“Philip K. Dick”
“Lem belongs in that company of SF writers – Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Kim Stanley Robinson”
“Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, Kobo Abe, Angela Carter (and behind them Kafka and Borges)”
“Ursula Le Guin and Theodore Sturgeon had endorsed him”
“Lem should have had his mind blown not only by Philip K. Dick, but by Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, by Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, by Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism, by Sterling and cyberpunk, by Kim Stanley Robinson and so many others. He lived long enough that he could have seen how Carter Scholz, in Radiance, marries a Lemian satire of Cold War militaristic capitalism to the architecture of a William Gaddis novel, or how Ted Chiang’s brainy novellas crystallise Lemian themes of metacognition and first contact”
“Lem resembled other Cold War artists who appealed to me in those years, men who ironised or allegorised mid-century cataclysms and the Cold War fear that emerged from them – Stanley Kubrick, Philip K. Dick, Rod Serling, J.G. Ballard”