Stanislaw Lem
In 1976, in a preface to the classic Russian science fiction novel A Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the great Theodore Sturgeon mentioned that Stanislaw Lem was then the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. Sturgeon loved to provoke, but he always did so on a factual basis. Ursula K. Le Guin, another internationalist pillar of writing, wrote an introduction to Lem’s Solaris. Testimonials to Lem’s importance may be found from any number of writers. As usual for the US market, however, translated fiction is a steep hill to climb for readers’ acceptance and enthusiasm.
Lem (1921-2006) was a Polish fiction writer and wide-ranging essayist on philosophy and literary criticism. He has been translated into more than 50 languages and sold scores of millions of copies worldwide. He had a talent for the satirical approach to the future, but he also was a skilled investigator of dark psychological depths in what seemed to be straightforward adventure stories. He knew when not to overexplain — indeed, the impossibility of communication was a theme of the work of this Pole born in Lviv, which became part of Ukraine, who trained to be a doctor and could not bear the sight of blood, who wrote star-spanning works of imagination under Soviet censorship guidelines.
Recently, Lem has had the posthumous good fortune to be published by MIT Press. The attractive editions inspired me to create this page dedicated to him. I will be adding the many title of his earlier primary publisher, Harcourt, as I get the opportunity.
Invincible
Invincible
A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.
In the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanisław Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines—perhaps the survivors of a “robot war.” Rohan and his men are forced to confront the classic quandary: what course of action can humanity take once it has reached the limits of its knowledge? In The Invincible, Lem has his characters confront the inexplicable and the bizarre: the problem that lies just beyond analytical reach.