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).