Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Lem was born on September 12, 1921, in the city of Lwów, which was then located in the Second Polish Republic (currently, the city is called Lviv and located within the borders of Ukraine). Though Jewish, Lem decided that he did not believe in an all-powerful, benevolent God due to evident evils present in the world. During the Nazi German occupation of Poland during World War II (1939–1945), Lem’s family hid their Jewish ethnicity using forged documents. In 1946, Lem serially published his first novel, The Man from Mars, about scientists experimenting on a crash-landed Martian cyborg, in a science-fiction magazine. Lem subsequently disavowed the novel, which he claimed to have written solely for the money. From 1948 to 1956, Poland (among other Eastern Bloc countries) saw a great deal of communist censorship, and Lem had to sprinkle novels such as The Astronauts (1951) and The Magellanic Cloud (1955) with communist utopian ideas and aesthetics to get them published. After communist censorship in Poland eased, Lem published prolifically, writing novels, short stories, essays, and philosophical treatises. In 1961, Lem published perhaps his most famous novel, Solaris, about researchers on a remote planet who encounter mysterious “visitors” apparently constructed by the planet’s maybe-sentient ocean. In 1982 he moved from Poland to Germany but moved back in 1988. Lem died in 2006.