A Perfect Vacuum

So far, my experience with Polish author Lem has had a 50% succes rate. I liked Solaris, and absolutely loved The Cyberiad -- I even included it in my list of favorites. But both this and Fiasco were letdowns. Nevertheless, I will continue reading Lem for sure.

As for A Perfect Vacuum, I expected something different -- Lemian versions of M. John Harrison's great fictional short reviews in You Should Come With Me Now. What we get instead often has more to do with the canon of Western Literature -- think Crusoe, Dostoevsky,... -- than actual speculative fiction. The fictional reviews are dense, longwinded and have a lot of heavy meta-literary stuff. Often they are more tedious synopses than actual reviews, so in a sense this feels like a collection of discarded ideas that didn't make it to actual novels.

'Pericalypse' and the introduction were great though, and there might still be gems in the second half of the book, but I lacked the stamina to hunt for them. DNF at 50%.