Stanisław Lem (Polish pronunciation: [staˈɲiswav ˈlɛm] ( listen); 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. He was named a Knight of the Order of the White Eagle. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is perhaps best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon claimed that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world.
His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humankind's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns. Multiple translated versions of his works exist.
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Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, Poland (now Ukraine). He was the son of Sabina Woller and Samuel Lem, a wealthy laryngologist and former physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Though raised a Roman Catholic, he later became an atheist "for moral reasons ... the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally". After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, he was not allowed to study at the Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin" and only due to his father's connections was accepted to study medicine at Lwów University in 1940. During World War II and the Nazi occupation (1941–1944), Lem survived with false papers, earning a living as a car mechanic and welder, and becoming active in the resistance. (Lem's family had Jewish ancestors, and thus was in greater danger than they would have already been as Polish citizens and intellectuals.) In 1945, Polish eastern Kresy were annexed into the Soviet Ukraine and the family, like many other Poles, was resettled to Kraków where Lem at his father's pressure took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. He refused to tailor his answers to the prevailing Lysenkoism and failed his final examinations on purpose so as not to be obliged to become a military doctor. Earlier he had started working as a research assistant in a scientific institution and writing stories in his spare time.
Lem made his literary debut in 1946 as a poet, and at that time he also published several dime novels. Beginning that year, Lem's first science fiction novel Człowiek z Marsa (The Man from Mars) was serialized in the magazine Nowy Świat Przygód (New World of Adventures). Between 1947 and 1950 Lem, while continuing his work as a scientific research assistant, published poems, short stories, and scientific essays. However, during the era of Stalinism, all published works had to be directly approved by the communist regime. Lem finished a partly autobiographical novella Hospital of the Transfiguration (Szpital Przemienienia) in 1948, but it was suppressed by the authorities until 1955 when he added a sequel more acceptable to the doctrine of socialist realism. In 1951 he published his first book, Astronauci (The Astronauts); it was commissioned as juvenile SF and Lem was forced to include many references to the 'glorious future of communism' in it. He later criticized this novel (as well as several of his other early pieces, bowing to the ideological pressure) as simplistic; nonetheless its publication convinced him to become a full-time writer.
Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period in the Soviet Union led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech. Between 1956 and 1968, Lem authored 17 books. His works were widely translated abroad (although mostly in the Eastern Bloc countries). In 1957 he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogi (Dialogues). Dialogi and Summa Technologiae (1964) are his two most famous philosophical texts. The Summa is notable for being a unique analysis of prospective social, cybernetic, and biological advances. In this work, Lem discusses philosophical implications of technologies that were completely in the realm of science fiction then, but are gaining importance today—for instance, virtual reality and nanotechnology. Over the next few decades, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological, although from the 1980s onwards he tended to concentrate on philosophical texts and essays.
He gained international fame for The Cyberiad, a series of humorous short stories from a mechanical universe inhabited by robots (who had occasional contacts with biological "slimies"), first published in English in 1974. His best-known novels include Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (Głos pana, 1968), and the late Fiasco (Fiasko, 1987), expressing most strongly his major theme of the futility of mankind's attempts to comprehend the truly alien. Solaris was made into a film in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972; in 2002, Steven Soderbergh directed a Hollywood remake starring George Clooney.
In 1982, with martial law in Poland declared, Lem moved to West Berlin where he became a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). After that, he settled in Vienna. He returned to Poland in 1988.
In the early 1990s Lem met with a literary scholar and critic, Peter Swirski, for a series of extensive interviews, published together with other critical materials and translations as A Stanislaw Lem Reader (1997). In the book Lem speaks about a range of issues rarely before touched on in any interview. Moreover, the book includes Swirski's translation of Lem's retrospective essay, 'Thirty Year Later', devoted to Lem's legendary nonfictional treatise, Summa Technologiae. During later interviews in 2005, Lem expressed his disappointment with the genre of science fiction and his general pessimism regarding technical progress. He viewed the human body as unsuitable for space travel, held that information technology drowns people in a glut of low-quality information, and considered truly intelligent robots as both undesirable and impossible to construct.
Lem died in Kraków on 27 March 2006 at the age of 84 due to heart disease.
Lem was awarded an honorary membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) in 1973 despite being technically ineligible. SFWA Honorary membership is given to people who do not meet the criteria for joining the regular membership but who would be welcomed as members. Lem, however, never had a high opinion of American science-fiction—particularly the works of Harlan Ellison—describing it as ill thought-out, poorly written, and interested more in making money than in ideas or new literary forms. After his American publication, when he was eligible for regular membership, his honorary membership was rescinded. Some of the SFWA members apparently intended this as a rebuke, and it seems that Lem interpreted it thus, but the organization's official line is that honorary membership is only extended to people who are not eligible for regular membership. After his American publication, Lem was invited to stay on with the organization with a regular membership, but declined.
Lem singled out only one American SF writer for praise, Philip K. Dick—see the 1986 English-language anthology of his critical essays, Microworlds. Dick, however, considered Lem to be a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect. After many members (including Ursula K. Le Guin) protested Lem's treatment by the SFWA, a member offered to pay his dues. Lem never accepted the offer. He had also been critical of science fiction in general, and had recently distanced himself from the genre, saying that his early works may have been SF, but his later ones were more mainstream.
Lem's work displays several recurring themes. The first major grouping of his fiction falls into a more traditional understanding of science fiction, with elements including speculation on technological advances, space travel and alien worlds. This group includes such works as Eden (1959), Return from the Stars (1961), Solaris (1961), The Invincible (1964), His Master's Voice (1968), and Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1968). Fables of a dark nature make up the other grouping. These include The Star Diaries (1957), Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), and The Cyberiad (1965). One of Lem's primary themes was the impossibility of communication between humans and profoundly alien civilizations. His aliens are often incomprehensible to the human mind, be they swarms of mechanical insects (in The Invincible), a living ocean (in Solaris) or strangely ordered societies of more human-like beings in Fiasco and Eden, describing the failure of the first contact. Lem's book Return from the Stars follows an astronaut's adjustment to a radically changed human society after spending 100 years in space. In His Master's Voice Lem describes the failure of humanity's intelligence in deciphering and truly comprehending an apparent message from space. He wrote about human technological progress and the problem of human existence in a world where technological development makes biological human impulses obsolete or dangerous. His criticism of most science fiction surfaced in novels (His Master's Voice), literary and philosophical essays (Fantastyka i futurologia) and interviews. In the 1990s Lem forswore science fiction and returned to futurological prognostications, most notably those expressed in Okamgnienie (Blink of an Eye). He became increasingly critical of modern technology in his later life, criticizing inventions such as the Internet.
In many novels, humans become an irrational and emotional liability to their machine partners, who are not perfect either. Issues of technological utopias appeared in Peace on Earth, in Observation on the Spot, and, to a lesser extent, in The Cyberiad. Lem often placed his characters — like the spaceman Ijon Tichy of The Star Diaries, Pirx the pilot (of Tales of Pirx the Pilot), or the narrator of Return from the Stars in strange, new settings. Thrust into the unknown, he used them to personify various aspects of the possible futures, often having them balance on the thin line separating his belief in the inherent goodness of humanity and his deep pessimism about human limitations.
He also often deploys a wicked sense of humor in his descriptions of even the darkest human situations, most famously in The Futurological Congress and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. In this regard, he has sometimes been compared to Kurt Vonnegut or Franz Kafka. Many of his lighter tales are about Ijon Tichy, a cosmic traveller in his one-man spaceship, whose adventures challenge commonly accepted ideas about things like time travel, the nature of the soul, and the origin of the universe, in a satiric and ironic, yet undeniably logical way.
Three of his novels are likely his most famous. The philosophical Solaris, filmed twice, is set on an isolated research station above the planet Solaris, which is home to a unique alien lifeform. Głos Pana (His Master's Voice) is a very philosophical - much more so than Solaris - story of a scientific effort to decode, translate and understand an extraterrestrial transmission, critically approaching humanity's intelligence and intentions in deciphering and truly comprehending a message from space. Finally, The Cyberiad, pointedly subtitled "Fables for the Cybernetic Age", provides a commentary on humanity in the form of a series of comic short stories relating the adventures of two robot 'constructors' who handle engineering issues around the galaxy.
Franz Rottensteiner, Lem's former agent, was instrumental in introducing him to the Western audience, but they later separated on bitter terms. Rottensteiner summarized his importance:
With [number of translations and copies sold], Lem is the most successful author in modern Polish fiction; nevertheless his commercial success in the world is limited, and the bulk of his large editions was due to the special publishing conditions in the Communist countries: Poland, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic). Only in West Germany was Lem really a critical and a commercial success [... and everywhere... ] in recent years interest in him has waned. But he is the only writer of European SF of whom most books have been translated into English, and [...] kept in print in the USA. Lem's critical success in English is due mostly to the excellent translations of Michael Kandel...
Stanisław Lem, whose works were influenced by such masters of Polish literature as Cyprian Norwid and Stanisław Witkiewicz, chose the language of science fiction as in the communist People's Republic of Poland it was easier — and safer — to express ideas veiled in the world of fantasy and fiction than in the world of reality. Despite this — or perhaps because of this — he has become one of the most highly acclaimed science-fiction writers, hailed by critics as equal to the likes of H. G. Wells or Olaf Stapledon.
Lem's works influenced not only the realm of literature, but that of science as well. Return from the Stars includes the "opton", which is often cited as the first published appearance of the idea of electronic paper.
In 1981 the philosophers Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett included three extracts from Lem's fiction in their important annotated anthology The Mind's I. ... Hofstadter commented that Lem's "literary and intuitive approach... does a better job of convincing readers of his views than any hard-nosed scientific article... might do".
Will Wright's popular city planning game, SimCity, was partly inspired by Lem's short story, "The Seventh Sally." Lem's works have been used as teaching texts for philosophy students. Texts by Lem were set to music by Esa-Pekka Salonen in his 1982 piece, Floof.
The Magellanic Cloud (Obłok Magellana, 1955, untranslated into English)
The Invasion from Aldebaran (pl:Inwazja z Aldebarana, 1959) – Collection of science fiction stories.
Solaris (1961) – SF novel. The crew of a space station is strangely influenced by the living ocean as they attempt communication with it. Translated into English from the French translation by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox in 1970. Made into a Russian film in 1972, and US film in 2002.
Ze wspomnień Ijona Tichego; Professor A. Dońda (1971)
Observation on the Spot (pl:Wizja lokalna, 1982) – Ijon Tichy novel about the planet Entia. Not translated into English.
Library of 21st Century (Biblioteka XXI wieku, 1986) – 3 more fictional reviews; translated as One Human Minute
The Fantastical Lem (Fantastyczny Lem, 2001) – Short stories collection. Not translated into English.
Summa Technologiae (1964) - Philosophical essay. Partially translated into English.
Lem was well-known for criticizing the films based on his work, including the famous characterization of Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky as "Crime and Punishment in space".
Ikarie XB-1 (in USA as White Planet or Voyage to the End of the Universe, Czechoslovakia 1963) – loosely based on The Magellanic Cloud, uncredited
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