Lem was haunted by the idea that losses can overwhelm the human capacity to apprehend them.įourteen years after his death, the universe is still struggling to catch up with the vast creative force that was Stanisław Lem. Astronauts disembark from a spaceship into the aftermath of an atrocity scientists face an alien intelligence so unlike our own that their confidence in the special purpose of human life falters. In a cycle of melancholy sci-fi novels written in the late nineteen-fifties and sixties- Eden, Solaris, Return from the Stars, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Invincible, and His Master's Voice-Lem suggested that life in the future, however remote the setting and however different the technology, will be no less tragic. Lem was a giant of mid-20th-century science fiction, in a league with Arthur C.

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