Stanisław Lem kept imagining minds so alien that humans could never understand them
Stanisław Lem sold more than 45 million books in over 50 languages, yet his most famous novel, Solaris, is about failure: scientists orbiting a living ocean they cannot comprehend. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon named him the most widely read science fiction writer on Earth, and his philosophy foresaw virtual reality.
Lem was born in Lwów in 1921 to a prosperous laryngologist's family. He said his real birthday was 13 September, moved to the 12th on the certificate out of superstition. After the Soviets took the city in 1939 his bourgeois background kept him out of the polytechnic, though his father's contacts got him into medicine. Under Nazi occupation his Jewish family escaped the ghetto with false papers, and Lem worked as a mechanic and welder while slipping stolen munitions to the Polish resistance. He later said Nazi law was what taught him he had Jewish blood.
Resettled in Kraków after 1945, he deliberately skipped his final medical exams so he would not be drafted as a military doctor. His first science fiction novel, The Man from Mars, was serialised in 1946. Stalinist censors shaped his early career: The Astronauts of 1951 was merely the first book they allowed, while his semi-autobiographical hospital novel, finished in 1948, waited seven years.
The Polish October freed him, and between 1956 and 1968 he wrote seventeen books, including The Star Diaries with the space traveller Ijon Tichy, Solaris in 1961, The Cyberiad and His Master's Voice. In the 1964 Summa Technologiae he reasoned about technologies then pure fantasy, among them virtual reality, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. He also enjoyed pranks of form, writing reviews of and introductions to books that do not exist.
Sympathetic to dissidents, he left for West Berlin when martial law came in 1982, then lived in Vienna before returning home in 1988. In later interviews he voiced disappointment with science fiction itself. He died on 27 March 2006, and the Polish parliament declared 2021 Stanisław Lem Year.
Source: Stanisław Lem
