One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1986. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151695504. Translated from the Polish by Catherine S. Leach. 128 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Vaughn Andrews. Jacket illustration by John Alfred Dorn III.
DESCRIPTION - In these three previews of the 21st century—actually reviews of not-yet-written books—Lem brings us startling news indeed. ‘One Human Minute’ describes a kind of super—World Almanac that summarizes what everyone on earth is doing during a single minute. We learn, for instance, that 34.2 million men and women make love every minute. During the same sixty seconds, however, only 0.0000001 person is killed by a falling meteor. Star Wars are a thing of the past for the author of Weapons Systems of the 21st Century, which Lem 'reviews’ next. Human beings, obsolete on the battlefield of the future, have been replaced by synthetic insects, or synsects, with mixed results: ‘YOU can hardly have a parade of stainless steel bugs,’ observes Lem. The human experience on our planet, Lem argues in ‘The World as Cataclysm,’ has been a chancy business—more the result of catastrophes in the sky than of orderly evolution. ‘The universe is a crooked roulette wheel,’ Lem concludes, and in the future the game is likely to be no less crooked. One Human Minute is one of Lem's wildest flights of fancy—blending thought-provoking philosophical reflection with the Polish master's usual out-of-this-world humor.
Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
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