Stanisław Lem was born in the Polish city of Lvov in 1921, into a well-to-do middle-class family. Although he was never a religious person, he was of Jewish descent. Following in the footsteps of his father, he enrolled in the Medical School of Lvov until, in 1939, the Germans occupied the city.
For the next five years, Resistance member Lem will live on fake papers and will work as a mechanic and welder and sabotage German cars. In 1942 his family got rid of the gas chambers of Belzec by a miracle. At the end of the war, Lem returned to the Faculty of Medicine, but left soon after due to diverse ideological discrepancies and that he did not want to be enlisted as a military doctor. In 1946 he was forcibly "repatriated" to Krakow, where he would establish his residence. It would not take him too long to start a faltering literary career. His first novel is considered The Hospital of Transfiguration (Impedimenta, 2007), written in 1948 but not published in Poland until 1955 because of problems with communist censorship. In fact, this novel was considered "counterrevolutionary" by the Polish authorities. It was not until 1951, the year he published Astronauts (Impedimenta, 2016), when he finally took off his literary career. The novels he wrote from then on, belonging mostly to the genre of science fiction, would make him an undisputed master of modern Polish literature: Eden (1959), The Research (1959; Impedimenta, 2011), Memories Found In a bathtub (1961), Solaris (1961; Impedimenta, 2011, for the first time in Polish translation), Reports of the pilot Pirx (1968), The voice of his master (1968) or Congress of futurology (1971). Lem was also the author of a varied philosophical and metaliterary work. In this field, apart from his work Summa Technologiae (1964), the so-called "Library of the XXI Century", conformed by Perfect Vacuum (1971; Impedimenta, 2008), Magnitude imaginary (1973, Impedimenta, 2010), Golem XIV ; Impedimenta, 2012) and Provocación (1982, forthcoming in Impedimenta). Lem was an honorary member of the SFWA (American Association of Science Fiction Writers), from which he was expelled in 1976 after declaring that American science fiction was of poor quality. He died on 27 March 2006 in Krakow, at the age of eighty-four, after a long coronary heart disease.