Hailed by Theodore Sturgeon as the “most widely read science-fiction writer in the world,” the Polish futurist, novelist, essayist, thinker, and critic Stanislaw Lem has been translated into more than 50 languages. Besides his celebrated science fiction novels, Lem wrote numerous essays, forays into other fictional genres, and much more, including Summa Technologiae, a collection of essays in which he predicted a variety of technological advances that have since come to pass.
Born in Lwow, Poland in 1921, Lem has been the recipient of countless awards and accolades during his lifetime and after his death in 2006. Praised in both his native Poland and around the world, Lem has inspired everything from Google doodles to the naming of a variety of heavenly bodies, including the star Solaris which, in 2019, was named after Lem’s most famous novel.
Lem’s work has been translated frequently to the screen, beginning as early as 1960, when his 1951 novel The Astronauts was loosely adapted into First Spaceship on Venus. The most famous of these is Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 adaptation of Solaris, which was already the second time that novel had hit screens. An American version starring George Clooney was later made by director Steven Soderbergh in 2002.
Solaris
Among Anglophone readers, this 1961 classic is undeniably Lem’s best-known work. Following a crew of scientists on a space station above the eponymous planet as they attempt to communicate with an extraterrestrial intelligence in the form of a living, sentient ocean on the planet’s surface, Solaris tackles many of the themes which made up Lem’s recurring preoccupations, including frustrated first contact, the limitations of the human mind, and the inability to communicate with truly alien intelligences.
It is Lem’s most oft-reprinted and frequently adapted work, having been made into several major motion pictures, though Lem himself rejected all of them as failing to truly address the book’s thematic underpinnings.
The Star Diaries
This collection of some of Stanislaw Lem’s best-loved short stories first introduces his readers to his recurring character Ijon Tichy, a spacefarer who winds up encountering a madcap array of unusual extraterrestrial life and other bizarre phenomena. It is also an ideal introduction to Lem’s more satirical side, as many of Ijon Tichy’s adventurers can perhaps best be described as satirical science fiction “tall tales” which poke fun at a variety of human institutions including both communism and capitalism, as well as theology, rationality, and more.
The Futurological Congress
Ijon Tichy returns in this novel of black humor that is one of the many science fiction novels to prefigure The Matrix. In it, Tichy travels to the Eighth World Futurological Congress at a Hilton Hotel in Costa Rica, where he is dosed with hallucinogens and experiences a terrifying future world where all of reality is hidden behind successive “masks” of various drugs, which prevent people from seeing the horrors of their real conditions. As one of the few sleepers who has awakened in this new world, he must find a way to survive or escape … unless, of course, he’s still hallucinating in the sewers beneath a Hilton Hotel.
The Cyberiad
Taking place in a universe peopled almost entirely by intelligent machines, Lem’s 1965 collection has been compared with the works of Douglas Adams. It follows two constructor robots with almost godlike powers thanks to the incredible machines that they can build, as they travel the universe helping those in need… albeit also demanding payment in exchange for their services.
The stories of The Cyberiad have been adapted into a variety of films and games—and even an opera!—and a statue of one of the characters from the book currently resides in the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw. Praised by science fiction legends such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut, The Cyberiad was hailed as “truly amusing and profoundly disturbing at the same time” in The Virginia Quarterly Review upon its first translation into English.
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
Thedore Sturgeon called Stanislaw Lem’s Kafkaesque novel of social and political satire “a well-wrought nightmare indeed.” It concerns the eponymous memoirs, which are found in the lava-filled ruins of an ancient civilization that sounds an awful lot like America. The memoirs are apparently written by an agent of some government branch whose mission is so secret that even he is not allowed to know what it is, as he is plunged into a chaotic nightmare of paranoia, written with what Lem himself described as a “combination of grim weirdness and humor.”
Eden
Throughout his long career, Stanislaw Lem wrote many novels and stories on the subject of first contact between humans and other intelligent alien species. The first of these was Eden, written in 1959, in which a spacecraft makes a crash landing on a beautiful planet inhabited by strange aliens they call “doublers.” Though Lem himself later disregarded the novel as “so-so,” others have marked it as the “beginning of the full maturity of Lem as a writer,” and an important early example of one of Lem’s most persistent themes.
Fiasco
Almost three decades after his first attempt at a novel about first contact, Stanislaw Lem returned to the theme (not for the first time) with this much more pessimistic view of the subject. As a ship from Earth approaches the planet Quinta, which is believed to harbor intelligent life, they struggle to communicate with the aliens there, leading to an escalating series of tragic misunderstandings in a “remarkable achievement” and a “most moving experience” that “will come to be regarded as one of the great SF novels” (New York Times Review of Books).
His Master's Voice
“Lem offers a sheaf of cosmic answers, some truly mind blowing” (White Dwarf) in this classic 1968 novel about a message from space. As mathematician Peter Hogarth joins a Pentagon project to try to decipher an apparent neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation, he and his colleagues run up against one of Lem’s favorite hurdles—the limits of human understanding. As their frustrations mount, the solution to the mystery may ultimately prove to be insoluble, and may reveal more about humans and humanity than about the beings who may or may not have sent the message.
