Synopses may not accomplish much in explaining the appeal of the works of Stanislaw Lem. A message arrives from the stars, and humanity comprehensively fails to decipher it. An astronaut returns from a centurylong mission that we barely hear about. A robotic swarm extinguishes nearly all life on a planet, and a mission can’t figure out anything to do to counter it. Yet Lem is one of the few world-renowned science fiction authors not to have written in English, with fans as diverse as Anthony Burgess, Douglas Hofstadter, Carl Sagan, and John Updike. Six of his works have been rereleased by MIT Press this month, all of them excellent.
Born to a Jewish family in Lwow, then in Poland, in 1921, Lem survived World War II thanks to forged papers and trained as a doctor before beginning his writing career. He drifted into sci-fi in part because it was easier to escape communist censors — in outer space, he could write what he pleased. His sensibilities, however, remained literary: He dismissed most sci-fi as “empty games.” Good science fiction, in his view, involved “the art of putting hypothetical premises into the very complicated steam of socio-psychological occurrences.”
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