Stanislaw Lem

The Franz Kafka Prize-winning author invites you to a doped-up dystopia. “Nobody can really know the future. But few could imagine it better than Lem.” —The Paris Review
 
Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Polish author Stanislaw Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological...

An astronaut returns to Earth after a 10-year mission and finds a society that he barely recognizes in science fiction novel by the Solaris author, whose works “make our weary universe seem pale and undistinguished by comparison” (The Washington Post).
 
Stanisław Lem’s Return from the Stars recounts the experiences of Hal Bregg, an astronaut who returns from an exploratory mission that...

From the author of Solaris, this novel of an encounter with an alien intelligence creates “a terrifyingly plausible picture of a world gone mad” (Kirkus Reviews).
Six explorers—the Captain, Doctor, Engineer, Chemist, Physicist, and Cyberneticist—crash land on a beautiful but strange planet, fourth from another sun. The landscape is bizarre, hosting acrid deserts, hissing trees, and thick spiderlike...

Ingenious essays from “a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age, who plays in earnest with every concept . . . from free will to probability theory” (The New York Times Book Review).
In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem steps outside of his fictional comfort zone to try his hand at reviewing the literature of others. The only catch is this: None of these books have actually been published—or...

Essays by the author of Solaris: “Lem’s delightful sense of humor accentuates his essential seriousness about humanity’s possible fate” (Publishers Weekly).
In One Human Minute, Stanislaw Lem takes a hard look at our world and technology—what it means now and what dire implications it could have for the future—in satirical, wise, and biting prose.
 
With this collection...

A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.

In the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanisław Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of

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An early realist novel by Stanisław Lem, taking place in a Polish psychiatric hospital during World War II.

Taking place within the confines of a psychiatric hospital, Stanisław Lem's The Hospital of the Transfiguration tells the story of a young doctor working in a Polish asylum during World War II. At first the asylum seems like a bucolic refuge, but a series of sinister encounters and incidents reveal an underlying brutality.

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“Lem has an almost Dickensian genius for vividly realizing the tragedy and comedy of future machines.” —The New York Times Book Review
These are the stories of Trurl and Klapaucius, master inventors and engineers known as “constructors,” who have created marvels for kingdoms. Friends and rivals, they are constantly outdoing and challenging each other to reveal the next great evolution in cybernetics,...

“A stunningly inventive fantasy about cosmic travel” from the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris (The New York Times).
The Hermes explorer ship represents the epitome of Earth’s excellence: a peaceful mission sent forth to make first contact with an alien civilization, and to use the expansive space technology developed by humanity to seek new worlds, friendships, and alliances....

Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanislaw Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial...