Stanisław Lem


Stanisław Herman Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories include satire and humor. Lem's books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 45 million copies. From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. The total print of Lem's books is over 30 million copies.
Lem's works explore philosophical themes through speculation 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. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books.
Translating his works is difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, idiomatic wordplay, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.

Life

Early life

Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, interwar Poland to a family of Jewish origin. According to his own account, he was actually born on the 13th of September, but the date was changed to the 12th on his birth certificate because of superstition. He was the son of Sabina née Woller and Samuel Lem, a wealthy laryngologist and former physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and first cousin to Polish poet Marian Hemar. 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 Soviet invasion and occupation of Eastern Poland, he was not allowed to study at Lwow Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin", and only due to his father's connections was accepted to study medicine at Lwów University in 1940. During the subsequent Nazi occupation, Lem's family, which had Jewish roots, avoided imprisonment in a ghetto, surviving with false papers. He would later recall:
During that time, Lem earned a living as a car mechanic and welder, and occasionally stole munitions from storehouses to pass them on to the Polish resistance.
In 1945, the Polish Eastern Borderlands were annexed into Soviet Ukraine, and the family, along with many other Poles, 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, 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

Lem made his literary debut in 1946 with a number of works of different genres, including poetry as well as a science fiction novel, The Man from Mars, serialized in . 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 and similar works, particularly at Tygodnik Powszechny. In 1951, he published his first book, The Astronauts. In 1953 he met and married Barbara Leśniak, a medical student.
Their church marriage ceremony was performed in February, 1954. In 1954, he published a short story anthology, Sesame and Other Stories. The following year, 1955, saw the publication of another science fiction novel, The Magellanic Cloud.
During the era of Stalinism, which had begun in Poland in the late 1940s, all published works had to be directly approved by the communist state. Thus Astronauci was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the censors. Going by the date of the finished manuscript, Lem's first book was a partly autobiographical novella Hospital of the Transfiguration, finished in 1948. It would be published seven years later, in 1955, as a trilogy under the title Czas nieutracony. 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—forced upon him by the censors and editors—various references to socialist realism as well as the "glorious future of communism". 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. His writing over the next three decades or so was split between science fiction and essays about science and culture.
In 1957, he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogues, 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: Eden, Śledztwo and the short story anthology Inwazja z Aldebarana. 1961 saw two more books, the first regarded as being among his top works: Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie, Solaris, as well as Powrót z gwiazd. This was followed by a collection of his essays and non-fiction prose, Wejście na orbitę, and a short story anthology Noc księżycowa. 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.
, 30 October 2005.
1965 saw the publication of The Cyberiad and of a short story anthology, The Hunt. 1966 is the year of Wysoki Zamek, followed in 1968 by Głos Pana and Tales of Pirx the Pilot. Wysoki Zamek 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. 1967 and 1970 saw two more non-fiction treatises, Filozofia przypadku and Fantastyka i futurologia. Ijon Tichy returned in 1971's The Futurological Congress Kongres futurologiczny; in the same year Lem released a genre-mixing experiment, Doskonała próżnia, a collection of reviews of non-existent books. In 1973 a similar work, Wielkość urojona, was published. In 1976, Lem published two novels: Maska and Katar. In 1980, he published another set of reviews of non-existent works, Prowokacja. The following year sees another Tichy novel, Wizja lokalna, and Golem XIV. Later in that decade, Lem published Pokój na Ziemi and Fiasko, his final science fiction novel.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lem cautiously supported the Polish dissident movement, and started publishing essays in Paris-based 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. After that, he settled in Vienna. He returned to Poland in 1988.

Final years

From the late 1980s onwards, he tended to concentrate on philosophical texts and essays, published in a number of Polish magazines. They were later collected in a number of anthologies.
In early 1980s literary critic and historian Stanisław Bereś conducted a lengthy interview with Lem, which got published in book format in 1987 as Rozmowy ze Stanisławem Lemem . That edition was subject to censorship. A revised, complete edition was published in 2002 as Tako rzecze… Lem.
In the early 1990s, Lem met with the literary scholar and critic Peter Swirski for a series of extensive interviews, published together with other critical materials and translations as A Stanislaw Lem Reader ; in the book, Lem speaks about a range of issues rarely touched on before in any interview. Moreover, the book 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. Subsequently, Peter Swirski has published a series of in-depth studies of Lem as a writer, philosopher, and futurologist; notable among them are the recent From Literature to Biterature: Lem, Turing, Darwin, Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel, Lemography, and Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future''.

Writings

Science fiction

Stanisław Lem works were influenced by such masters of Polish literature as Cyprian Norwid and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. His prose show a mastery of numerous genres and themes.

Recurring themes

Lem's works include a great variety of thought.
One of Lem's major recurring themes, beginning from his very first novel, The Man from Mars, was the impossibility of communication between profoundly alien beings, which may have no common ground with human intelligence, and humans. The best known example is the living planetary ocean in Lem's novel Solaris. Other examples include swarms of mechanical insects, and strangely ordered societies of more human-like beings in Fiasco and Eden, describing the failure of the 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. Many of Lem's works include beings and/or machines who are more advanced than humans. Lem also underlines the uncertainties of evolution, including that it might not progress upwards in intelligence.

Other writings

Śledztwo and Katar are crime novels ; Pamiętnik... is a psychological drama inspired by Kafka. Doskonała próżnia and Wielkość urojona are collections of reviews of non-existent books and introductions to them. Similarly, Prowokacja purports to review a Holocaust-themed work.

Essays

Dialogues and Summa Technologiae are Lem's two most famous philosophical texts. The Summa is notable for being a unique analysis of prospective social, cybernetic, and biological advances; in this work, Lem discusses philosophical implications of technologies that were completely in the realm of science fiction at the time, but are gaining importance today—for instance, virtual reality and nanotechnology.

Views in later life

Lem's criticism of most science fiction surfaced in literary and philosophical essays Science Fiction and Futurology and interviews. In the 1990s, Lem forswore science fiction and returned to futurological prognostications, most notably those expressed in Blink of an Eye.
Lem said that since the success of Solidarnosc, and the collapse of the Soviet empire, he felt his wild dreams about the future could no longer compare with the reality.
He became increasingly critical of modern technology in his later life, criticizing inventions such as the Internet, which he said "makes it easier to hurt our neighbors."

Criticism

In opinion of Elizabeth Bear, Lem's work is “casually misogynist when it bothers to acknowledge the existence of women at all, frequently racist, and replete with deeply misanthropic Swiftian allegories.”

Relationship with American science fiction

SFWA

Lem was awarded an honorary membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1973. SFWA Honorary membership is given to people who do not meet the publishing criteria for joining the regular membership, but who would be welcomed as members had their work appeared in the qualifying English-language publications. Lem never had a high opinion of American science fiction, describing it as ill-thought-out, poorly written, and interested more in making money than in ideas or new literary forms. After his eventual American publication, when he became eligible for regular membership, his honorary membership was rescinded. This formal action was interpreted by some of the SFWA members as a rebuke for his stance, and it seems that Lem interpreted it as such. Lem was invited to stay on with the organization with a regular membership, but declined. After many members protested against Lem's treatment by the SFWA, a member offered to pay his dues. Lem never accepted the offer.

Philip K. Dick

Lem singled out only one American science fiction writer for praise, Philip K. Dick, in a 1984 English-language anthology of his critical essays, . Lem had initially held a low opinion of Philip K. Dick and would later claim that this was due to a limited familiarity with Dick's work.
Dick, who had mental health problems, maintained that Stanisław Lem was probably a false name used by a composite committee operating on orders of the Communist party to gain control over public opinion, and wrote a letter to the FBI to that effect. Lem was also 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.

Significance

Writing

Lem is one of the most highly acclaimed science fiction writers, hailed by critics as equal to such classic authors as H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. In Poland, in the 1960s and 1970s, Lem remained under the radar of mainstream critics, who dismissed him as a "mass market", low-brow, youth-oriented writer; such dismissal might have given him a form of invisibility from censorship. His works were widely translated abroad, appearing in over 40 languages, though the bulk of them were in Eastern Bloc countries. Franz Rottensteiner, Lem's former agent abroad, had this to say about Lem's reception on international markets:
His best-known novels include Solaris, His Master's Voice, and the late Fiasco.

Use in films

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. Solaris is not the only work of Lem's to be filmed. Over ten film and television adaptations of his work exist, such as adaptations of The Astronauts and The Magellan Nebula. Lem himself was, however, critical of most of the screen adaptations, with the sole exception of Przekładaniec in 1968 by Andrzej Wajda. More recently, in 2013, the Israeli–Polish co-production The Congress was released, inspired by Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.

Use in education and philosophy

Lem's works have been used in education, for example as teaching texts for philosophy students.
In 1981, the philosophers Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett included three extracts from Lem's fiction in their annotated anthology The Mind's I, accompanied by Hofstadter's comment, which says in part that Lem's "literary and intuitive approach... does a better job of convincing readers of his views than any hard-nosed scientific article... might do".

Other influence

Other influences exerted by Lem's works include Will Wright's popular city-planning game SimCity, which was partly inspired by Lem's short story The Seventh Sally.
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.

Honors

Awards


Political views

Lem's early works were socialist realist, possibly to satisfy state censors, and in his later years he was critical of this aspect of them. However he never showed any wish to relocate permanently in the west. By the standards of the Soviet bloc, Lem was financially well off for most of his life. He moved with his family to Vienna for a few years, during the time of the crackdown against the Polish trade union Solidarity.
Lem was a critic of capitalism, totalitarianism and of ideologies.
Lem believed there were no absolutes; "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, and would prevent human's attainment of transcendence. He believed that transcendence might be achievable through the construction of a great many artificial worlds, and "then examine in which one the “sum of happiness” will be the greatest."

Personal life

Lem was a polyglot: he knew Polish, Latin, German, French, English, Russian and Ukrainian. Lem stated that his IQ was tested at high school as 180.
Lem was married to Barbara Lem née Leśniak until his death. She died on 27 April 2016. Their only son, Tomasz, was born in 1968. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna, and graduated with a degree in physics from Princeton University. Tomasz wrote a memoir about his father, Awantury na tle powszechnego ciążenia, which contain numerous personal details about Stanisław Lem. The annotation of the book 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, for 5 or 6 hours before taking a break.
Lem was an aggressive driver. He loved sweets, and did not give them up even when, toward the end of his life, he fell ill with diabetes. In the mid-80s due to health problems he stopped smoking.
Stanisław Lem died from heart disease in Kraków on 27 March 2006 at the age of 84.