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Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations), by Stanislaw Lem
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The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Throughout his writings, comprising dozens of science fiction novels and short stories, Lem offered deeply philosophical and bitingly satirical reflections on the limitations of both science and humanity.
In Summa Technologiae—his major work of nonfiction, first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time—Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance. Indeed, many of Lem’s conjectures about future technologies have now come true: from artificial intelligence, bionics, and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload, the concept underlying Internet search engines, and the idea of virtual reality. More important for its continued relevance, however, is Lem’s rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity.
Preceding Richard Dawkins’s understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker by more than two decades, Lem posits evolution as opportunistic, shortsighted, extravagant, and illogical. Strikingly original and still timely, Summa Technologiae resonates with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.
- Sales Rank: #921354 in Books
- Published on: 2014-01-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.10" w x 6.00" l, 1.30 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 440 pages
Review
"At the end of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologiae, an ambitious compendium of all orthodox philosophical and theological knowledge about the world. Seven hundred years later, science fiction author Stanislaw Lem writes his Summa Technologiae, an equally ambitious but unorthodox investigation into the perplexities and enigmas of humanity and its relationship to an equally enigmatic world in which it finds itself embedded. In this work Lem shows us science fiction as a method of inquiry, one that renders the future as tenuous as the past, with a wavering, ‘phantomatic’ present always at hand." —Eugene Thacker, author of After Life
"Summa is a fantasia that follows certain lines of speculative thought as far as Lem can take them. Lem’s sober materialism may seem dehumanizing, but he brings back to the frontier a question that has plagued civilization since the beginning, and whose shifting, always insufficient answers have always signaled revolutions in culture: what is it to be human?" —Los Angeles Review of Books
"With Summa Technologiae, his masterwork of non-fiction which has been translated into English for the first time, Lem has taken Western civilisation for a spin—with spectacular consequences. " —New Scientist
About the Author
Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006) was the best-known science fiction author writing outside the English language. His books have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold more than 27 million copies worldwide.
Joanna Zylinska is professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Bioethics in the Age of New Media and The Ethics of Cultural Studies.
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Lem's cornerstone, here at last
By David Auerbach
Dazzlingly brilliant, Summa Technologiae is Lem's speculative nonfiction masterpiece, written in 1964 but not translated into English until now. It contains the intellectual seeds of most of his subsequent work, and ideas that very few science-fiction writers were even touching at the time (nanotech, evolutionary biology, virtual reality, complexity theory, the "singularity", etc.). The penultimate section, "The Creation of Worlds," is one of the most mind-expanding things I've read in some time, tying evolution, cosmology, technology, and language together in an epic analogy.
Fans of Lem's later Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum will find many of their ideas already present in Summa. Lem is not as pessimistic here as he would later become. While hardly a techno-booster, he's more concerned here with possibilities than likelihoods, so he does indulge in some best-case fantasies at times--which are still not *that* sunny.
Here's what he has to say: "Civilization lacks knowledge that would allow it to choose a path knowingly from the many possible ones, instead of drifting in random tides of discoveries. The discoveries that contributed to its construction are still partly accidental. ... So it is not a question of condemning of praising technology but rather of examining to what extent we can trust its development and to what extent we can influence its direction."
Not terribly reassuring. The sections on virtual reality ("phantomatics") and artificial life ("imitology") are lighter on the gloom and feel quite prescient.
Many thanks to Minnesota and the translator for putting this out in English. While not necessarily the best place to start if you're new to Lem (try A Perfect Vacuum for a more digestible, Borgesian form of some of Lem's ideas), Summa contains Lem's brilliance in the most concentrated form. It is absolutely essential for Lem fans and for anyone interested in authentic, hard-nosed futurism, rather than posthumanist cheerleading.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Be prepared to work at it
By Brian Carss
This was a solid read and not something that I anticipated when I first read earlier reviews in the New Scientist magazine.
It turned out to be a discourse on evolution from two different viewpoints, bio-evolution and techno-evolution. The first is well understood but one needs to have your attention drawn to the second, which is very different, in that it can be reversed with all the cultural consequences, while the former can not.
Be prepared to work at this book as the author introduces all sorts of new and newly created vocabulary, but don't be put off. It is well worth the time spent reading it.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating
By Davidson
An historical oddity - very much "dated" in one sense, since this translation into English has come decades after its original publication, but on the other hand, it is a compelling reminder of Lem's power as a prophet. So he talked about "phantomatics"... which we now call "Virtual Reality". Lem isn't the easiest to read, but you can't discount him as a futurist.
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