Does your prose feel boring? Does your fictional world feel shallow? Read some Stanislaw Lem, the Polish master of space stories. You can meet him in this short film that I found on SFSignal.
The movie gives you a groovy look at the life of a Polish writer in the 1970's, as well as a peek at the Andrei Tarkovsky version of Lem's Solaris. Ever since I read his novel Fiasco, I fell in love with Lem's Jorge Luis Borges-laced blend of science fiction.
I'll never forget the first few pages of Fiasco, where he wrote a couple mind-blowing pages about skimming the surface of a moon inside a gigantic robot. Too much science fiction seems badly-imagined--too many elves and not enough story--but Lem's skinny books hinted at an entire imaginary universe and physics that existed alongside his fiction.
When Lem died in 2006, Book Ninja collected all the obituaries about this amazing writer.
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