His peers hated him; he didn’t think much of them either. And now that Stephen Soderbergh has made a version of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel Solaris, the 81-year-old Polish writer kinda hates it. Jeet Heer of the National Post has written a terrific piece summarizing the life and complex, frequently-misunderstood work of this sci-fi titan. A sample:

Among other things, ”Solaris” is a veiled attack on Marxism and its claim to have replaced religious mystery with a science of human history. Solaristics, the systematic study of the planet’s ocean, is said to be a rational pursuit - but it’s really, Kelvin notes, just ”the space era’s equivalent of religion: faith disguised as science.” He adds: ”Contact, the stated aim of Solaristics, is no less vague and obscure than the communion of the saints, or the second coming of the Messiah.”

Check the piece out; if more critics wrote this intelligently about science fiction, more people would read it!

Though maybe the tide’s turning. There’s been a recent boomlet of articles praising Philip K. Dick and noting how eerily prescient was his superparanoid vision of the world. Laura Miller wrote a terrific essay for the New York Times Book Review a while back — “It’s Philip Dick’s World, We Only Live in It” — and back in the summer, an op-ed piece in the Times noted that Dick was the perfect author for our highly-surveilled times.