Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Herman^[2] Lem (Polish pronunciation: [staˈɲiswaf ˈlɛm]; 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire, and a trained physician. Lem's books have been translated into forty-one languages and have sold over forty-five million copies.^[3][4] From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. 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.^[5]

Lem's works explore philosophical themes through speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, 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.

Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.

Life

Early life

House #4 on Bohdana Lepkogo street in Lwów, where, according to his autobiography "Wysoki zamek", Lem spent his childhood.

Lem was born in 1921 into a secular Jewish family in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). 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,^[6][7] and first cousin to Polish poet Marian Hemar (Lem's father and Hemar's mother were brother and sister).^[8] In later years Lem sometimes claimed to have been raised Roman Catholic, but he went to Jewish religious lessons during his school years.^[2] 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".^[9][10] In later years he would call himself both an "agnostic"^[11] and an atheist.^[12]

After the Soviet invasion and occupation of Eastern Poland, he was not allowed to study at the 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.^[13] During the subsequent Nazi occupation (1941–1944), Lem's family, which had Jewish roots, avoided imprisonment in a ghetto, surviving with false papers.^[7] 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.^[7][14]

During that time, Lem earned a living as a car mechanic and welder,^[7] and occasionally stole the munitions from storehouses (to which he had access as an employee of a German company) to pass it to Polish resistance. ^[15]

In 1945, Polish Eastern Borderlands were annexed into Soviet Ukraine and the family, like many other Poles, was resettled to Kraków, where Lem, at his father's insistence, took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University.^[7] He did not take his final examinations on purpose, so as not to be obliged to become a military doctor.^[13] Earlier, he had started working as an assistant in a hospital and writing stories in his spare time.^[7]

Rise to fame

Stanisław Lem and toy cosmonaut, 1966

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 (Człowiek z Marsa) serialized in Nowy Świat Przygód (New World of Adventures).^[7] 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.^[16] In 1951, he published his first book, The Astronauts (Astronauci).^[7] In 1953 he met and married (civil marriage) Barbara Leśniak, a medical student.^[17] Their church marriage ceremony was performed in February, 1954.^[7] In 1954, he published a short story anthology, Sesame and other stories (Sezam i inne opowiadania).^[7] The following year, 1955, saw the publication of another science fiction novel, The Magellanic Cloud (Obłok Magellana).^[7]

During the era of Stalinism, which had begun in Poland in the late '40s, all published works had to be directly approved by the communist regime. Thus Astronauci was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the censors.^[7] Going by the date of finished manuscript, Lem's first book was a partly autobiographical novella Hospital of the Transfiguration (Szpital Przemienienia), finished in 1948.^[7] It would be published seven years later, in 1955, as a trilogy under a title Czas nieutracony (Time Not Lost).^[7] The experience of trying to push Czas.. through the censors was one of the major reasons Lem decided to focus on the less-censored genre of science fiction.^[16] 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".^[16][18] Lem later criticized several of his early pieces as compromised by the ideological pressure.^[7]

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.^[7][16][18] Between 1956 and 1968, Lem authored seventeen books.^[18] His writing over the next three decades or so was split between science fiction (primarily prose) and essays about science and culture.^[16]

In 1957, he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogues (Dialogi), as well as a science-fiction anthology, The Star Diaries (Dzienniki gwiazdowe),^[7] collecting short stories about one of his most popular characters, Ijon Tichy.^[19] 1959 saw the publication of three books: Eden, Śledztwo and the short story anthology, Inwazja z Aldebarana.^[7] 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.^[7] This was followed by a collections of his essays and non-fiction prose, Wejście na orbitę (1962), and a short-story anthology Noc księżycowa (1963).^[7] 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 (Niezwyciężony).^[7][18]

Lem signing in Kraków, 30 October 2005

1965 saw the publication of The Cyberiad (Cyberiada). That year also saw the publication of a short-story anthology, The Hunt (Polowanie).^[7] 1966 is the year of "Wysoki Zamek", and 1968, "Głos Pana" and "Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie".^[7][18] "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.^[7] 1967 and 1970 saw two more non-fiction treatises, "Filozofia przypadku" and "Fantastyka i futurologia".^[7] Ijon Tichy returns in 1971's The Futurological Congress Kongres futurologiczny, the year of a genre-mixing experiment, "Doskonała próżnia" (a collection of reviews of non-existent books).^[7] 1973 sees a similar work, "Wielkość urojona".^[7] In 1976, Lem published two novels: "Maska" and "Katar".^[7] In 1980, he published another set of reviews of non-existent works, "Prowokacja".^[7] The following year sees another Tichy novel, "Wizja lokalna",^[7] and Golem XIV. Later in that decade, he published "Pokój na Ziemi" (1984) and "Fiasko" (1986), Lem's final science-fiction novel.^[7]

In the late '70s and early '80s, Lem cautiously supported the Polish dissident movement, and started publishing essays in Paris-based Kultura.^[7] 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).^[7] After that, he settled in Vienna. He returned to Poland in 1988.^[7]

Final years

From the late 1980s onwards, he tended to concentrate on philosophical texts and essays, published in a number of Polish magazines (Tygodnik Powszechny, Odra, Przegląd, and others).^[7][16] They were later collected in a number of anthologies.^[7]

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 (1997); 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 legendary 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.^[20] 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 (2013), Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel (2014), Lemography (2014), and Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future (2015).

In 1996, Lem received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle.^[21]

Lem died from heart disease in Kraków on 27 March 2006 at the age of 84.^[16]

Controversies

SFWA

Lem was awarded an honorary membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) 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, however, 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.^[22] After his eventual American publication, when he became eligible for regular membership, his honorary membership was rescinded, an action that some of the SFWA members apparently intended as a rebuke,^[23] and it seems that Lem interpreted it as such. Lem was invited to stay on with the organization with a regular membership, but declined.^[24] After many members (including Ursula K. Le Guin) protested Lem's treatment by the SFWA, a member offered to pay his dues. Lem never accepted the offer.^[22][24]

Philip K. Dick

Lem singled out only one^[25] American SF writer for praise, Philip K. Dick—see the 1986 English-language anthology of his critical essays, Microworlds. Dick thought 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. Stanisław Lem was also responsible for Polish translation of Dick's work, and when Dick felt monetarily short-changed by the publisher, he held Lem personally responsible (see Microworlds).^[26]

Significance

Lem has become 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.^[27] In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world.^[5]

In Poland, in the '60s and '70s, 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.^[7]

The total volume of his published works is over twenty-eight million volumes.^[16] His works were widely translated abroad, appearing in over forty languages, though the bulk of them were in Eastern Bloc countries (Poland, Germany, and the Soviet Union).^[7] Franz Rottensteiner, Lem's former agent abroad, had this to say about Lem's reception on international markets:

With [number of translations and copies sold], Lem is the most successful author in modern Polish fiction; nevertheless his commercial success in the world is limited, and the bulk of his large editions was due to the special publishing conditions in the Communist countries: Poland, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic). Only in West Germany was Lem really a critical and a commercial success [. . . and everywhere . . . ] in recent years interest in him has waned.

But he is the only writer of European [science fiction, most of whose] books have been translated into English, and [. . .] kept in print in the USA. Lem's critical success in English is due mostly to the excellent translations of Michael Kandel.^[28]

His best-known novels include Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (Głos pana, 1968), and the late Fiasco (Fiasko, 1987). 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 re-adaptation in 2002 by American director Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney.

Solaris is not the only work of Lem's to be made into a movie. Over ten movie, film, and television adaptations of his work exist, such as adaptations of The Astronauts (First Spaceship on Venus, 1960) and The Magellan Nebula (Ikarie XB-1, 1963).^[29] Lem himself was, however, critical of most of the screen adaptations, with the sole exception of Przekładaniec in 1968 by Andrzej Wajda.^[7] More recently, in 2013, the Israeli–Polish co-production The Congress was released, inspired by Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.^[30]

Lem's works have been used in education, for example as teaching texts for philosophy students.^[31]

Lem's works have influenced not only the realm of literature, but that of science as well. For example, Return from the Stars includes the "opton", which is often cited as the first published appearance of the idea of electronic paper.

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".^[27]

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.^[32]

Writings

Science fiction

Stanisław Lem works were influenced by such masters of Polish literature as Cyprian Norwid and Stanisław Witkiewicz. His prose show a mastery of numerous genres and themes.^[7]

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 (in The Invincible), and strangely ordered societies of more human-like beings in Fiasco and Eden, describing the failure of the first contact. In His Master's Voice, Lem describes the failure of humanity's intelligence to decipher and truly comprehend an apparent message from space.^[33][34]

Two overlapping arcs of short stories, Fables for Robots (Bajki Robotów), translated in the collection Mortal Engines), and The Cyberiad (Cyberiada) 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").^[7][35]

"Śledztwo" and "Katar" are crime novels (the latter without a murderer); "Pamiętnik . . ." is a psychological drama inspired by Kafka.^[7] "Doskonała próżnia" and "Wielkość urojona" are collections of reviews of non-existent books and introductions to them.^[7] Similarly, "Prowokacja" purports to review a Holocaust-themed work.^[7]

Essays

Lem's criticism of most science fiction surfaced in literary and philosophical essays Science Fiction and Futurology and interviews.^[36] In the 1990s, Lem forswore science fiction and returned to futurological prognostications, most notably those expressed in Blink of an Eye (Okamgnienie). He became increasingly critical of modern technology in his later life, criticizing inventions such as the Internet.^[37]

Dialogi and Summa Technologiae (1964) are Lem's two most famous philosophical texts. The Summa is notable for being a unique analysis of prospective social, cybernetic, and biological advances;^[7] 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.

Honors

• 1957 – City of Kraków's Prize in Literature (Nagroda Literacka miasta Krakowa)
• 1965 – Prize of the Minister of Culture and Art, 2nd Level (Nagroda Ministra Kultury i Sztuki II stopnia)
• 1972 – member of commission "Poland 2000" of the Polish Academy of Sciences
• 1973
  • Prize of the Minister of Foreign Affairs for popularization of Polish culture abroad (nagroda Ministra Spraw Zagranicznych za popularyzację polskiej kultury za granicą)
  • Literary Prize of the Minister of Culture and Art (nagroda literacka Ministra Kultury i Sztuki) and honorary member of Science Fiction Writers of America
• 1976 – State Prize 1st Level in the area of literature (Nagroda Państwowa I stopnia w dziedzinie literatury)
• 1979
  • Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for his novel Katar.
  • A minor planet, 3836 Lem, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1979, is named after him.^[38]
• 1981 – Doctor honoris causa honorary degree from the Wrocław University of Technology^[16]
• 1986 – Austrian State Prize for European Literature
• 1991 – Austrian literary Franz Kafka Prize
• 1994 – member of the Polish Academy of Learning
• 1996 – recipient of the Order of the White Eagle^[16]
• 1997 – honorary citizen of Kraków^[16]
• 1998 – Doctor honoris causa: University of Opole, Lviv University, Jagiellonian University^[16]
• 2003 – Doctor honoris causa of the University of Bielefeld^[16]
• 2007 – A street in Kraków is to be named in his honour.^[39]
• 2009 – A street in Wieliczka was named in his honour^[40]
• 2011 – An interactive Google logo inspired by The Cyberiad was created and published in his honor for the 60th anniversary of his first published book: The Astronauts.^[41][42]

Notes

Further reading

• Wojciech Orliński, Co to są sepulki? Wszystko o Lemie (What are Sepulki? Everything about Lem), 2007, ISBN 8324007989.
• Peter Swirski, Stanislaw Lem Reader, Northwestern University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-8101-1495-X description
• Peter Swirski, Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge, McGill-Queen's UP, 2000, ISBN 0-7735-2078-3
• Peter Swirski (ed), The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008, ISBN 0-7735-3047-9
• Peter Swirski From Literature to Biterature: Lem, Turing, Darwin, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013.
• Peter Swirski Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel, Liverpool University Press, 2014.
• Peter Swirski (ed), Lemography, Liverpool University Press, 2014.
• Peter Swirski Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future, Liverpool University Press, 2015.
• "Acta Lemiana Monashiensis" ed. Lech Keller, „Acta Polonica Monashiensis", special edition dedicated to Lem, 2002, vol. 2, nr 2 Monash University 2003, 207 p., ISSN 1326-8562 review in Polish
• Lech Keller, Visions of the Future in the Writings of Stanislaw Lem (Volume 1, "Visions of the Future") Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010, 392 p., ISBN 978-3-8383-5900-7
• Lech Keller, Visions of the Future in the Writings of Stanislaw Lem (Volume 2, "Annotated and Cross-Referenced Primary and Secondary Bibliography of Stanislaw Lem") Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010, 696 p., ISBN 978-3-8383-6942-6
• Jameson, Fredric. "The Unknowability Thesis." In Archaeologies of the Future: This Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London and New York: Verso, 2005.
• Suvin, Darko. "Three World Paradigms for SF: Asimov, Yefremov, Lem." Pacific Quarterly (Moana): An International Review of Arts and Ideas 4.(1979): 271–283.
• "A Visionary Among the Charlatans": Lem's essay on Philip K. Dick at the Science-Fiction Studies website
• "Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature: Lem's caustic criticism of Tzvetan Todorov's essay on the fantastic
• Solaris, Rediscovered by Gary K. Wolf, Wired December 2002 including some comments from Lem
• Lem at "The Modern Word"
• Biography at sci.fi
• Biography at poland.gov
• Biography at culture.pl
• Science Fiction as a Model for Probabilistic Worlds: Stanislaw Lem's Fantastic Empiricism by Dagmar Barnouw, Science Fiction Studies, # 18 = Volume 6, Part 2 = July 1979
• Stanislaw Lem, Jeet Heer, Boston Globe Ideas, 15 December 2004
• The writing of Stanislaw Lem – Reviews by Matt McIrvin
• Stanislaw Lem Bibliography
• "Less Predictable Realities," translated by Joanna Zylinska, in the journal Scapegoat, issue 05 (2013)
• Tsalyk St. Creator of worlds
• Lem, Stanisław. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006. Retrieved 30 June 2006. 

Obituaries

• Life after Lem, Warsaw Voice 5 April 2006 (cover story)
• To Solaris and beyond, Philosopher's Zone Australian Broadcasting Corporation discussion about Lem's works; MP3
• Times Online obituary

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Stanisław Lem.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Stanisław Lem

• Official website – maintained by Lem's son and secretary
• Stanisław Lem at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Stanisław Lem at the Internet Movie Database
• Lemopedia, The Lem Encyclopedia wiki