Re: THEORY: Browsing at Borders Public Library

>I need to read "Languages of Pao" in its entirety
>(having read excerpts like "Moon Moth" in various collections)
>and "Babel-17 (Delaney is maybe my favorite sci-fi author
>just based on his short stories; I read lots of shorts).
>But the corner-chain-bookstore-abomination didn't have either.
>I settled for some Stanislaw Lem, irrelevantly. Next, the library.
Stanislaw Lem actually wrote one of the funnier descriptions of morphology
in the Futurological congress. One of the characters explains the "science"
of futurolinguistics, which attempts to gain insight into the future by
creating the words that will be used in the future. Once you have the
words, one can guess at the concepts underlying them, and gain new insight.

I've always wondered how this (or any part of the Cyberiad) reads in
Polish, as it's an truly funny tour through English derivational
morphology. Michael Kandel's translations of Lem are eerily full of
carefully directed wordplay, and are most impressive.

  -- David
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