Stanisław Lem
| Stanisław Lem | |
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Lem in 1966
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| Born | 12 September 1921 Lwów, Second Polish Republic (now Ukraine) |
| Died | 27 March 2006 (aged 84) Kraków, Poland |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Period | 1946–2005 |
| Genre | Hard science fiction, philosophy, satire |
| Spouse | Barbara Leśniak (1953–2006; his death; 1 child) |
| Website | |
| lem |
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Stanisław Herman 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. 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.
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.
Lem was born in 1921 into a secular Jewish family in Lwów, interwar 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, and first cousin to Polish poet Marian Hemar (Lem's father and Hemar's mother were brother and sister). 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, Lem however had a positive view of both Judaism and Christianity and considered them to be superior to most other forms of religions.
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