This month’s issue of Lampa (Lamp) has a few features on Stanisław Lem, who passed away recently. Radek Knapp writes in one of them “One day I told the Master that I had written a story, to which Lem replied: ‘don’t write. You’ll starve to death’.” It’s a tough old profession alright but not for everyone. Lem, for instance, is one of the most successful science fiction writers of the century. But take young gun Ignacy Karpowicz, an excerpt of whose latest novel, Niehalo, appears in the same magazine. The novel-writing game gives such poor pickings that this young man (born 1976) has to scrape along doing translations as well – from English, Spanish and Amharic. It’s not much but combined with the occasional royalty cheque it just about allows him the financial independence to live in both Costa Rica and Ethiopia, when he’s not travelling around Central America and Eastern Africa.

I never did take to Lem. Solaris was a struggle and I cannot even remember if I ever managed to finish The Invincible. Gazeta Wyborcza published an extract from one of his masterpieces to mark his passing. They titled it “Sepulka?! Without a wife?!” In it Tichy, the narrator, finds himself in strange place where all the time he hears the word “sepulka.” His curiousity is aroused. Even though there are signs advertising this sepulka he cannot figure out what it is. At last he goes into a shop selling sepulkas and tries to buy one. The salescreature is horrified to learn that he does not have a wife and refuses to sell him one. Undeterred, Tichy, asks an acquaintance he bumps into in a bar to sell him one. The acquaintance’s wife overhears and faints and the narrator is heaved out of the bar.

Now I know it’s the future and they do things differently there and all that, but what kind of a moron tries to find out what something is by buying it? I myself am a stranger in a strange land but it would never cross my mind to find out what a “prezerwatywa” was by trying to buy one off an acquaintance in a bar – especially not after such a reception as Tichy received in the shop. (“Prezerwatywa” is the Polish for condom.)

Still, it’s hard to dislike a writer who would say “I have tried to forget what I wrote in The Magellan Nebula but I don’t know if I have succeeded because it is a hopeless book. That Sesame is very poor and Astronauts is terrible.” I must be doing something wrong.