Stanislaw Lem

Stanisław Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical and humorous character. Lem's books have been translated into more than 50 languages and have sold over 45 million copies. He is perhaps best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has twice been made into a feature film. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. Lem is the author of the fundamental philosophical work Summa Technologiae, in which he anticipated the creation of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and also developed the ideas of human autoevolution, the creation of artificial worlds, and many others. Lem's science fiction works explore philosophical themes through speculations on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity's place in the universe. His essays and philosophical books cover these and many other topics. Translating his works is difficult due to Lem's elaborate neologisms and idiomatic wordplay. The Polish Parliament declared 2021 Stanisław Lem Year. Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, interwar Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). He was the son of Sabina née Woller and Samuel Lem, a wealthy laryngologist and former physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army. He later became an atheist for moral reasons. After the 1939 Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and Belarus, he was not allowed to study at Lwow Polytechnic as he wished because of his bourgeois origin, and only due to his father's connections he was accepted to study medicine at Lwów University in 1940. During World War II, Lem, due to being a Polish Jew, had to survive using fake papers, and worked as a car mechanic and welder. After the war, he moved to Kraków, where he published his first poem in 1946. He continued to study medicine, but did not take the final exams. He became interested in science fiction and wrote his first novel, The Man from Mars, in 1946, but it was deemed unsuitable for publication and remained unpublished until 2011. His first published novel was The Astronauts in 1951, which was influenced by Soviet propaganda and the socialist realism genre. He later renounced his early works as naive and simplistic. He joined the Polish Writers' Union in 1953, and became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1976. He received many awards and honors, both in Poland and internationally, such as the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish state distinction, in 1997. He was married to Barbara Leśniak, a psychologist, from 1953 until his death in 2006. They had one son, Tomasz, who became a physicist and mathematician. Lem died of heart failure in 2006 at the age of 84. He was buried at the Salwator Cemetery in Kraków.