Legacy MattersOne of the giants of science fiction died last week, Stanslaw Lem, whose books were translated into 41 languages and sold over 27 million copies according to Wikipedia. His most famous book, Solaris, was made twice into a movie, the latest version starring George Clooney.
From his obituary in the London Telegraph.
Stanislaw Lem, who has died aged 84, was a Polish author whose work employed and subverted the conventions of science fiction and other genres to tackle philosophical questions and to circumvent censorship by the Communist regime.
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Lem enrolled in medical school in 1939, but his studies were interrupted when Germany invaded. The family avoided imprisonment by using false papers to disguise their Jewish background. Lem got a job as a mechanic, where he "learnt to damage German vehicles in such a way that it wouldn't be immediately discovered". During this time, he became acutely aware of the role of chance in life, a subject which was later to haunt his fiction. "The difference between life and death depended upon… whether one went to visit a friend at one o'clock or 20 minutes later," he explained. He worked with the resistance, delivering ammunition and smuggling items into the ghetto, from which, in 1942, most of his Jewish friends were taken to their deaths in the camps.
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By his death, he was widely regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in European literature, and lauded both for his linguistic inventiveness and a stance which, in its suspicion of both political pragmatism and abstract utopianism, had come to be seen as visionary.