Stanislas Lem

I read this afternoon that Stanislas Lem, one of the world's great writers, not inconceivably it's greatest, has died, at age 84. My science fiction reading has always tended to be rather hit or miss, and to come in bunches - discovering Lem, back in the late 80s, set off a particularly significant strand of reading, as he led me not only to his own work, but to Philip K. Dick as well. Lem was a magisterial presence, writer of philosophical science fiction, of excellent criticism, of brilliant and very funny intellectual games (see Imaginary Magnitude, his book of introductions, to such marvels as Reginald Gulliver's Eruntics, an account of "a philosopher-dilittante and amateur bacteriologist who one day eighteen years ago decided to teach bacteria English", and succeeded so well that they began to predict the future, and the content of yet unwritten books.) He was a giant, and will be missed.