Stanislaw Herman Lem was the celebrated Polish writer, satirist, philosopher, science-fiction author and futurologist — the author of the fundamental philosophical work Summa Technologiae, in which he anticipated virtual reality and artificial intelligence and developed the ideas of human auto-evolution and the creation of artificial worlds. His books have been translated into forty languages and printed in some thirty million copies.
Lem was born into the family of Samuel Lem, an ear, nose and throat doctor, and Sabina Woller; his cousin Marian Hescheles was a well-known Polish poet and playwright. He was studying medicine at Lviv University when the Second World War broke out. Despite their Jewish origins, the family managed to escape deportation to the ghetto during the war years thanks to forged papers. Under the Nazi occupation Stanislaw worked as a car mechanic and welder and took part in a resistance group.
In 1946 Lem was repatriated to Krakow and resumed his medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. On finishing the course he refused to sit the final examinations, unwilling to become a military doctor, and received only a certificate of completed study. He then worked as an assistant to Professor Mieczyslaw Choynowski in the Science Studies Circle, a clearing-house for foreign scientific literature. In his spare time he began writing stories to eke out a living in the hard postwar years; his first pieces appeared in print in 1946. The sideline soon became his main occupation: in 1948 he published an article criticizing Lysenko and was cast out of the scientific community.
His first literary success came in 1951 with the novel The Astronauts, which was reprinted abroad many times. In 1953 he married Barbara Lesniak, a radiologist; their son Tomasz was born in March 1968.
In 1973 Lem was made an honorary member of the SFWA, the American science-fiction writers' organization that founded the Nebula Award — and was expelled from it in 1976 for his criticism of American science fiction, which he called kitsch, accusing it of shoddy thinking, poor prose and an excessive appetite for profit at the expense of new ideas and literary forms. The SFWA later offered him ordinary membership, which he declined. In 1981 Lem received an honorary degree from the Wroclaw University of Technology, and later from the universities of Opole, Lviv and the Jagiellonian.