Google has launched a new doodle to celebrate the work of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. The doodle takes the form of an interactive logic puzzle, which some people are reporting can take at least half an hour to complete.
Stanislaw Lem is best known in the west for his sci-fi novel Solaris, which has been filmed a number of times, by directors including Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. He has also been described as one of the most widely-read sci-fi authors in the world.
Lem is also known for The Cyberiad, a series of short stories and novels exploring a universe populated primarily by machines, and it’s this series that the Google doodle explores.
I would be interested in knowing how Google decided to give this rather obscure writer such an elaborate “doodle”. The value of this publicity is immense. Google’s blog on their doodles is rather vague and unhelpful. I am asking, in short, is this a paid-for doodle?
What are you talking about? If you think Stanislaw Lem is a ‘rather obscure writer’, that’s your problem. Millions of people would disagree with you.