Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Herman Lem (; 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.

Life

Early life

thumb|House No. 4 on [[Bohdan Lepky Street in Lviv, where, according to his autobiography Highcastle, Lem spent his childhood]]

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, In later years Lem sometimes claimed to have been raised Roman Catholic, but he went to Jewish religious lessons during his school years.

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.

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. 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.

Rise to fame

thumb|Stanisław Lem and toy [[cosmonaut, 1966]]

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 ' (New World of Adventures). In 1954, he published a short story collection, ' [Sesame and Other Stories] . Thus The Astronauts was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the state censors. 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).

In the early 1990s, Lem met with the literary critic and scholar Peter Swirski for a series of extensive interviews, published together with other critical materials and translations as A Stanislaw Lem Reader (1997). In these interviews Lem speaks about a range of issues he rarely discussed previously. The book also includes Swirski's translation of Lem's retrospective essay "Thirty Years Later", devoted to Lem's 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. The best known example is the living planetary ocean in Solaris. Other examples include the intelligent swarms of mechanical insect-like micromachines in The Invincible, and strangely ordered societies of more human-like beings in Fiasco and Eden, describing the failure of first contact.

Another key recurring theme is the shortcomings of humans. In His Master's Voice, Lem describes the failure of humanity's intelligence to decipher and truly comprehend an apparent message from space. Two overlapping arcs of short stories, Fables for Robots and The Cyberiad provide a commentary on humanity in the form of a series of grotesque, humorous, fairytale-like short stories about a mechanical universe inhabited by robots (who have occasional contact with biological "slimies" and human "palefaces").

Other writings

The Investigation and The Chain of Chance are crime novels (the latter without a murderer); Pamiętnik... is a psychological drama inspired by Kafka. His criticism of most science fiction surfaced in literary and philosophical essays Science Fiction and Futurology and interviews. and returned to futurological prognostications, most notably those expressed in ' [Blink of an Eye]. He had a deep appreciation for the works of Polish writer Czesław Miłosz and respected Józef Piłsudski as a national leader. He became increasingly critical of modern technology in his later life, criticising inventions such as the Internet, which he said "makes it easier to hurt our neighbors." protested against Lem's treatment by the SFWA, a member offered to pay his dues. Lem never accepted the offer. There were several attempts to explain Dick's act. Lem was responsible for the Polish translation of Dick's work Ubik in 1972, and when Dick felt monetarily short-changed by the publisher, he held Lem personally responsible (see Microworlds).

Influence

Will Wright's popular city-planning game SimCity was partly inspired by Lem's short story "The Seventh Sally" in The Cyberiad. designated the "Year of Lem".

A major character in the film Planet 51, an alien Lem, was named by screenwriter Joe Stillman after Stanisław Lem. Since the film was intended to be a parody of American pulp science fiction shot in Eastern Europe, Stillman thought that it would be hilarious to hint at the writer whose works have nothing to do with little green men.

Adaptations of Lem's works

Solaris was made into a film in 1968 by Russian director Boris Nirenburg, a film in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky—which won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972—and an American film in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Film critics have noted the influence of Tarkovsky's adaptation on later science fiction films such as Event Horizon (1997) and Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010).

A number of other dramatic and musical adaptations of his work exist, such as adaptations of The Astronauts (First Spaceship on Venus, 1960) and The Magellanic Cloud (Ikarie XB-1, 1963). Lem himself was, however, critical of most of the screen adaptations, with the sole exception of Przekładaniec in 1968 by Andrzej Wajda.

1991 – Austrian literary
1996 – recipient of the Order of the White Eagle

Recognition and remembrance

1972 – member of commission "Poland 2000" of the Polish Academy of Sciences
1979 – a minor planet, 3836 Lem, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh is named after him.
1994 – member of the Polish Academy of Learning
1997 – honorary citizen of Kraków
In December 2020 Polish Parliament declared year of 2021 to be the Year of Stanisław Lem. Since 2011 the Garden has been organizing out the competition "Lemoniada", inspired by the creative output of Lem.
2021 – Lem Prize has been established by Wrocław University of Science and Technology to commemorate the 100th birthday Stanisław Lem. It is awarded annually to one young (under 40) European researcher whose creative work in science or engineering has potential for positive impact on the future of civilization increasingly filled with technology.

Political views

Lem's early works were socialist realist, possibly to satisfy state censorship. In his later years, Lem was critical of this aspect of his work. He never showed any wish to relocate permanently in the West. By the standards of the Eastern Bloc, Lem was financially well off for most of his life. Lem was a critic of capitalism, totalitarianism, and of both Stalinist and Western ideologies.

Lem believed there were no absolutes. He said: "I should wish, as do most men, that immutable truths existed, that not all would be eroded by the impact of historical time, that there were some essential propositions, be it only in the field of human values, the basic values, etc. In brief, I long for the absolute. But at the same time I am firmly convinced that there are no absolutes, that everything is historical, and that you cannot get away from history." Lem was concerned that if the human race attained prosperity and comfort, this would lead it to passiveness and degeneration. Lem claimed that his IQ was tested at high school as 180.

In 1953, Lem met radiology student Barbara Leśniak, whom he married in a civil ceremony the same year. The couple's church marriage ceremony was performed in February 1954. Their only child, (born 1968), who graduated with a degree in physics from Princeton University, has written Awantury na tle powszechnego ciążenia (Tantrums on the Background of the Universal Gravitation), a memoir which contains numerous personal details about Lem. The book jacket says Tomasz works as a translator and has a daughter, Anna.

As of 1984, Lem's writing pattern was to get up a short time before five in the morning and start writing soon after; Lem would write for five or six hours before taking a break.

Lem was an aggressive driver. He loved sweets (especially halva and chocolate-covered marzipan), and did not give them up even when, toward the end of his life, he fell ill with diabetes. Due to health problems, Lem stopped smoking in the mid-1980s. Coffee often featured in Lem's writing and interviews.

Stanisław Lem died from a heart failure in the hospital of the Jagiellonian University Medical College, Kraków on 27 March 2006 at the age of 84.

In November 2021, Agnieszka Gajewska's biography of Lem, Holocaust and the Stars, was translated into English by Katarzyna Gucio and published by Routledge. It discussed aspects of Lem's life, such as being forced to wear the yellow badge and being struck for not removing his hat in the presence of Germans, as required of Jews at the time.

Lem loved movies and greatly enjoyed artistic cinema (especially the movies of Luis Buñuel). He also liked King Kong, James Bond, Star Wars, and Star Trek movies but he remained mostly displeased by movies which were based upon his own stories. The only notable exceptions are Voyage to the End of the Universe (1963) (which didn't credit Lem as writer of the original book The Magellanic Cloud) and Przekładaniec (Layer Cake) (1968) (which was based upon his short story "Do You Exist, Mr Jones?").

Bibliography

A list of works by Stanisław Lem and their subsequent adaptations in other media: