"The Invisible" was the first adult sci-fi book I read. I think I was in 2nd grade and had just learned how to read. Very early 80's.
I recall that my arts teacher told me about Lem in 4th grade when I was drawing some spaceship and I told her I already read some books by him. She didn't believe me until I told her details about the stories.
"The Invincible" was mind blowing at that age and set a pretty high standard for everything in that genre I read after.
I still think my dad left it laying on the living room table intentionally for me to find.
He had almost everything Lem had written until then and was probably fed up with me reading the pulp kids/teen sci-fi that I was at the time.
As I grew up in Germany pretty much all of Lems works were readily available in German, which definitely helped.
Speaking of Lem adaptions: I was already doing computer graphics/VFX in my early 20's when I gave reading "Solaris" another try (it had been too long in the tooth for me in parts as a teen).
And I recall the visual description of the ocean at multiple scales (it's two pages or more) and though: that will take years for VFX tools to get to the stage where we can visualize that.
I'd say we've only been there since less than a decade.
I recall that my arts teacher told me about Lem in 4th grade when I was drawing some spaceship and I told her I already read some books by him. She didn't believe me until I told her details about the stories.
"The Invincible" was mind blowing at that age and set a pretty high standard for everything in that genre I read after.
I still think my dad left it laying on the living room table intentionally for me to find. He had almost everything Lem had written until then and was probably fed up with me reading the pulp kids/teen sci-fi that I was at the time.
As I grew up in Germany pretty much all of Lems works were readily available in German, which definitely helped.
Speaking of Lem adaptions: I was already doing computer graphics/VFX in my early 20's when I gave reading "Solaris" another try (it had been too long in the tooth for me in parts as a teen).
And I recall the visual description of the ocean at multiple scales (it's two pages or more) and though: that will take years for VFX tools to get to the stage where we can visualize that.
I'd say we've only been there since less than a decade.