Alien Laughter: Review of The Playful Lem

Cole Adams Under Review:The Playful Lem: A Short Story Sampler. Stanislaw Lem, translated & edited by Michael Kandel. MLA, July 2026. Although Stanisław Lem was a pioneer of many of the conventions we invoke when we discuss “science fiction” today, he was a legendary curmudgeon when it came to the genre’s communities of writers and readers in America. At his prickliest he viewed them as childish, even moronic. It is a testament to the hunger for his brand of critical SF, however, that many of his most-read novels in the U.S., including Solaris (1961), His Master’s Voice (1968), and Fiasco (1986), are ones that rewrote the terms of first contact narratives around deeply philosophical questions. Lem wrote plenty of space opera hijinks, though a core concern remained the underbelly of dehumanization that propels genocidal violence: failures of communication and the opaqueness of others’ experiences, the drive to understand difference whose unsettling ambiguity brings it into proximity…