This was my first time reading anything from Stanislaw Lem other than a skim through of The Invincible years ago, which I honestly have mostly forgotten. I wish I had realized then what an amazing hard, science-fiction writer Lem was. Well, some of the stories are a bit dated as far as specific technologies go, they are still interesting and thought-provoking.
I was about half way through the book, while reading Darkness and Mildew, that I started to notice he wrote in such a way that the main theme/antagonist/etc behind the story is technology agnostic to a point. And his forethought on artificial intelligence & Vonn Neumann theory is honestly quite astounding for the time these were written. Those were extremely next level topics at the time, and I am sure his fiction helped inspire many of the advances we’ve seen in complex systems, AI and ML.
One comment thread I found in several of his stories that really caught my attention was the notion that alien life will most likely be so vastly different from intelligent life on earth that 1) we may not even know they are here, 2) that our species will be so different based on our evolutionary paths that we cannot communicate as we understand communication, 3) not all life may actually be organic life or wholly organic life, and 4) that our first contact from another intelligent species may not be with organic life.
While some of this definitely feels dated, it is definitely entertaining and holds up to this day as what I would consider absolute classics in hard science-fiction. This was probably the best re-introduction I could have had to Lem.