THEODORE STURGEON famously declared Stanislaw Lem to be the most widely-read SF writer in the world. (Perhaps unfortunately for Sturgeon, since Lem in turn regarded him as little better than a hack.) I''ve always had the impression, accurate or not, that Lem has usually been underread stateside, and a brief survey of the scholarship cited online in the SFRD seems to confirm this: rather a lot of the work out there is not in English and dated at that. So it''s a pleasant relief--if not actual redress--that Liverpool University Press has just released this volume of Lem''s selected letters. The editor and translator, Peter Swirski, is Lem''s second American translator--the first being Michael Kandel, the recipient of the letters in this volume. Swirski conducted a lengthy series of interviews with Lem for the volume A Stanislaw Lem Reader, published in 1997, and also edited a volume of essays on Lem, including one by Kandel, for the more recent collection The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem (2008).The letters span the dates from 1972 to 1987, with the vast bulk of them written during the 70s. Then-contemporary world events provide Lem ample room to expound with increasing cynicism on the world stage and especially on America.

He dourly predicts America''s descent into a police state, and is frustrated by world leaders'' reluctance and inability to address climate change and the energy crisis. (The letters offer a perhaps useful if depressing exercise for younger readers to find that the more things change, the more they stay the same.) Even more often, however, he is given to reflect on the nature of totalitarian government, which usually surfaces in discussions of Kafka and Orwell, or occasionally in memories of his youth in wartime Poland. Then in one especially illuminating letter from October 1974, he writes during a stay in Frankfurt that he wants to take the opportunity to write a letter that he knows won''t be opened or censored; he describes the recent disappearance of an unnamed party member and relates it to increasing delays in publishing both for himself and others. Some people may want to read this volume alongside Robert Darnton''s newest tome, Censors At Work: How States Shaped Literature, for further insight into a process that Lem takes for granted and that he, presumably, can''t discuss further.Speaking of deletions: The expurgations from this book are numerous, though Swirski assures us in his introduction that they most often consist only of "Lem''s countless, not to say obsessive, invocations of FAME & FORTUNE (virtually always cast in BLOCK TYPE)" (2). We should hope this is true, and yet some missives conclude so abruptly--such as that dated 1 August 1972, in which Lem glances at his memories of the German occupation and declares that "Still--there is a time for dying and there is a time for living" (36)--that we might wish for more of his indulgences to his ego. They are illustrative of his character--which is, at this time, an author at the height of his popularity and acclaim.

In those moments when Lem pauses and steps away from his career as author and critic, he reveals himself as a man continually haunted by the Holocaust, as an irascible elder aware of his foibles ("I''m emotionally cold and can''t stand PHYSICAL contact with people" (89)), and an imaginative philosophe ("I had this idea about a desacralized version of a pact with the devil." (109)).Readers plumbing for nuggets of Lem''s criticism will find much to enjoy here: his letters discussing the fracas regarding his honorary membership within the SFWA-and his subsequent removal--appear in full, along with his remarks regarding the kind letters he received from "Mrs. Le Guin" afterwards. There is nothing regarding his noted opinions on Philip K. Dick, and rather little regarding his opinions of other American SF authors (and none of that favorable, of course). Rather more time is spent discussing Kafka and Orwell, and occasionally Vonnegut, Arendt, or Eco.As a final note, I will say that for me the greatest hurdle in this short, dense book is its typography.

This may sound like nitpicking at its worst, but after years in academia my eyes have become accustomed to reading academic texts in something at least approaching Times New Roman. The introduction, annotations, and index are all printed in that font, but the letters themselves are set in a large Courier font that, at first blush, lends the volume an air of amateurishness that is totally unwarranted. Having read other volumes in the Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies series, I know this to be an unusual decision. Swirski''s notes on typography in the introductory matter discuss his apparatus for denoting Lem''s texts in various languages so that the attentive reader will know when Lem himself is providing English phrases versus those of his translator. Nothing is said about the font shifts, which makes me wonder if it is meant as a literary device (allowing the reader to pretend s/he is reading Lem''s original typescript letters) or an aesthetic choice (a friend more knowledgeable than I on the topic of Slavic translations claims that the usage is not unusual).This book is of course going to be of most interest to devotees of Lem, as well as academics particularly interested in international SF and SF criticism. Its price point is outside of the range of those outside of academic libraries or true completists, but it is a valuable book for all that. One can only hope for a more complete second edition.