Polish writer who was the most popular and the most frequently published abroad. A classic of science fiction. Born in Lwow in 1921, Lem had lived in Krakow since 1946. He died there on March 27, 2006.

On this page we present two articles on Stanisław Lem - his biographical note originally published on www.polska2000.pl, and a profile of the author written by Paweł Kozioł.


He was the Polish writer who was the most popular and the most frequently published abroad. A classic of science fiction, Lem was nevertheless atypical of the writers in that genre - perhaps because he chose it less than freely in the 1940s, when the political oppression of Stalinism made it impossible for him to express himself openly in contemporary novels. Educated as a physician and scientific theorist, Lem possessed expert knowledge of the theory of evolution, mathematics, robotics, astronomy and physics, as well as of literature and many other fields. He became a universal "seeker of wisdom," a philosopher and blazer of the ways opened to mankind by the development of science and technology.

His first novel, "The Hospital of the Transfiguration", had a contemporary setting. Even here, we can see his central themes: the nature of human thought and human identity, and the ethical problems facing science. Lem then went on to write several score of science fiction novels, stories and plays. In his space exploration stories, Lem poses questions about the role of necessity and accident in physics, biology and human culture; about the future development of technology and its human consequences; about the existence and nature of God and transcendence; about the possibility of communicating with other forms of intelligent life. Taking up basic problems of biology, ethics, and politics, Lem analyzed the paradoxes associated with social progress as new barriers of technological capacity are crossed. The plots of his novels and stories are sometimes positive and sometimes grotesquely funny, making use of and playing games with literary styles and conventions. While always rich in philosophical subtexts, Lem's fictions are always engrossing and suspenseful. After all, they are always the stories of individuals (either humans or fantastic robots) and are steeped in emotions stemming from true contact with the Other and acquaintance with the limits of one's own nature.

All of these are among the best-known works of twentieth-century science fiction. Outside Poland and Germany, Lem's collections of essays are less well known: "Dialogues", "Summa Technologiae", "The Philosophy of Accidents", "Fantasy and Futurology", "The Sex Wars" and "The Mystery of the Chinese Room". Yet these are the works that most fully reflect Lem's philosophical system and ideas, his fascination with broad horizons and his talent for correct predictions about the directions that the development of science and technology will take. Although he stopped writing fantastic tales in recent years, Lem remained a prolific writer of essays and short stories that continue to reach an established and enthusiastic audience.

"We have failed, my dear, to appreciate the role of error as a fundamental Category of Existence. Don't think in Manichaean terms! According to that school, God creates order and Satan keeps trying to trip Him up. Not so! If I can get my hands on some tobacco, I shall write about the final chapters found in books of philosophy, namely an anthology of Apostasy, or a theory of existence based on error, since errors is stamped on error, error uses error, creates error, until probability changes into the Fate of the World." (Professor A. Donda. From the "Memoirs of Ijon Tichy")

Source: www.polska2000.pl, copyright: Stowarzyszenie Willa Decjusza; updated: March 27, 2006.





The leading representative of Polish science fiction, a philosopher, futurologist and essayist, his works also include realistic novels and satirical texts.

Born on 12 September 1921 in Lvov as the son of the successful laryngologist Samuel Lehm and Sabina Woller (he recalls his childhood in the autobiographical book, "Wysoki zamek" ["Highcastle"]), a relative of Marian Hemar. He went to the Karol Szajnoch 2nd Grammar School and planned to study at Lvov Technical University but this turned out to be impossible in a city occupied by Soviet troops. Thanks to his father's connections, he was accepted for studies in Medicine but they were interrupted during the period of the German occupation, when he worked as a mechanic's assistant and as a welder. Lem continued his studies after the war but he did not take his final examinations because he wanted to avoid being drafted into the army. In 1946, the whole family moved to Kraków as they did not wish to accept citizenship of the USSR.

Lem's literary career began with his cooperation with periodicals ("Kuźnica", "Tygodnik Powszechny", "Nowy Świat Przygód"). Initially, he published poems, later included as an appendix to "Wysoki zamek", as well as stories about the occupation. In "Nowy Świat Przygód" he also published, in extracts, his first science fiction novel, entitled "Człowiek z Marsa" ["Man from Mars"].

In 1947-1950, the writer worked in the Scientific Conservatory headed at that time by Dr Mieczysław Choynowski. After this institution was closed, he found himself in a difficult material and life situation. The unexpected success of "Astronauci" ["The Astronauts"], the first of Lem's science fiction works to be published in book form, and concurrent problems with the printing of the earlier "Szpital Przemienienia" ["Hospital of the Transfiguration"] (because of the demands of the censor, this was developed into a trilogy entitled "Czas nieutracony" ["Time not lost"], which ends with the main protagonist accepting a party membership card) meant that the writer decided once and for all to devote himself to the writing of science fiction. On the one hand, this ensured for him the possibility of writing reflections that interested him about the place of technology in the lives of human beings; on the other hand, it made evading censorship easier.

In 1953, Stanisław Lem married Barbara Leśniak, a radiologist; their son, Tomasz, was born in 1968. In 1983-1988, the writer lived abroad (Berlin, Vienna) and then settled again in Kraków. During the last years of his life, he cooperated intensively with "Tygodnik Powszechny". He died on 27 March 2006 and the urn containing his ashes was laid at the Salwatorski Cemetery. Although he declared himself to be an agnostic, at the request of his family the funeral was conducted in accordance with Roman Catholic rites.

Stanisław Lem possessed several degrees of Doctor honoris causa (including from Wrocław Technical University, the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Lvov University and the University of Bielefeld). In 1973, the writer was granted honorary membership of the Association of Science Fiction Writers of America but, because of procedural perturbations, he refused the ordinary membership that he was offered in 1975. The planetoid 3836 Lem was named after the writer.

• A general description of Lem's writings

Jan Błoński, as early as in 1961 ("Życie Literackie" no. 497), drew attention to the multiplicity of shapes in Lem's creative work. Lem touched upon almost all the possibilities that were given to the writer by contemporary science fiction. It could even be said that in his creative work, chronologically compact but quantitatively abundant, he repeated in a way the evolution of the genre: in essence, he began from tales which were simple, trusting and encouraging ("Astronauci", "Obłok Magellana" ["The Magellanic cloud"] in order to arrive quite soon at parody ("Dzienniki gwiazdowe Ijona Tichego" ["The star diaries"]) and at an apocalyptic and concentrated vision of "the worst of all possible worlds" ("Eden"). What is more, he systematically tested the literary chances that science fiction brings.

His later period only emphasised this accurate diagnosis and all that is left for us to do is to develop it.

Lem's works can provisionally be divided into several groups. After the tales which today have been forgotten and the early stories which were optimistic in tone (later criticised by the writer himself as "social realist"), in the 1960s Lem created works that had the most to do with the canonical form of science fiction and which, by the way, introduced into the genre a specifically understood realism. I am referring here to novels such as "Eden" (1959), "Powrót z gwiazd" ["Return from the stars"] (1961), "Solaris" (1961), "Niezwyciężony" ["The invincible"] (1964), "Głos Pana" ["His Master's Voice"] (1968) and also the tales which were published in various collections and were finally published in the collection entitled "Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie" ["Tales of Pirx the pilot"] (1968). After 1968, Lem basically returned to this writing formula only once, in his last novel entitled "Fiasko" ["Fiasco"] (1987).

A somewhat longer life was lived by the works which had a grotesque hue and which were sometimes even perversely archaised and linked in series on account of the distinctive figures of the main protagonists, such as the stellar traveller Ijon Tichy or the constructors Trurl and Klapaucjusz. The texts of this kind are characterised as a rule by great linguistic invention. They feature technical-feudal neologisms, rhymes and also extremely grotesque names for the tools of the future world. The last novel with Ijon Tichy, "Pokój na ziemi" ["Peace on earth"] appeared in 1987.

In time, the centre of gravity of Lem's creativity moved ever more in the direction of essays and philosophical deliberations. The most important work of this type is undoubtedly "Summa technologiae" although it is also worth mentioning "Filozofia przypadku" ["The philosophy of chance"], since the echo of the attitudes expressed therein can be heard in the anti-crime stories "Śledztwo" ["The investigation"] and "Katar" ["The cold"].

On the borderline between the grotesque and essays are the so-called apocrypha - reviews of non-existent books. Here it is worth mentioning that in their case the proportion, pretty equal in "Doskonała próżnia" ["A perfect vacuum"], in time moved towards a more serious tone. The last in the book review series "The world as holocaust" was written in such a way that a case is known where the book was treated as existing.

In the last period of his life, Lem was active as a columnist. His texts appeared above all in "Tygodnik Powszechny" and as "Rozważania sylwiczne" ["Silvan deliberations"] in the monthly "Odra". These feature articles concerned mainly the present and future of broadly understood civilisation and the form was quite traditional and, therefore, far from the bravura of some of his earlier works. The brilliance of the ideas, however, remained the same as usual - for example, in the remark that it was the natural order that before artificial intelligence there should appear something called "the artificial cretin."


The above description is naturally quite sketchy. More detailed analyses are to be found below, where the themes are grouped in accordance with their subject matter and not chronologically according to the dates of publication of the books. This decision was dictated by the fact that excellent descriptions of particular works, written by Jerzy Jarzębski, can be found at: http://solaris.lem.pl.
The list of the contents of this article can be found below:

• Realism

The world presented in Lem's works differs from the reality known in typical science fiction primarily because, as a rule, the author does not lead us to understand that he is presenting uncommon things. On the contrary, many elements of Lem's reality were constructed in such a way as to create the impression of future normality and daily routine. Particularly "Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie" are characteristic from this point of view - here, the Solar System is described as a tamed space, subjected to scientific research and economic exploitation, and able even to sustain tourist activity. This does not mean, however, that this is a safe space, of which fact the people who have to work there become convinced many times.

The following comparison can be risked: space flights in "Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie" are presented more or less like long sea voyages at the end of the era of great sailing ships. This feature is underlined, for example, by the stylised decorations of the rocket from the story "Terminus" - round, brass, pseudo-windows, in which the lighting had been placed, light-blue maps imitating the colour of marine maps and finally the half-legendary story about the shipwrecked people fighting for survival to the very end. In the reality in which Pirx moves, however, the romanticism of the profession of cosmonaut gradually gives way to routine and that in turn leads to numerous shortcomings. Both the procedures and the equipment leave much to be desired, being a mixture of the newest achievements of technology and tools and evidently outdated methods of proceeding (all of this, obviously, from the point of view of the future).

This ambivalence of experimental novelty and inevitable wear and tear is reflected by the material objects presented in the tales. On the one hand, there often appear prototypes of equipment (which of course does not guarantee their reliability) and, on the other, there are very precise descriptions of discomfort, destruction, wear and tear or even flawed construction decisions (the peeling armour-plating on the "Koriolan"). The greatest threat to people, however, is not constituted by unreliable technology but by the limitations inherent in the people themselves. In "Ananke", the cause of the spectacular catastrophe is the programmer's pathological perfectionism; in "Odruch warunkowy" ["Conditioned reflex"], the error, fatal in its consequences, appears several times when the indications of the unreliable alarm equipment are misinterpreted by the people working there. If the main protagonist as a rule finds a way out of similar situations, this does not occur as the result of a feature common to superheroes - Pirx the pilot is indeed presented as an absent-minded dreamer - but thanks to intuition, allowing him to go beyond the schematic way of acting. What is more, this daydreaming, constituting an apparently negative characterological feature, conditions the practical effectiveness of Pirx's actions. This model of heroism, strictly connected with a weakness, which is attained by a person who is in essence average (which from the point of view of the rules of the genre of science fiction writing is a novelty) gives the figure of Pirx a somewhat Conradian nature.

The price for the fact that the reader feels quite at home in Lem's fantastic worlds (and I will not go into whether the price is paid consciously) is the presence of certain anachronisms. In "Eden", where the technology allows for not only inter-planetary travel but also inter-stellar journeys, one of the protagonists uses a petrol lighter. Such situations should be differentiated from obviously humorous anachronisms, such as those that fill "Bajki robotów" ["Mortal engines"] or "Dzienniki gwiazdowe" ["The star diaries"].

Another somewhat paradoxical manifestation of realism is the very artistic and detailed presentation of the reality which appears to the protagonists as alien. What is interesting is that these could be manifestations of an extra-terrestrial civilisation or the situation seen on earth by a person from another time. This person could be the victim of physical paradoxes connected with travelling at near light speed ("Powrót z gwiazd" ["Return from the stars"]) or the beneficiary of being revived after many years ("Fiasko" or "Kongres futurologiczny" ["The futurological congress"], which illustrates the same problem in a light-hearted convention).

In all these cases, the alienness presented by Lem is concrete and almost tangible, disquieting not because of some lack of specification but mainly because it cannot be understood. As a rule, human cognitive schemata are put to the test by a blurring of the distinctions between the living and the dead, the natural and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic. Here we could recall the necrocytes from "Niezwyciężony", i.e. the miniature flying military automata which are intelligent only as a swarm, or the biological factory in "Eden" or all the forms of thinking jelly that appear from "Solaris" up to "Dzienniki gwiazdowe". Another sign of strangeness that is typical of Lem is the degeneration or perversion of the construction conception, usually bringing about the effect of catastrophe, after which only fragments remain to be interpreted. This motif appeared first of all in "Astronauci" and then underwent numerous modifications.

Władimir Borisow (http://acta-lemiana.prv.pl) draws attention to the strength and concrete nature of the images of alienness included in these writings:

"The highest degree of the expressiveness of the linguistic means used by him are testified to by the descriptions of at least two fantastic landscapes. You could look through even a thousand science fiction books and never find such spectacular descriptions of invented phenomena as in the stories about the creations in 'Solaris' - puzzling symmetriads, mimoids, tree-mountains etc. or about Birnam Wood on Titan ('Fiasko') which, admittedly, did not go anywhere in contrast to Shakespeare's but is constantly changing nevertheless."

One can also talk about Lem the realist from a completely different perspective. He began his exercises in presenting alienness at the end of his early novel "Szpital przemienienia", located in the reality of the German occupation. In Jarzębski's opinion, this work presents the same philosophical problems that we know from Lem's mature and canonical works (partly neutralised, however, by the fact that the most difficult questions are asked in this novel by a negative character, the man of letters, Sekułowski).

The remark about the philosophical precedence of "Szpital przemienienia" ought to be supported by examples - let me say then that the conflict between cold scientific rationality and human nature, presented in "Szpital przemienienia" in the form of a discussion among psychiatrists, will return, for example, in the tale entitled "Rozprawa" ["Debate"], in the utterances of the rebellious humanoid robot, Calder, and in the thoughts of Pirx, who confronts him. The humanist aspects of the doctor's mission will resonate in turn in the figure of the Doctor in "Eden" and the disturbing descriptions of madness will affect, more often than people, the robots caricaturing our awareness (cf. the image of religious raptures expressed at the scrapping of the automata in "Powrót z gwiazd").

• Grotesque

Just as the appearance of Pirx the pilot is a sign of a serious reflection on the meeting-point of technology and human nature, so the presence of Ijon Tichy almost always indicates the grotesque character of a work (the exceptions are the untitled but numbered tales about mad inventors added to "Dzienniki gwiazdowe" stylised rather on intimate technological horror stories). Jerzy Jarzębski attributed to the improbable tales of Ijon Tichy features of the tales of Baron Münchhausen (Lem himself, however, stated that any similarity was absolutely unintentional). The whole series makes use of ideas which, it would appear, no longer have any place in "serious" science fiction - time travel (the inconstant numbering of successive voyages is explained by the possibility of the existence of such types of incidents), cases of being lost in a time loop, aliens very similar to humans... The staffage of this kind make us think that "Dzienniki..." is not in essence science fiction sensu stricto but a philosophical tale (on the pattern of Diderot's "Jacques the fatalist"), making use merely of an unusual set of props.

Among the works of the philosophical tale type, a sizeable group is constituted by texts which are in Lem's creative output a kind of specialité de la maison - anti-utopias presented in a comical way. Degenerate other-planet societies can be allegories of totalitarianism - like, for example, the planet Pinta, where it is attempted to force people to breathe under water, which is supposed to be the effect of an excessive growth of bureaucratic structures responsible for the irrigating of a once dry globe. At other times they are the symbol of chaos and the aimlessness of history - like the globe on which Ijon Tichy set up a machine to speed the passage of time, which he had received from Professor Tarantoga, just so that he could observe for infinity successive revolutions and changes of systems. Sometimes, texts of this kind become completely serious mental experiments - as in the case of the description of a rational race which gained the possibility of freely shaping the bodies of its representatives.

As far as the comical features of the series of texts with Ijon Tichy in the main role are concerned, they ensue as much from the futuristic situational comedy and the ideas clearly going beyond the borders of probability as from the finesse of the linguistic jokes. Both kinds of humour brighten up the text of "Ratujmy kosmos" ["Let's save the cosmos"] attached to some editions of "Dzienniki...". The open letter from Ijon Tichy calls into existence various grotesquely dangerous or distasteful forms of extra-terrestrial life which nevertheless have to be protected in accordance with the highest standards of ecology. Among the forms of life that are threatened is the ant Krzesławka Dręczypupa ["Chairish Bottomtormentor"], herds of which attacked tourists near sightseeing spots - in order to attract their victims, the swarms of ants formed themselves into the shapes of wicker armchairs.

Ijon Tichy also appeared in the relatively late works "Wizja lokalna" ["Observation on the spot"] and "Pokój na ziemi" ["Peace on earth"], which, under the mask of humour, talk about extremely serious problems: the former about hypothetical forms of the future society, jamming ethics with technology and about the civilisational implications of anatomical construction that is other than human (the Entians presented here are a rational race descended from flightless birds), while the latter about disarmament. Here, the similarity to a philosophical tale, or to an allegorical fantasy in the style of Swift's "Gulliver's travels", is even clearer.

Lem's jokes generally had a hidden agenda. The idea in "Cyberiada" ["The cyberiad"] for a unit serving to measure happiness connected with the metric system (one hed is the measure of happiness felt by a person on taking off a shoe in which there was a nail which had been tormenting him for one kilometre) seems to be pure grotesque, unconnected with reality. It takes on a deeper meaning, however, when we recall the mathematical apparatus and statistical tools used in psychology and sociology. If, on the other hand, someone is looking in Lem's work for a greater dose of absurd humour, then "Bajki robotów" should be recommended. The structure of the joke is as follows: technologically advanced beings live in feudal societies because it is only in such that there can appear figures characteristic of fairy stories: a cruel tyrant, a brave knight, a king's false adviser or a princess waiting to be married. The list of fairy-tale characters has been changed in only one place - the wizard is replaced by a constructor, in addition presented without exception as a positive figure. This substitution seems to be in accordance with Stanley C. Clarke's thinking, according to which each sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, whereas the constructor being on the side of good gives the impression of praising rationalism and science, which cope well even in a world of absolutely absurd rules. Such a vision would, however, be an oversimplification - rationalism is here mercilessly mocked in the text entitled "Przyjaciel Automateusza" ["Automatthew's friend"]. The eponymous hero buys a small piece of equipment able to be worn in the ear and capable of maintaining a friendly conversation. When, however, Automateusz accidentally finds himself on a desert island, his electronic friend keeps on suggesting the most rational way out of the situation, which is suicide.

At the same time as "Bajki robotów" and "Cyberiada", there also appeared "Dyktanda" ["Dictation exercises"], short and absurd texts which are full of spelling difficulties and which are supposed to help his wife's nephew to learn. The texts had to wait until 2001 to be published in book form. "Dyktanda" is characterised by black, sometimes even quite macabre, humour (for instance a method for obtaining liver: "In order to prepare it, you should buy a car and race around in it until you run somebody over. The liver, no longer needed by the victim, should be taken out of his insides and placed in the fridge").

• Discursiveness

As I have already mentioned, in the later period of his creative output the writer abandoned fiction in favour of forms which were devoid of fictional elements but which more directly expressed his attitudes. It is worth noting, however, that Lem moved towards essay writing gradually and almost from the very beginning of his creative work. Although scientific explanations of the reality shown in the novels are, within the framework of science fiction, a completely typical device, the author of "Solaris" used it with particular intensity.

The discursive and not fictional character has its beginning in a relatively early novel - "Astronauci" - which tells about the Tunguska catastrophe and rocket technology and which is characterised by a relatively small measure of fiction. The aforementioned tendency to present scientific deliberations in an almost unprocessed manner was the stronger because Lem chose as his protagonists people for whom science and technology constituted an inseparable element of their lives - engineers, doctors, scientists, discoverers, pilots. In effect, there is a lack in his novels of attempts to exploit an alternative compositional scheme, in which the main protagonist is a child or a completely lay person who could in a natural way ask questions on the subject of the world surrounding them.

The above-mentioned choice is the more symptomatic because Lem's protagonists, specialising in the cognition of reality, sooner or later find themselves in situations which in fact make lay persons of them. The author himself is interested in matters which are situated on the borderline of the possibilities of human cognition. The plots of his novels as a rule are generally the scaffolding for thoughts - it is not strange, therefore, that after a certain time Lem switched to a form expressing those thoughts without fictional additives.

The book crowning the series of canonical works from the 1960s - "Głos Pana" - can already be somewhat paradoxically called "a novel in the form of an essay". The two things responsible for this are the creation of the main protagonist - an outstanding mathematician Peter Hogarth, who is prone on occasions to anthropological deliberations - and the fictional premise of the book itself. It talks about an attempt to read "a letter from the stars" which, despite the commitment of the finest minds, becomes contaminated by typically human militarism. The project, uniting scientists selected to decipher the mysterious message, begins to resemble the Manhattan Project, on account of the location of the research complex in the desert, control from the side of the authorities and the hopes nurtured by the state founders of discovering new technologies which could be used as a new weapon of mass destruction. The last point, however, does not materialise - not even because of the "conspiracy" of Professor Hogarth but because of the random nature of the TREX effect (Transport Explosion). Hogarth sees in this fact the effect of extraordinary carefulness on the part of the Aliens, who had foreseen and prevented all possible destructive readings of the "letter".

Against the background of other novels about contact, "Głos Pana" is different because it expresses complete cognitive failure. Everything that the novel's protagonists can do, despite their undoubted scientific genius, is the creation of another mythology about Contact, making from it almost the Word of God creating the universe and in addition protecting it from interpretations that could have fatal consequences for humanity.

One layer of the novel that has not yet met with deserved attention is the biting satire on the universalistic claims of humanism in the 1960s. It is not without reason that the key words repeated many times in the expressions of the protagonists are communiqué, context, code, transmitter and receiver - terms originating in the structuralist teachings about language represented by Jacobson. The humanists taking part in the Project are, therefore, presented as quite unnecessary - because even if some of their ideas should be regarded as interesting, they do not refer at all to the presupposed aims of the research.

Another text straddling the border between fictional prose and an essay is "Golem XIV". Of fictional elements there remains in this text only the creation of an artificial intelligence which far exceeds human intelligence - the rest is a series of lectures presented as the fruit of the thoughts of the eponymous super-computer. What is interesting is that Golem suggests a description of evolution consistent with that which can be found in Richard Dawkins's "The selfish gene" (1976).

The greatest achievement of Lem's essay writing is undoubtedly "Summa technologiae". The book, whose title was supposed to bring to mind the work by Thomas Aquinas, discusses the philosophical implications of future discoveries by analysing the meeting-point of technology and biology and also, by the way, introducing ideas like virtual reality (here called "phantomatics"). This text displays extraordinary intellectual panache. For example, it deliberates over the consequences of humanity achieving such a technological level that it will be possible to talk about omnipotence (giving the possibility of creating universes and establishing the rules governing it). Another mental provocation in "Summa..." is the "Pasquinade on evolution", which states that from an engineering point of view natural selection led to the coming into existence of a construction that is far from perfect (whereas earlier evolution "projects", like unicellular beings, were decidedly better). And although the title rather suggests something from the grotesque, the idea itself is developed in a deadly serious manner, leading to a consideration of the possibility of gradually replacing biology with technology.

Also, if you consider it against the background of the other essays, "Summa technologiae" plays a very specific role. This can be seen from the following fact: a considerable part of Lem's later essay writing can be treated as monographs, amendments or complements to "Summa...". This was noticed by Tomasz Fiałkowski in a reference to the course of conversations he had had with the writer and included in his book "Świat na krawędzi" ["The world at the edge of the abyss"]:

"He also confronted the prognoses contained in 'Summa technologiae' and in his other books with the world surrounding us. He did this not without satisfaction - many of these prognoses had come true and even earlier than he himself had predicted - but also not without bitterness, discouraged as he was by many aspects of contemporary civilisation and the misuse of new discoveries by people."

A particular place among his non-fiction works is occupied, albeit for somewhat different reasons, by "Fantastyka i futurologia" ["Fantasy and futurology"]. It expresses in a direct way the views of the author on the area of creativity with which he occupied himself. In Jarzębski's summary it presents itself as follows:

"Perhaps the most significant thing for Lem in evaluating science fiction is the assessment of how seriously and responsibly it treats the first part of its generic name."

The demands of probability, of the logical cohesion of the presented world and, finally, for the basic differences that characterise the fantasy reality to have an influence on the plot, not being simply a picturesque background for a traditional adventure story, recall, by the way, the postulates expressed considerably later by Jacek Dukaj.

Finally, "Filozofia przypadku" is also a specific text - it arose from a revolt against structuralism (which only confirms the reading of "Głos Pana" suggested above). Admittedly, Lem begins his deliberations about chance from literature but he moves away from them first of all by formulating a concept of culture as the domain of random processes and then teaches us how to recognise the actions of random factors where we instinctively expect to see a cohesive construction set towards a defined aim.

"Filozofia przypadku" may not have a particularly expressive continuation in Lem's philosophical writings but two anti-crime stories may serve as the gleanings for such - "Śledztwo" and "Katar" (regarded by the author as an improved version of "Śledztwo"). The two works differ from classical crime stories in that they lack the most important element, which is a perpetrator. In both cases he is replaced by a sequence of strange coincidences and in "Katar" even the solving of the mystery is brought about by chance.

• Apocrypha

A singular form of Lem's creative output is the description of non-existent books, taking on the form of a review or an introduction to a fictional publication. "Doskonała próżnia" ["A perfect vacuum"] mainly contains reviews of future fictional works while "Biblioteka XXI wieku" ["Library of the 21st century"] discusses non-existent popular scientific publications. Stanisław Bereś summed up this kind of creative work in a concise sentence:

"The literature of fantasy has become transformed into the fantasy of literature."

Lem sees the reason for writing works with such a singular construction in his own laziness:

"I think that with the passing of the years there grew within me a certain impatience with regard to conscientious, craftsmanlike and slow fictionalisation. In order to change the illumination of an idea into narration you have to work terribly hard, including in extra-intellectual categories. That was one of the main reasons why I took such horrible short-cuts as these books were." (http://solaris.lem.pl/content/view/151/104/)

It would be appropriate here to present a few of the literary ideas presented in "Doskonała próżnia". Some of them could actually be regarded as sketches from which there might germinate full-length novels. Among them is the longest - "Gruppenführer Louis XVI", which describes a mad attempt to create a state, patterned on feudal France but based in Argentina, by a group of refuges from the defeated Nazi Germany. Further on there are texts which are parodies of experiments conducted under the banner of roman nouveau, such as "Toi" ["You"], being a torrent of abuse directed at the reader, or "Gigamesh", in its complication setting out to provide competition for James Joyce's "Ulysses". It is also worth mentioning a third group of works, related to "Biblioteka XXI wieku" - projects of future essays, prognoses of future cultural processes or ideas corresponding to Lem's non-fiction writing. For example, there are texts attributed to one Kouska who, with grotesquely exaggerated meticulousness, describes the role of coincidences in human life - these texts could be connected with both "Filozofia przypadku" and the novels "Śledztwo" and "Katar".

• Fiasco, or pessimism

Lem talked only with reluctance about his earliest novels, seeing in them too many concessions to real socialism. The matter turns out to be more complex, however, even if just because in none of these supposedly "law-abiding" books is there even the smallest mention made of future governments of the Communist party and the praise of science, rationalism and technocracy voiced by Lem also does not fit at all well in those ideologised times. It is possible, therefore, to think that the real reason for the writer's reluctance towards his earlier works must lie somewhere else. I would see it in the fact that the optimism of those works in time became completely alien to the author.

Lem the pessimist appears most clearly in his last novel, entitled "Fiasko". It constitutes in a way a recapitulation of the motifs included in earlier works. The main protagonist is, in a certain sense, Pirx the pilot ("in a certain sense" because he was resurrected from two bodies, one of which belonged to Pirx while the other to a young pilot who hurried to his aid). The voyage whose aim is to make contact with an alien civilisation recalls that from "Obłok Magellana", the planet's inhabitants who "bag themselves up" are like those in "Eden" and their military technology resembles the necrocytes from "Niezwyciężony". The difference is that in the aforementioned books the people do not have such a destructive instinct, or the will to make contact with the other side is stronger (Lem directly refers to the concept of a "contact window" - a short period (on the cosmic scale) between the achievement by civilisation of a technological level enabling inter-stellar communication and self-destruction or an abandonment of expansion). In "Fiasko" both the people and the other side ratchet up the spiral of suspicion, as a consequence of which the planet is destroyed.

The meaning of this fictional solution is clear: Lem thinks that the genetic conditioning of the human race towards violence is so strong that it can become active in even the most inappropriate situations. The myth about progress and joyous expansion is substituted irreversibly by a tale about the dark sides of humanity.

• Obsessions

The writing of Stanisław Lem can also be characterised by starting not from the issues but from his favourite motifs, which reappear in many of his novels. Some of them have already been presented when we were talking about the ways of presenting alien civilisations and also about "Fiasko", which ended the writer's novel writing. Ideas such as thinking jellies or the miniaturised and mobile weapons moving around in herds like insects, or even robots taking over or parodying the mystic needs of humanity - all of these are visible to everyone who has read several of the writer's most important works. We can also notice a whole series of subjects which are repeated with somewhat less intensity but which are important for the overall picture of his creative work.

One of these is the activity of various kinds of secret services. The childhood game of fabricating fictitious and usually secret documents in "Wysoki zamek" can be seen as an indication of the writer's earliest interest in this subject matter. The author himself recalls this as follows:

"As a pupil I used to produce a lot of important documents: identity cards, certificates, passports, diplomas and legal acts, on the strength of which I received uncounted wealth, noble titles and authority, or else 'the highest plenipotentiary powers', permits, encoded proofs and cryptograms of the greatest importance - and all of this from a country for which it would be futile to search on a map."

A similar reality, consisting almost exclusively of ranks, documents and secret codes, materialised in the grotesque "Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie" ["Memoirs found in a bathtub"] - the fundamental difference being the fact that the protagonist of this tale is only just learning the rules binding in this world of secret hierarchies. Also the centre of gravity has been moved from joy at the structure of the bureaucratised world into an individual attempt to become alienated from it through a mystically understood Betrayal.

Another often and eagerly repeated motif is a worldwide catastrophe, consisting in the loss by humanity of the whole resource of artificially stored information. In "Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie" the cause is extra-terrestrial bacteria that decompose paper. In "Pokój na ziemi" it is a weapon that is the effect of artificial evolution deprived of human control. On this occasion, the catastrophe concerns all the information stored electronically, effectively reversing human development. Finally, Professor A. Dońda's tale, added to "Dzienniki gwiazdowe", suggests a humorous complementation of the theory of relativity, postulating the equivalence of matter, energy and information. The effect is such that after crossing a defined threshold of saturating the world with information, the knowledge created by humanity disappears, which leads to a new universe coming into existence.

The obsession with a surfeit of information was also expressed in another way. In "Doskonała próżnia" there appears, for example, a text entitled "Perycalypsis", which proposes a system of grants to those creators who would refrain from any unnecessary multiplication of the achievements of humanity. In "Wizja lokalna", the highly developed civilisation of the Luzanians has to cope with the problem of losing orientation around its own scientific achievements, periodically undertaking the so-called investigation of science (broad-scale research into the resources of their own knowledge). The motif signalled above makes us wonder about the image of science in Lem's writings. The author, who came from firm rationalism, in time began to turn his attention to its inevitably human and, therefore, limited character. Hence, in the descriptions of the sociological background of research works, there is often activated an element of grotesque. This happens not only in the novels with a satirical bent ("Kongres futurologiczny"). Stanisław Bereś in this way comments on the parts of "Solaris" devoted to a description of the state of research into the thinking ocean:

"Impressing with his erudition and his inventiveness, creating hypotheses (a post-modern game with scientific concepts) and at the same time critical towards the mechanisms governing the development of science (the pamphlet tone of the reconstruction of the state of research into the planet), the writer shows the helplessness of humanity in the face of the mysteries of the universe and the inability to go beyond one's own categories and logic." (http://acta-lemiana.prv.pl/)

A matter to which insufficient attention has been paid is probably that of Lem's theological fascinations. They are often fulfilled in grotesque forms, such as the description of the order of robots (the Destructionist Fathers) included in "Dzienniki gwiazdowe". It is hard, however, to treat in the category of a joke the title of the aforementioned "Summa Technologiae" or else "Głos Pana". The latter example is particularly interesting: if the not decoded message from the stars is identified with the Gospel, it then constitutes a utopian project of a Holy Book which cannot be exploited for the doing of evil (technological novelties arising from partial readings of the "letter" cannot be used as weapons). In this sense, "Głos Pana" would suggest such a Word of God which would be more human, more humanitarian.


The first Polish editions of Lem's works

• "Człowiek z Marsa" ["Man from Mars"] (s-f novel) printed in instalments in the "Nowy Świat Przygód" periodical, 1946.
• "Astronauci" ["The astronauts"], Czytelnik, 1951.
• "Jacht 'Paradise'. Sztuka w czterech aktach" ["The yacht 'Paradise'. A play in four acts"] (co-author: Roman Hussarski), Czytelnik, 1951.
• "Sezam i inne opowiadania" ["Sesame and other tales"] (contains the first episodes of the adventures of Ijon Tichy), Iskry, 1954.
• "Obłok Magellana" ["The Magellanic cloud"], Iskry, 1954 (the novel had been printed earlier in instalments in "Przekrój")
• "Czas nieutracony" ["Time not lost"], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1955.
• "Dzienniki gwiazdowe" ["The star diaries"], Iskry, 1957 (amended and expanded edition: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966; Czytelnik, 1971).
• "Dialogi" ["Dialogues "] (essays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957.
• "Eden", Iskry, 1959.
• "Śledztwo" ["The investigation"], Wydawnictwo MON, 1959.
• "Inwazja z Aldebarana" ["The invasion from Aldebaran"] (contains tales which would later form part of "Tales of Pirx the pilot"), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1959.
• "Powrót z gwiazd" ["Return from the stars"], Czytelnik, 1961.
• "Solaris", Wydawnictwo MON, 1961.
• "Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie" ["Memoirs found in a bathtub"], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1961.
• "Księga robotów" ["The book of robots"] (tales), Iskry, 1961.
• "Wejście na orbitę" ["Going into orbit"] (essays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1962.
• "Noc księżycowa" ["A moonlit night"] (tales and television screenplays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963.
• "Niezwyciężony i inne opowiadania" ["The invincible and other tales"], Wydawnictwo MON, 1964.
• "Bajki robotów" ["Mortal engines"], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1964.
• "Summa Technologiae" (essays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1964.
• "Polowanie" ["Hunting"] (tales), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1965.
• "Cyberiada" ["The cyberiad"] (tales), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1965 (expanded edition: 1967).
• "Wysoki Zamek" ["Highcastle"], Wydawnictwo MON, 1966.
• "Głos Pana" ["His Master's Voice"], Czytelnik, 1968.
• "Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie" ["Tales of Pirx the pilot"], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1968 (expanded edition: Czytelnik, 1973).
• "Filozofia przypadku" ["The philosophy of chance"] (essays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1968.
• "Fantastyka i futurologia" ["Fantasy and futurology"] (essays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1970.
• "Doskonała próżnia" ["A perfect vacuum"] (apocrypha), Czytelnik, 1971.
• "Bezsenność" ["Sleeplessness"] (tales), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1971.
• "Wielkość urojona" ["Imaginary magnitude"] (apocrypha), Czytelnik, 1973.
• "Rozprawy i szkice" ["Essays and sketches"] (essays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1975.
• "Szpital Przemienienia" ["Hospital of the transfiguration"], Czytelnik, 1975.
• "Katar" ["The cold"], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1976.
• "Maska" ["The mask"] (tales and television screenplays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1976.
• "Powtórka" ["Repetition"] (tales and radio scripts), Iskry, 1976.
• "Golem XIV" (tales), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1981.
• "Wizja lokalna" ["Observation on the spot"], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1982.
• "Prowokacja" ["Provocation"] (apocrypha), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1984.
• "Człowiek z Marsa" ["Man from Mars"], 1985 (fanzne edition, not respecting copyright).
• "Biblioteka XXI wieku" ["Library of the 21st century"] (apocrypha), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1986.
• "Pokój na Ziemi" ["Peace on earth"], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1987.
• "Fiasko" ["Fiasco"], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1987.
• "Pożytek ze smoka" ["The usefulness of the dragon"] (tales), PTWK, 1993.
• "Człowiek z Marsa" ["Man from Mars"], Nowa, 1994 (the first official compact edition).
• "Lube czasy" ["Delightful times"] (feature articles), Znak, 1995.
• "Sex Wars" (feature articles), Nowa, 1996.
• "Tajemnica chińskiego pokoju" ["The mystery of the Chinese room"] (feature articles), Universitas, 1996.
• "Dziury w całym" "[Picking holes"] (feature articles), Znak, 1997.
• "Bomba megabitowa" ["The megabit bomb"] (feature articles), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999.
• "Okamgnienie" ["A blink of an eye"] (feature articles), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000.
• "Przekładaniec" ["Layer cake"] (screenplays), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000.
• "Dyktanda czyli..." ["Dictation exercises or..."], Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001.
• "Listy albo opór materii" ["Letters or the resistance of matter"] (selection of letters), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002.
• "Dylematy" ["Dilemmas"] (feature articles), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003.
• "Krótkie zwarcia" ["Short circuits"] (feature articles from "Tygodnik Powszechny" written after 1994), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004.
• "Lata czterdzieste. Dyktanda" ["The 1940s. Dictation exercises"] (debut tales from the 1940s and "Dictation exercises"), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005.
• "Rasa drapieżców. Teksty ostatnie" ["The predator race. Final texts"] (feature articles from "Tygodnik Powszechny" from 2005 and 2006 selected by Tomasz Fiałkowski), Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006.
• "Sknocony kryminał" ["A botched crime story"] (crime story and play from the author's notes), Agora SA 2009.

Author: Paweł Kozioł, April 2009; English translation © Tadeusz Z. Wolański

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