Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) was a world-renowned Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire whose books have appeared in more than thirty countries and sold millions of copies. Over half a century, he published a flurry of influential and groundbreaking fiction and nonfiction books.
In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. If true, this was in part because Lem was a genius but also because Lem often adopted the form of the short tall tale or folktale for his science fiction, speaking therefore in a near-universal language. Yet the intellectual rigor of his fiction is second to none, spanning such areas as advanced technology, human intelligence, community, and the nature of alien life. Much of his work exists within a continuum also occupied by idiosyncratic, brilliant writers such as Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Leena Krohn.
He is perhaps most famous for writing the classic 1961 novel Solaris, translated into film thrice, most notably by Andrei Tarkovsky. But Lem’s adventures with nonfiction are just as breathtaking, especially Summa Technologiae (1964), a brilliant and risky survey of possible informational, A.I., and ecological advances, interwoven with musings of a biological and technological nature.
Parts of the American science fiction community did not particularly get along with Lem. He became the epicenter of a controversy involving the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1973 when he was awarded, and then denied, an honorary membership with the organization; some saw it as a rebuke to his mostly negative opinion of American science fiction, which he thought was too commercially driven. Even when Lem praised an American writer—one Philip K. Dick—it caused difficulties. Dick reported Lem to the FBI, believing that “Lem” was a front for a communist agent trying, somehow, to undermine the United States. Thereafter, Lem can hardly be blamed for having nothing to do with the science fiction community—especially given that he had his own difficulties with the Communist Party in his country. (Thankfully, his international popularity allowed Lem more leeway than most writers in the Soviet bloc.)
Although most of the Lem canon is well worth reading, his stories featuring Ijon Tichy, described as the hapless Candide of the Cosmos, are particularly hilarious and rich in detail. Tichy pilots his single-seat rocket through deep space, encountering time warps, weird intergalactic civilizations, and black holes. Whether it is killer potatoes who love to eat spaceships or robot theologians living in catacombs, Lem’s imagination is superlative in these beloved tales. As translator Michael Kandel noted in The Star Diaries (1976), these stories include playful anecdotes, pointed satire, and outright philosophy. But rather than innovating, as Kandel believed, Lem was renovating—by bringing the conte philosophe approach used by early twentieth-century science fiction into the modern era and thus allying himself with writers such as Alfred Jarry and Paul Scheerbart.
“Let Us Save the Universe” (1971), first published in English in The New Yorker (1981), is one of the last Tichy tales, and as such encapsulates many of the joys of the series, even as it also includes a note of sadness. In revisiting his favorite places, Tichy finds too much has been polluted or transformed. “Tichy” is pronounced “Tee-khee” and suggests the Polish word for “quiet.”