Stanisław Herman Lem (Polish: [staˈɲiswaf ˈlɛm] ; 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer. He was the author of many novels, short stories, 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 more than 45 million copies. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world.
Lem was 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 Sejm (the lower house of the Polish Parliament) declared 2021 Stanisław Lem Year.
Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, interwar Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). According to his own account, he was actually born on 13 September, but the date was changed to the 12th on his birth certificate because of superstition. He was the son of Sabina née Woller (1892–1979) and Samuel Lem (1879–1954), a wealthy laryngologist and former physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and first cousin to Polish poet Marian Hemar (Lem's father's sister's son). In later years Lem sometimes claimed to have been raised Roman Catholic, but he went to Jewish religious lessons during his school years. 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". In later years he would call himself both an agnostic and an atheist.
After the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland's former eastern territory (now part of Ukraine and Belarus), he was not allowed to study at Lwów Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin"; it was due to his father's connections that he was accepted to study medicine at Lwów University in 1940. During the subsequent Nazi occupation (1941–1944), Lem's Jewish family avoided placement in the Nazi Lwów Ghetto, surviving with false papers. He would later recall:
During that period, I learned in a very personal, practical way that I was no "Aryan". I knew that my ancestors were Jews, but I knew nothing of the Mosaic faith and, regrettably, nothing at all of Jewish culture. So it was, strictly speaking, only the Nazi legislation that brought home to me the realization that I had Jewish blood in my veins.
During that time, Lem earned a living as a car mechanic and welder, and occasionally stole munitions from storehouses (to which he had access as an employee of a German company) to pass them on to the Polish resistance.
In 1945, Lwów was annexed into the Soviet Ukraine, and the family, along with many other Polish citizens, was resettled to Kraków, where Lem, at his father's insistence, took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. He did not take his final examinations on purpose, to avoid the career of military doctor, which he suspected could have become lifelong. After receiving absolutorium (Latin term for the evidence of completion of the studies without diploma), he did an obligatory monthly work at a hospital, at a maternity ward, where he assisted at a number of childbirths and a caesarean section. Lem said that the sight of blood was one of the reasons he decided to drop medicine.
Lem started his literary work in 1946 with a number of publications in different genres, including poetry, as well as his first science fiction novel, The Man from Mars, serialized in Nowy Świat Przygód (New World of Adventures). Between 1948 and 1950 Lem was working as a scientific research assistant at the Jagiellonian University, and published a number of short stories, poems, reviews, etc., particularly in the magazine Tygodnik Powszechny. In 1951, he published his first book, The Astronauts. In 1954, he published a short story collection, Sezam i inne opowiadania [Sesame and Other Stories] . The following year, 1955, saw the publication of another science fiction novel, The Magellanic Cloud.
During the era of Stalinism in Poland, which had begun in the late 1940s, all published works had to be directly approved by the state. Thus The Astronauts was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the state censors. Going by the date of the finished manuscript, Lem's first book was a partly autobiographical novel Hospital of the Transfiguration, finished in 1948. It would be published seven years later, in 1955, as a part of the trilogy Czas nieutracony (Time Not Lost). The experience of trying to push Czas nieutracony through the censors was one of the major reasons Lem decided to focus on the less-censored genre of science fiction. Nonetheless, most of Lem's works published in the 1950s also contain various elements of socialist realism as well as of the "glorious future of communism" forced upon him by the censors and editors. Lem later criticized several of his early pieces as compromised by the ideological pressure.
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 seventeen books.
In 1957, he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogs, as well as a science fiction anthology, The Star Diaries, collecting short stories about one of his most popular characters, Ijon Tichy. 1959 saw the publication of three books: the novels Eden and The Investigation, and the short story anthology An Invasion from Aldebaran (Inwazja z Aldebarana). 1961 saw the novels Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Solaris, and Return from the Stars, with Solaris being among his top works. This was followed by a collection of his essays and non-fiction prose, Wejście na orbitę (1962), and a short story anthology Noc księżycowa (1963). In 1964, Lem published a large work on the border of philosophy and sociology of science and futurology, Summa Technologiae, as well as a novel, The Invincible.
1965 saw the publication of The Cyberiad and of a short story collection, The Hunt (Polowanie). 1966 was the year of Highcastle, followed in 1968 by His Master's Voice and Tales of Pirx the Pilot. Highcastle was another of Lem's autobiographical works, and touched upon a theme that usually was not favored by the censors: Lem's youth in the pre-war, then-Polish, Lviv. 1968 and 1970 saw two more non-fiction treatises, The Philosophy of Chance and Science Fiction and Futurology. Ijon Tichy returned in 1971's The Futurological Congress; in the same year Lem released a genre-mixing experiment, A Perfect Vacuum, a collection of reviews of non-existent books. In 1973 a similar work, Imaginary Magnitude, was published. In 1976, Lem published two works: "The Mask" and The Chain of Chance. In 1980, he published another set of reviews of non-existent works, Provocation. The following year saw another Tichy novel, Observation on the Spot, and Golem XIV. Later in that decade, Lem published Peace on Earth (1984) and Fiasco (1986), his last science fiction novel.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lem cautiously supported the Polish dissident movement, and started publishing essays in the Paris-based magazine Kultura. 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.