Lem, Stanislaw
Lem, Stanislaw (1921– ),Polish writer and philosopher, physician by education, author of several popular science‐fiction novels and short stories. He lived in West Berlin in 1980–3 and in Austria in 1983–8. His early novels, such as The Astronauts (1951) and The Magellan Cloud (1953–5), are utopian fairy tales, depicting interplanetary communist paradise. Lem's best‐known works, Eden (1959) and Solaris (1961), also adapted for film by Andrei Tarkovsky, are more like contemporary existential novels, reflecting on the essence of human civilization, possible contacts with other worlds, and the problems and dilemmas of mutual understanding. These ‘serious’ novels are deeply psychological and display the writer's extreme erudition and keen insight into human nature.
By contrast, quite a number of his novels and stories, for instance, Robot Fairy Tales (1964) or Cyberiade (1965),...
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