|
source
|
|
Written October 2001 by Sandy Toh, university of colorado student.
|
|
|
|
Stanislaw Lem
|
A Polish satirical and philosophical science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem was born on September 12, 1921, to the family of a wealthy laryngologist in Lwow (now known as Lvov, Ukraine). By his own admission in the autobiographical Wyzoki Zamek (High Castle), he was "a monster" in his childhood, terrorizing those around him, including his parents, Samuel Lem and Sabina (nee Woller), though this merely came from his playfulness and resistance towards authority. A voracious reader, his earliest childhood memories were of science and literature books, an interest that continued throughout his life. Many of his childhood attitudes, literary concerns, and personality have carried through into his current works.
He attended the K. S. Szajnocha II State Grammar School in Lwow from 1932 to 1939, receiving a secondary school certificate. The period of his higher education was characterized by the events of World War II. He went on to study medicine at the Lvov Medical Institute after the first occupation of Lwow by the Soviet forces, but had his education interrupted by the Nazi occupation in 1942 which caused the closing of all Polish Universities. Lem thus become a mechanic's helper and welder for a German firm that recycled raw materials. He only resumed his studies in 1944 after the Soviet army occupied the city again.
In 1946, he was repatriated to Krakow, along with his family, and there enrolled at the Jagiellonian University, where he finished his medical studies but did not take the final exam to avoid being drafted as a military doctor. This was also the year he made his writing debut with the novel Czlowiek z Marsa (A Man from Mars), published in "Nowy Swiat Przygod" in episodic form. Lem worked as a junior research assistant from 1947 for Konserwatorium Naukoznawcze (The Circle for the Science of Science) led by doctor Mieczyslaw Choynowski, whose acquaintance he describes as a "crucial event for both his personal and intellectual development." There, he became involved with editing the journal Zycie Nauki (The Life of Science), where he first read about cybernetics, a theme explored in works like The Cyberiad and Mortal Engines. In his spare time, he wrote stories and poems.
Lem's first novel, Szpital Przemienienia (Hospital of the Transfiguration), was set in Nazi-occupied Poland. However, it was not his first book published due to Communist Party censorship. Instead, his first published work was Astronauci (The Astronauts) which he describes as a "naïve SF novel." In 1953, Lem married Barbara Lesniak, a radiologist.
From 1956 to 1968, Lem was at his prolific best, writing some of his most acclaimed works, such Solaris (1961), which explored the limitations of human understanding. He also wrote his theoretical masterpiece, Summa Technologiae (1964), a treatise presenting daring hypotheses showing the path future human technological thought and culture will follow. It is in this period when he wrote his books of short stories that would be continued in later books, such as The Star Diaries (1957), telling the adventures of the comic hero Ijon Tichy, a cheerful space pilot. Other cycles are those of Pirx the Pilot in Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1979), those of Trurl and Klaupacius in The Cyberiad (1965), and the robot fairy tales.
I was using humour for various reasons. First, some topics were unsuitable for serious treatment, such as questions of genetics. All those sketches of weird skeletons I drew in the Star Diaries were intended to make this subject less horrible.
Besides serious literary works, Lem often utilized humor in his works, presenting them as fables or memoirs, originally to avoid Communist Party censorship, as well as present his view of the "crazy situations" that would occur in the future due to human irresponsibility.
In contrast to his earlier, more optimistic works examining human technological development, its future, and responsibilities, his works after 1968 appear to be more experimental. This would include books such as A Perfect Vacuum (1971), a collection of reviews of nonexistent books.
Lem has received much recognition for his work, including many Polish and international awards for literature, becoming a member of the committee "Poland 2000" in 1972, as well as receiving honorary degrees from Warsaw Polytechnic and other universities. In 1973, he was invited to be an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA). However, his high standards for science fiction--and low opinion of American science fiction, which he considers to be "ill thought out, poorly written, and focused more on adventure than ideas or new literary forms"--led to his expulsion from the SFWA. This followed a critical article, which was badly translated into English, offending many authors.
Lem's work has been translated into thirty languages and sold over eleven million copies. He has experimented with a myriad of genres, from poetry to novels, detective fiction to sociological material, as well as literary works. Well versed in science, unlike many science fiction authors, he reads in four foreign languages in order to keep up with original scientific literature. He has lived in Austria and Italy from 1983, and after writing Pokòj Na Ziemi (1987), announced that he would no longer publish novels, but only essays and columns. Lem's work in the fields of philosophy, social commentary, literary theory and science, combined with his great skill and craft in writing shows him to be one of the most diverse, versatile and intelligent authors in his field.
|
|
|
|
