Stanislaw Lem: A Cosmic Adventure of the Mind

(by Jerzy Jarzebski)

Lem's youth in Lvov was affluent, peaceful and marked by experiments and search for knowledge - not by cataclysms of life.  But these were soon to follow; during the war two armies trundled through the city and under Soviet and German occupation members of the family of a young student of the local Medical Institute became refugees.  After the war Lem's family settled in Kraków.  His experience was enriched not only by difficult times of war - Lem also had an exceptional mind; in the pre-war pioneer studies of students' IQ he was found to be the most intelligent child in the southern Poland.   

Lem tried everything: medical studies, the humanities and natural sciences.  His restless mind was unable to concentrate on one discipline; he wanted to understand everything by seeking global philosophical answers encompassing the entire universe along with mysteries of life and mind.  The same was true in the case of literature: in the forties Lem wrote classical science fiction, modern fiction, detective stories and poems.  Later he wrote mostly science fiction - mainly because the communist censorship left little room for creativity in other fields.  Hence Lem "designed future" - first concentrating on the struggle of good and evil (in the form of militarism and greed for goods and power) and later in the form of more complicated models - in order to show the future problems of our civilization.