Hey that’s my title

Bible pants

Especially in western europe. I'd be far less surprised about a bible belt in say, Poland.

It wouldn't surprise me if he was the type to not watch a lot of tv

It wasn't an issue so much, but just something you'd hear every once in a while from Star Wars fans. "He says parsecs, but parsecs is a measure of distance and not speed. They messed up that in the script - here's an explanation that actually makes sense, it's my head canon"

Then when Solo came out all those talking points got thrown out, since that "head canon" became actual canon

That's how I remember all of this going down at least.

He says "If you watched the movie you'd find this obvious"

However, it seems most Star Wars fans disagree. I mean, this had to be explained in a follow-up movie, wasn't it?

Imagine that this is the weight Messi had been carrying on his shoulders playing in the final and all the other matches in this World Cup. The hope and expectations and all that energy of all those people rolled into a ball that he was carrying all while performing at the level he did. And that's not even mentioning his personal and professional ambition of getting that one trophy that had eluded him.. the only one that did.. until now.

Such a great performance from him regardless, but with all that pressure on him it's even more impressive.. and yeah, it took the whole team to win this World Cup, a lot of players played their part, not only Messi. But he was the one who galvanized and pushed them forward - scoring in every single round in the World Cup, the first player to ever do so. Such an amazing performance, no wonder he collapsed to his knees when it was all said and done

Sounds messi

Yeah I’m a big fan and got excited and shared my thoughts

At one point he was one of the best sold sci fi authors in the world - in any language, at least judging by the liner notes on some of his older publications. I assumed that’s why his books were translated to English so early and so well. But I agree! These days his works are not as much looked at and read as they seemed to be in the past

Sorry so how/why did Jules change to Jude? I actually have pinkeye and can barely read right now or else I’d read the article. Yeah I know I shouldn’t even be here, squinting furiously

He basically took Lem’s story, took out most of the elements that Lem was focusing on (alien contact) and shifted the focus on the wife and love angle, which in the novel is not a focus in any way.

Which is fine! He took an existing story and saw something else in it and made it into something different and new, keeping the setting the same. That happens all the time with the creative process, right? No problem there.

This is why the author didn’t like the movie though. From his pov the movie title implies that it’s the same story as the novel, but it’s very different. Whether you hold the same view or not, surely we can appreciate that position. He probably initially thought the movie was going to mirror the book and got disappointed when it became a love story instead and something much simpler. As an artist I can relate to that.

So yeah, Sodenberg made his own point and ran with it and that’s fine. Creative freedom and all that. As long as we acknowledge that the point of the novel was completely different and that the movie is not a faithful adaptation or anything close for that. It’s not meant to be a faithful adaptation though so it doesn’t fail in that regard. but some people trip up here due to the same title and setting, so they assume the book and the movie tell the same story. I think this is also another reason why the author was a bit miffed, being an eccentric creative type

The movie is technically based on the novel though and not the older movie adaptation, although to be fair that adaptation is a pretty good one, if missing some of the Lem like nuances.

I bet what happened was the studio said “Uh that won’t sell, focus the story on the wife instead”

The novel is quite amazing and focuses on many different points than the movie does. The novel is more or less about the complexity of truly alien contact, but the movie made it into a sort of love story. It’s Lem too so it’s not at all a traditional alien encounter story. At all

“it’s Lem” so the novels points are not very direct. Lem wrote under communism in Poland and wrote a lot of his works as satire criticizing communism. He had to be really sneaky about it though and fortunately the commie overlords never caught on.

But as a result his style is at times odd and def unique with vaguely hidden satire, in a lot of his works he relies on wordplay (that have been somehow amazingly been translated to English while still retaining the original charm and message), some of his stuff sort of reads like Douglas Adams with a twist, a bunch of it reads like stories for children mixed with philosophy and wordplay, and he even wrote a book of reviews of books that don’t exist.

His work is sort of all over the place but there is a string connecting it all that’s hard to pin down.

Solaris is one of his books that’s a bit more .. like a traditional novel, with no wordplay and probably satire but it’s much harder to spot. I haven’t read all his works but I have read about 15 and Solaris has always been my fav.

The English translations (some via French somehow) are very well done, I’ve read both the polish and English for some of them and it’s incredible how the essence of the story is almost the same, even though I would have guessed that polish wordplay would be hard to translate without losing something.

Highly recommend this author! Not for everyone but there is a lot of variety. Solaris reads completely different from Memoirs from a Bathtub, and the Investigation is a murder mystery set in England that takes a curious approach to the genre, to give some examples.

My fav scene from one of his short stories was when an astronaut fighting with different versions of himself gets pissed off and throws a steak out the airlock. For the rest of the story there is an occasional eclipse as the steak orbits his spaceship, occasionally obscuring the nearby star.

Plus it makes sense that not every culture would adopt Jesus’ birthday as year 0. There’s other religions out there, etc

Hmm when I landed in Kathmandu in 2017 this is what I saw at the airport

https://imgur.com/a/QzlpDRm

Loved the country! The people are amazing