Stanisław Lem remains one of the most important and most widely read science fiction writers in the world. His books have been translated into dozens of languages, with a combined circulation of over 30 million copies. Although fascinated with technology, he warned against its detrimental impact on human existence.
by Jan Hlebowicz
Born on September 12, 1921, in Lwów, Lem was the only child of Sabina and Samuel Lem. As a child, he was a connoisseur of sweets – candied fruit, chocolates, and candies, a collector of “all kinds of electrical and mechanical junk,” a designer of inventions, and a creator of fictitious passports and government notes – at least that is how he portrayed himself in his autobiography Highcastle. “The child I was interests me and worries me at the same time. Certainly, I did not murder anyone, except dolls and gramophones, yet it must be taken into account that I was physically weak and feared repression from adults. If four-year-old children were as strong as their parents, our world would look different. They really are a completely different species, they are certainly not less complicated than mature people – only the difficulty finds itself elsewhere,” he wrote.
Scrap, Nazis, and Hodgepodge
Lem began reading at the age of four, and from that moment on, books became his greatest passion. “In middle school, I read everything I could get my hands on, Fredro and May, Sienkiewicz, Verne and Wells, Słowacki and Pitigrilli; it was a real hodgepodge.” He passed his high school final exams shortly before the outbreak of World War II, which irrevocably closed the chapter of the Lem family’s stable, prosperous, and bourgeois life. The nightmare of the Soviet and German occupations left a deep mark on Lem, clearly visible in his later prose. “At that time, in a very direct and ‘practical’ way, I learned that I was not an ‘Aryan.’ My ancestors were Jews, but I had no idea about Judaism or, unfortunately, about Jewish culture. It was only thanks to Nazi legislation that I became aware that I had Jewish blood in my veins. However, we managed to avoid the ghetto – thanks to false documents, my parents and I managed to survive that time,” he recalled.
Due to the war, Lem could not fulfill his dream of studying science at the Lwów Polytechnic. He took up a physical job – he collected scrap metal, worked as a mechanic’s assistant, and later worked as a welder in the garages of a company recovering raw materials. At that time, an underground combat organization contacted Lem. He began to obtain explosives. In the summer of 1945, shortly after the war, the Lem family moved to Krakow. Lem, following his father’s professional path, began his medical studies. Yet, in 1948, he abandoned the idea. From that moment on, Lem devoted himself exclusively to writing. He began publishing in the Marxist „Kuźnica,” „Żołnierz Polski,” and also the Catholic „Tygodnik Powszechny.” The latter published Lem’s short story The Stranger. Its protagonist was a high school student who created a perpetual motion machine by breaking the laws of physics. However, it was destroyed by bombardment during the war, which also killed anyone nearby. “With this story, Lem entered the sphere of influence on science fiction conventions and, at the same time, erected a monument to his high school friends, whose mathematical abilities he admired. For many years, Lem had been convinced that if they had not died during the war, they would have achieved something exceptional,” wrote Prof. Agnieszka Gajewska, Lem’s biographer. His first novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration – a realistic story of a psychiatric facility operating during the war, was positively assessed by readers, yet the censors did not like it. Despite pressure from prominent representatives of the communist authorities, including Jerzy Putrament, Lem never joined the party. For these and other reasons, the work could not be published until seven years after it was written – in 1955, somewhat heralding the socio-political thaw.
The world fame of a visionary
„The idea of knowledge is so exciting to me. It manifests itself in me as a fascination with the limits of the human mind’s cognition. All my writing is about this,” said Stanisław Lem in one of his interviews. His prime time was the sixties. In 1961, he published two masterpieces, Solaris and Return from the Stars. Three years later – The Book of Robots, The Invincible, and Summa Technologiae. In 1965 – The Cyberiad and Hunting. Lem’s books are filled with prophecies of inventions of the future (internet search engines, virtual reality) and descriptions of devices (tablets, e-books, flash drives) that are now part of our everyday lives. Tadeusz Paszkiewicz, a professor of physics, noted a similarity between the methods of landing and launching rockets described in The Invincible and the operation of the Falcon 9 rocket of the American company SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk. In the same novel, Professor Marek Karliner, from Tel Aviv, found ideas that are now recognized as deep learning, neural networks, and force fields.
Interestingly, while Lem absorbed technical news, he never learned to use a computer himself. He remained faithful to the typewriter until the end of his life. Although fascinated with technology, he warned against its destructive influence on the physical and spiritual human condition. He claimed that „the world must be changed. Otherwise it will start changing us in an uncontrolled way.” He warned that artificial intelligence, by providing the human race with illusory prosperity, would lead to its passivity and, consequently, complete degeneration. On the one hand, he feared the loss of data resources, which would mean a regression in human development. On the other hand, he criticized the excess of information that leads to a cognitive impasse. The library he described in Solaris was symbolic of this – an infinite number of works does not lead to complete knowledge and understanding.
He warned against „megabit bombs,” his term for the contemporary phenomenon of fake news. He remained skeptical about biological interference in the human body. At the same time, as his biographer Professor Agnieszka Gajewska emphasized, Lem held a materialist view close to Darwin’s, remaining a rationalist and – most likely – an agnostic, though his thought was not devoid of metaphysics. He wrote in Fiasco: „High technology does not exclude religious beliefs,” and later added that „the world is constructed so badly that I prefer to believe that no one created it”. Lem’s works and thoughts became widely recognized during his lifetime. In 1970, Krzysztof Meyer’s avant-garde opera based on motifs from The Cyberiad was awarded the Grand Prix of the Prince Pierre of Monaco. Various films have been based on Lem’s prose. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris received a distinction at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972. Thirty years later, Steven Soderbergh reached for Lem’s work, casting the American film star George Clooney as Kelvin. Lem’s prose fascinated futurologist Alvin Toffler, writer Philip Roth, and especially Ursula K. Le Guin. The latter, a world-famous science fiction and fantasy writer, wrote a letter to Lem in 1972, sharing her impressions after reading his two essays published in the magazine „SF Commentary.”
“Le Guin responded with sympathy to Lem’s views on the genre and his complaints about the anti-rationalist tendencies in fantasy that were close to myth and fairy tale […]. She wrote about the desert, a place of profound solitude where, apart from her, only Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Philip K. Dick in the States, and Lem in Poland shared a similar sense of isolation,” Professor Gajewska summarized the writer’s correspondence. In another letter, Le Guin emphasized: “reading your letters is like leaving a small, closed room on a wonderful, cold, windy day. Although exposed to a gust of frosty wind, one can finally breathe a sigh of relief.” Lem, who corresponded with Le Guin, became an honorary voting member of the Science Fiction Writers of America and a member of the Science Fiction Research Association. His works have been translated into dozens of languages. In 1980, he was considered as one of the Polish candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ultimately, the award was ultimately given to Czesław Miłosz.
Throughout the 1990s, until his death, Lem’s work remained a significant reference point for readers worldwide. “He received letters of admiration in various languages […], many people asked him about the world’s future, [and] informed him that reading his novels had changed their lives. He was quite distressed by this, because he did not quite know what to do with these expressions of admiration […]. He was unable to address their fears related to the climate crisis, terrorism, and the political insolence of world leaders,” wrote Prof. Gajewska.
Death after Turkish Halva
The writer’s great passion was cars. “Stories related to the damaged cars or those being repaired, discussing the advantages of certain models. He also liked to brag. In our family, it started with the famous and legendary P-70, then there were a couple of Wartburgs, until finally something completely extraordinary happened: a Fiat 1800, an original Italian, a very beautiful winged car,” recalled Lem’s nephew, the bookseller, and publisher Michał Zych. Lem enjoyed racing other drivers, dynamically starting after the light turned green. He always took off from his garage with screeching tires. He spent hours tinkering with cars.
Although he sent readers on interstellar journeys in his books, he remained more of a homebody. He frequently refused to travel abroad even though he was supposed to go for book launches. Thus, Philip K. Dick was convinced that Lem did not exist at all, and that a group of communist prose writers, commissioned by Soviet services, wrote books signed with Lem’s name to undermine American literature. Lem attributed his reluctance to travel and engage with the outside world to cyclothymia, a mood disorder. During periods of increased stimulation, he could be hyperactive, euphoric, and talkative. He hardly needed sleep. However, these periods were followed by days of fatigue, sadness, and dislike for himself and his surroundings. Instead of socializing, he chose the company of his beloved wife Barbara and their noisy dachshunds.
“In recent years, he left home less and less often, and although the stream of invitations to various events did not decrease, he no longer took part in them; he never liked it anyway,” emphasized the publicist and literary critic Tomasz Fiałkowski. “The disease, or at least its symptoms, which Lem diagnosed in himself, certainly contributed to isolation but also to his creative passion. Over the years, he complained to his friends more and more often about his overwhelming aversion to life, ” explained Professor Agnieszka Gajewska. Despite these challenges, Lem remained active until the end, giving interviews and speaking on the most important issues in international newspapers. In the mid-eighties, he quit smoking due to health issues. However, he could not give up sweets, which he had loved since childhood. Towards the end of his life, he fell ill with diabetes, and he kept saying – to the irritation of his loved ones – that the act of suicide, consisting of locking himself in his office with a five-kilo can of Turkish halva might not be such a bad idea after all. Stanisław Lem passed away on March 27, 2006, at the age of 84.
“I did what I could, may those who are able do better,” is engraved on his gravestone. Recently, a computer game based on his novel The Invincible was created. Lem is honored as the namesake of many streets and schools, and the first Garden of Experiments in Poland in Krakow. The planetoid 3836 Lem and the first Polish artificial satellite were named after him.
