Stanisław Lem was born in the former Polish city of Lwów, now Ukraine, in 1921, into a wealthy middle-class family. Although he was never a religious person, he was of Jewish descent.
Following in his father's footsteps, he enrolled at the Medical Faculty in Lwów until, in 1939, the Germans occupied the city. For the next five years, Lem, a member of the resistance, will live with false papers and will dedicate himself to working as a mechanic and welder, and sabotaging German cars. In 1942 his family miraculously escaped the Bełzec gas chambers. At the end of the war, Lem returned to medical school, but he dropped out shortly after due to various ideological disagreements and because he did not want to be enlisted as a military doctor. In 1946 he was forcibly repatriated to Krakow, where he would take up residence. It would not take him too long to begin a hesitant literary career. His first novel is considered to be The Transfiguration Hospital (1955; Impedimenta, 2008), written in 1948 but did not see the light of day in Poland until 1955 due to problems with communist censorship. In fact, this novel was considered "counterrevolutionary" by the Polish authorities. It was not until 1951, the year in which he published Astronautas (1951; Impedimenta, 2016), when he finally took off his literary career. The novels he wrote from that moment on, mostly belonging to the science fiction genre, would make him an undisputed master of modern Polish literature: Eden (1959), The Investigation (1959; Impedimenta, 2011), Found Memories in a bathtub (1961), Solaris (1961; Impedimenta, 2011), The Invincible (1964; Impedimenta, 2021), Tales of the pilot Pirx (1968), The Voice of the Master (1968; Impedimenta, 2017), Diaries of the stars (1971), Congress of Futurology (1971), the story "Professor A. Donda" (1973), which has been part of several of his anthologies, or Hay Fever (1976; Impedimenta, 2018). Lem was also the author of a varied philosophical and meta-literary work. In this area, apart from his work Summa technologiae (1964), the so-called "21st Century Library" stands out, made up of Perfect Vacuum (1971; Impedimenta, 2008), Imaginary Magnitude (1973; Impedimenta, 2010), Golem XIV (1981). ; Impedimenta, 2012) and Provocation (1982; Impedimenta, 2020). He died in Krakow in 2006, at the age of eighty-four.
