Much Ado About Everything

I guess you can’t have good news without bad news.  Sad news of the day is that Stanislaw Lem, one of my all-time favourite Sci-Fi authors, has died.  He was pretty old – 84 – and hasn’t written anything that I can recall since 1988 or so, but his books were fairly important to me at some point of my life.  He’s most famous for “Solaris”, though I prefered his last book “The Fiasco”.  Perhaps his best book in my opinion was “The Invincible”, though “Solaris” is probably the closest to mainstream literature of all of his works.  Do read the book, regardless of movies.  It’s a powerful piece of work.  But never mind movies and “Solaris”, he was much more than just that.  He also wrote a bunch of stories about pilot Pirks in his earlier days, and this character even made it in a very clever way into his last book (“The Fiasco”).  Then there was the early book “Eden” as well as “Voice of our masters” (or something close to that).

Just checked Chapters.ca, and reminded myself, he also wrote Star Diaries (of Ilyon Tichy, mispelled but I read it in a different language).  Invincible seems really hard to find, unfortunately.  Well, Fiasco is available, and along with Solaris and stories about pilot Pirx – and Star Diaries – these will do.  I haven’t read many of his works myself either, as they were unavailable in my native language before I moved to Canada.

Good news of the day is that season 2 of Honey and Clover, probably the best anime of 2005, has been annonced!  Coming this summer in Japan!  I hope it’s at least half as good as part one was.