Books
For general questions regarding rights to Stanislaw Lem's works please e-mail us at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
- Which languages Lem's books were translated into?
- What was the total print-run of Lem's books?
- What are Scrupts (Sepulki in Polish, Sepulken in German)?
- What was that "Famous Philip K. Dick Letter" regarding Lem?
- Why was Stanislaw Lem expelled from the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) in 1976?
- Where did Lem describe his war experience
- Why is the main character called Kris Kelvin (a typical American or English name)?
- Will Solaris ever be translated directly into English?
Which languages Lem's books were translated into?
Lem's books were translated into 47 languages:
- Albanian
- Arabic
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Basque
- Bashkir
- Belorussian
- Bengali
- Bulgarian
- Catalan
- Chinese
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Esperanto
- Estonian
- Finnish
- Flemish
- French
- Georgian
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Macedonian
- Moldavian
- Mongolian
- Norwegian
- Persian
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian
- Serbo-Croatian
- Slovak
- Slovene
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
What was the total print-run of Lem's books?
The total print-run of Stanisław Lem's books is over thirty five million copies.
What are Scrupts (Sepulki in Polish, Sepulken in German) - apart from the fact that they are used at a scruptrum?
Scrupts are somewhat similar to Klapaucius's favorive pritons and gentle zits - however their social function seems entirely different. ;-)
What was that "Famous Philip K. Dick Letter" regarding Lem?
On September 2, 1974 Philip K. Dick sent the following letter to the FBI (Please keep in mind Mr. Dick was most probably suffering from schizophrenia): 
Philip K. Dick to the FBI, September 2, 1974
I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.
What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).
It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.
Why was Stanislaw Lem expelled from the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) in 1976?
The following quote from J. Madison Davis' book on Stanislaw Lem gives an answer to your question:
Lem has always been critical of most science fiction, which he considers ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or new literary forms. (...) Those opinions provoked an unpleasant debate in the SFWA [the "Lem affair"]. Philip José Farmer and others were incensed by Lem's comments (...) and eventually brought about the removal of the honorary membership(...). Other members, such as Ursula K. Le Guin, then protested the removal (...) and the SFWA then offered Lem a regular membership, which he, of course, refused in 1976. Asked later about the "affair," he remarked, that his opinions of the state of science fiction were already known when he was offered an honorary membership (...). He also added he harboured no ill feelings towards the SFWA or U.S. writers in particular, "...but it would be a lie to say the whole incident has enlarged my respect for SF writers".
Where did Lem describe his war experiences?
Mr. Lem's war experiences and their influence on his perception of chance and coincidence are quite well discussed in his autobiographical essay. More on this topic can be found in the volumes: A Perfect Vacuum, Imaginary Magnitude and other apocryphal works.
In "Solaris" words like "cosmonauts" and "communism" are not used even though Stanislav Lem wrote the book during the times of the cold war. And why is the main character called Kris Kelvin (a typical American or English name)?
Mr. Lem always preferred "astronauts" to "cosmonauts". As to communism and Kris Kelvin: there was no politics in "Solaris", hence there was no necessity to use the word "communism" (or "capitalism" for that matter). And yes - the name Kris Kelvin may sound British or American.
Kelvin is actually a Scottish name, taken from the River Kelvin which runs down from the southern Highlands to the River Clyde. When the physicist William Thomson became a peer, he took the title Lord Kelvin in honour of the river, which runs very close to the campus of Glasgow University, where he researched and taught. Among his many works on energy and the nature of heat, he wrote an influential paper on the concept of an absolute zero temperature; the scale he proposed is now widely used and and is measured in degrees Kelvin. Stanisław Lem was of course fascinated by limits and boundaries - and whatever lies beyond them.
[we are grateful to professor Laurence Davies for the above clarification]
Will Solaris ever be translated directly into English?
The first translation of "Solaris" into English was indirect (via French). Since the publisher was reluctant to consider a new one, the Lem Estate comissioned a new translation straight from the original. The new, 2011 canonical translation of "Solaris" by professor Bill Jonston is now available as an e-book or an audiobook.
Lem was a giant of mid-20th-century science fiction, in a league with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. And he addressed many of the themes they did: the meaning of human life among superintelligent machines, the frustrations of communicating with aliens, the likelihood that mankind could understand a universe in which it was but a speck.
Ben Sisario, „The New York Times”
Lem is capable of an amazing richness of image and a great knack for characterization. He is wildly comic, he is sardonic, perplexing, insightful.
Theodore Sturgeon, „The New York Times Book Review”
Lem, the Polish author, has been praised as the world's greatest writer of science fiction. Mr. Lem has no equal in his literary explorations of machines and their physical and philosophical potentialities.
Philip J. Farmer, „The New York Times Book Review”
Since Mr. Lem is a world class author, comparisons between the great Polish author Joseph Conrad (who wrote in English) and Mr. Lem (who writes in Polish) are pertinent. Both are deeply pessimistic, but Mr. Lem (like Mark Twain) uses humor as an instrument to deal with the tragic and the inevitable.
Philip J. Farmer, „The New York Times Book Review”
All books by this Polish master of intellectual science fiction should come with a label on the cover warning: ''Handle With Care.'' Mr. Lem is a moralist, an ironist, a man of wide erudition (in both science and literature) who has little patience with the shortcomings of his fellow man.
Gerald Jones, „The New York Times Book Review”
As he moves further away from personal relations, and casts a more sardonic eye on the tricks that humanity's Faustian intelligence plays on itself, Mr. Lem has come to identify with such writers as Swift and Voltaire.
Paul Delany, „The New York Times Book Review”
The mordant Mr. Lem, after all, is Poland's best-known writer in the West, a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age, who plays in earnest with every concept of philosophy and physics, from free will to probability theory.
John Leonard, „The New York Times Book Review”
Starting at the very edge of current theories of artificial intelligence, communications, cosmology and nuclear strategy, he soars out into dizzy flights of speculation, grafting one field onto another to populate whole new realms of possibility.
John Leonard, „The New York Times Book Review”
Over the last three decades he has created a body of profoundly speculative writing that - even sometimes at a double remove from us by way of German or French translations - has retained such intellectual bite, such rigorous wit, such deadly playful tightrope walking as to make him a modern European version of Swift or Voltaire.
Peter S. Beagle, „The New York Times Book Review”
Among Lem's essays Summa Technologiae occupies a central position, leaving behind cybernetic Dialogs, Fantastyka i Futurologia, Filolozofia Przypadku (an attempt at a "general theory of everything"). These other works are no less interesting, however Summa as a logical argument is "closed". It deals with problems that are even more important now than when the book was written - these issues are the most fascinating fulfillment of Lem's prognoses in the field of culture and technology.
Dialogs are partly "submerged" in an abstract of a philosophical dispute and current political topics; Fantastyka i Futurologia deals with problems of science fiction as a genre and its - usually dishonest - relationship with science. Filozofia Przypadku "erects a building of outlook" searching for structures common to biological evolution, history, culture, art, etc. In this respect Summa Technologiae is different: it is a summa and a "building", but in the sense of futuristic architecture. It presents daring hypotheses, shows the way, which -according to the author - human technological thought and culture will follow in the future.
Over twenty of Stanislaw Lem's works reached a print-run exceeding 30 million copies. These can be assigned to the following categories:
1. Eden (1959), Return From the Stars (1961), Solaris (1961), The Invincible (1964), His Master's Voice (1968), Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1968) are works serious in tone, following the classic science-ficion route, broadened and perfected by Lem.
2. Grotesque works, hillarious on the surface, frequently styled as traditional literary forms (tales, a memoir, a philosophical tale): The Star Diaries (1957), Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), The Cyberiad (1965), Inspection at the Scene of a Crime (1982), Peace on Earth (1987).
3. The Investigation, published in 1959, lies somewhere between a science-ficiton novel an a detective story, it is a peculiar negative of a detective romance. The Chain of Chance was published in 1976, which Lem considered a better, more convincing version of The Investigation.
4. Lem describes his childhood in Lvov in the autobiographical novel Highcastle (1966).
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