![]() Lem started his literary work in 1946 with a number of publications in different genres, including poetry, as well as his first science fiction novel, The Man from Mars ( Człowiek z Marsa), serialized in Nowy Świat Przygód ( New World of Adventures). Lem said that the sight of blood was one of the reasons he decided to drop medicine. After receiving absolutorium (Polish term for the evidence of completion of the studies without diploma), he did an obligatory monthly work at a hospital, at a maternity ward, where he assisted at a number of childbirths and a caesarean section. He did not take his final examinations on purpose, to avoid the career of military doctor, which he suspected could have become lifelong. In 1945, Lwow was annexed into the Soviet Ukraine, and the family, along with many other Polish citizens, was resettled to Kraków, where Lem, at his father's insistence, took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. So it was, strictly speaking, only the Nazi legislation that brought home to me the realization that I had Jewish blood in my veins.ĭuring that time, Lem earned a living as a car mechanic and welder, and occasionally stole munitions from storehouses (to which he had access as an employee of a German company) to pass them on to the Polish resistance. I knew that my ancestors were Jews, but I knew nothing of the Mosaic faith and, regrettably, nothing at all of Jewish culture. He would later recall: ĭuring that period, I learned in a very personal, practical way that I was no " Aryan". During the subsequent Nazi occupation (1941–1944), Lem's Jewish family avoided placement in the Nazi Lwów Ghetto, surviving with false papers. Īfter the 1939 Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and Belarus, he was not allowed to study at Lwow Polytechnic as he wished because of his " bourgeois origin", and only due to his father's connections he was accepted to study medicine at Lwów University in 1940. In later years he would call himself both an agnostic and an atheist. the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created. He later became an atheist "for moral reasons. In later years Lem sometimes claimed to have been raised Roman Catholic, but he went to Jewish religious lessons during his school years. He was the son of Sabina née Woller (1892–1979) and Samuel Lem (1879–1954), a wealthy laryngologist and former physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and first cousin to Polish poet Marian Hemar (Lem's father's sister's son). According to his own account, he was actually born on 13 September, but the date was changed to the 12th on his birth certificate because of superstition. Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, interwar Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). 4 on Bohdan Lepky Street in Lviv, where, according to his autobiography Highcastle, Lem spent his childhood The Polish Parliament declared 2021 Stanisław Lem Year. Translating his works is difficult due to Lem's elaborate neologisms and idiomatic wordplay. His essays and philosophical books cover these and many other topics. Lem's science fiction works explore philosophical themes through speculations on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity's place in the universe. Lem is the author of the fundamental philosophical work Summa Technologiae, in which he anticipated the creation of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and also developed the ideas of human autoevolution, the creation of artificial worlds, and many others. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris. ![]() Lem's books have been translated into more than 50 languages and have sold more than 45 million copies. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical and humorous character. ![]() ![]() Stanisław Herman Lem ( Polish: ( listen) 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. ![]()
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