For goodness' sake, /lit/, how is it possible to have such a thread up for more than 24 hours without mention of Stanisław Lem?

>>6502936
He's been mentioned (a bit). It is true though that he's the final boss of SF.

found this at a used bookstore for like $3.50
look harder

wouldn't it be great if there was a novel about a planet that was a living id box, where it read your mind and constructed people and things that comprised the biggest parts of your conscious experience, like your wife? you could have a guy arrive on the planet to study it, and then suddenly be visited by a copy of his wife who died years ago. you could write about how that would effect someone. how a relationship between you and the embodied memory of your dead wife would develop. the interplay between love and fear and the struggle of choosing to reject the apparition or give into it. you could explore what it means for your memory of a person to be fundamentally different from who the person was, and what it says about a man who prefers one to the other, and how he deals with learning horrible truths about himself. you could explore how isolation on a desert planet would make it easier or harder to be afraid things like this. you could explore insanity, you could explore guilt. you could have a deeply introspective protagonist who is unsure of himself and afraid but capable and compelling as a character with pathos and emotion.

or you could just write a fake textbook about how neutrinos work.

yeah, that latter sounds way better. let's go with that.

fuck solaris.

This is the most intelligent sci-fi book ever written.