Comment by Larkus on [link] New Scientist, on the distant future · 2012-05-06T13:38:36.833Z · LW · GW

Unfortunately, Lem's most thought provoking book, Summa Technologiae (1964), was never (completely) translated into English.

There is only a partial translation into English: http://web.archive.org/web/20041012053805/http://wwwnlds.physik.tu-berlin.de/~prengel/Lem/contents.htm

Russian translation: http://lib.ru/LEM/summa/summtitl.htm

Comment by Larkus on Rhetoric for the Good · 2011-10-31T20:29:19.596Z · LW · GW

lukeprog wrote: "Now: What are your favorite pieces of writing advice?"

"On Style" by Arthur Schopenhauer

German original: http://aboq.org/schopenhauer/parerga2/stil.htm

English translation: http://tinyurl.com/68oajcg

Excerpt: "It would generally serve writers in good stead if they would see that, whilst a man should, if possible, think like a great genius, he should talk the same language as everyone else. Authors should use common words to say uncommon things. But they do just the opposite. We find them trying to wrap up trivial ideas in grand words, and to clothe their very ordinary thoughts in the most extraordinary phrases, the most far-fetched, unnatural, and out-of-the-way expressions. Their sentences perpetually stalk about on stilts. They take so much pleasure in bombast, and write in such a high-flown, bloated, affected, hyperbolical and acrobatic style that their prototype is Ancient Pistol, whom his friend Falstaff once impatiently told to say what he had to say 'like a man of this world'."