Lem describes the environment of Regis III with sparse prose befitting the sparseness of the landscape. If I had to pick a word to describe the atmosphere of The Invincible, I would use ‘lonely.’ These are people in a dusty wasteland millions of miles from anything resembling civilization. The book then follows the exploratory team as they try to get to the bottom of the mystery. The Invincible is titled for the namesake exploratory vessel deployed to the planet Regis III, a barren and lifeless backwater world, to find the Condor, another exploratory ship that was lost on-planet. It is that older style of novel with relatively thin characters and blunt, practical prose. Campbell’s editorial desk without too many changes. This is a novel that could have passed through John W. Knowing this, it is strange, then, how much Lem’s novel The Invincible reads like something from the Golden Age of (Anglosphere) Science Fiction. Stanisław Lem notably had a disdain for American science fiction, which he found to be overly commercialized and not particularly daring he singled out only Philip K. Here, we shall turn to an example of one of these stories from a country we in the Anglosphere don’t usually think of as having a science fiction tradition: Poland. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama or Greg Bear’s Eon or Andy Weir’s The Martian.

This tradition has given us works like Arthur C.

Star Trek called space ‘the final frontier,’ and the show was pitched as ‘wagon train to the stars.’ Oftentimes, these stories are very American in their character ‘space western’ as a term exists for a reason. Science fiction, as a genre, is filled with stories of exploration.

The Invincible by Stanisław Lem