Lem, Philip K. Dick, and Royalties in the Soviet Era

Abstract

215 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Lem, Philip K. Dick, and Royalties in the Soviet Era. Marcin Wo³k’s review essay on “Stanis³aw Lem, Holocaust Survivor” (SFS 45.2 [2018]): 33240 ) offers a balanced review of the books by Agnieszka Gajewska and Wojciech Orliñski, including the fact that Lem’s statements about himself are not to be trusted; yet it also contains mistakes and inaccuracies, supposedly because the reviewer takes Orliñski at face value. In note 13, for instance, Wo³k claims that Lem already foresaw in his Dialogi (1957) that “no totalitarian regime could be sustained in the long run because there would be no positive feedback from society” (339); he is obviously referring to the essay “Cybernetyka stosowana: przyk³ad z diedziny socjologii” [Applied cybernetics: an example from the realm of sociology]. But this was added as “Annex I”—“Dialogi po szesnastu latach” [Dialogues after 16 years]—in the second edition of Dialogi in 1972. In 1957 there could hardly have been published in Poland an essay that opens with the statement that “So far there exists no textbook on the pathology of socialist administration.” This piece is, by the way, Lem’s most open political statement in Communist times, and his best political essay. So much for the increased censorship after 1970! Yet in 1972 it is far less impressive a prophecy than it would have been in 1957. Wo³k argues that “Lem’s letters to his most important translators and publishers (Franz Rottensteiner, Michael Kandel, Wolfgang Thadewald, Virgiljus Èepaitis)” (337) also constitute a significant source. Michael Kandel was of course an important Lem translator, and about the only one with whom he conducted an extensive correspondence. But as far as I can find out, Virgilijus Èepaitis, the Lithuanian translator, publisher, and politician, translated only Lem’s “The Chain of Chance” (into Russian) and never was Lem’s publisher. Wolfgang Thadewald was a German science-fiction fan and Lem’s agent for the German language. Unless one counts my sf fanzine, I was never Lem’s publisher, though I was his literary agent up to 1995 in the West (with the exception of Germany) and a free-lance editor for the Insel/ Suhrkamp group responsible for many of Lem’s German appearances. But I never was a “major” Lem translator. I Englished just a few of Lem’s critical writings from German and translated Lem’s “Mein Leben” into English; it had been commissioned by Gale Research for the first volume of their CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL series. When Lem learned that the fee was $1,000, he wrote the piece at once in German, assuming that I would translate it into English. I did and then sold magazine rights for $10,000 to The New Yorker, where it appeared as “Chance and Order” (30 Jan. 1984). The Gale Research publication, which contains photos, is apparently unknown in Poland. The review claims that “in the socialist economic reality, the royalties from foreign film-makers and publishers had to be collected abroad in person and spent there” (337). This does not apply to Lem, for of course there existed a system for the transfer of royalties among socialist countries. The case of Philip K. Dick is quite different, for Dick had signed a contract specifying payment in Polish zloties. And those zloties were not transferable into hard 216 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) currency. Sometimes publishers had to pay in foreign currency, which was always scarce in the communist economy; but science-fiction rights were not high on a list of commodities to be bought for hard currency. If Dick had insisted on a payment in dollars, Ubik simply would not have appeared in a Polish translation in 1972. But Lem got enough money from other socialist countries—at official exchange rates. If he traveled to Prague and Bratislava (in the 1950s and 1960s it must have been), it was presumably on shopping sprees. In Poland itself, with its economy of dearth, many things simply were not available. Czechosovlakia was a relatively rich country, its cities had not been destroyed by the war, and stores were well stocked, much better than in...