*He was the kind of guy who would teach himself English by reading Norbert Wiener.
Yup, that's Stanislaw all right
(…)
If Lem didn’t think much of American popular culture, neither did he have much esteem for its literature. In his letters to Kandel he singled out books like Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), which he called “utterly worthless,” and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which he proclaimed a “demented dud.” But he reserved his greatest scorn for American science fiction, which he attacked as “pseudo-scientific fairy tales” and “hyped-up trash,” among other insults. When the aggrieved Science Fiction Writers of America revoked his honorary membership in 1975 over an article titled “Looking Down on Science Fiction: A Novelist’s Choice for the World’s Worst Writing,” Lem expressed his satisfaction to Kandel, commenting that “to me the opinion of morons is worth exactly nothing.” Later it turned out that the English title of the piece was an inaccurate translation of the German, but Lem’s views were clear enough.
Lem’s criticisms may have been curmudgeonly and, as Swirksi suggests, rooted in his frustrated desire for greater American recognition. But to Lem the country also represented dangers that we are only now beginning to appreciate. He foresaw dystopia not only in resource-starved wastelands, but also in technological prisons of pleasure and excess. “The idea would be to expand the gamut of pleasurable sensations to the maximum, and perhaps even to bring into being […] other, as yet unknown, kinds of sensual stimulation and gratification,” he wrote in His Master’s Voice. This possibility became the premise for The Futurological Congress, in which humanity becomes trapped in a pharmacologically induced paradise, unaware of its own looming extinction.
Most presciently, Lem understood that even mundane varieties of information could be disastrous in overwhelming quantities. What happens, he asked in His Master’s Voice, when “the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?” Or, as he wrote in the same novel, “freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors […] ?” Facebook and the deluge of fake news sites didn’t exist when Lem wrote this, but their creation wouldn’t have surprised him. The future of the United States, he wrote to Kandel, is “dark, most likely.” …
