both a polymath and a virtuoso storyteller and stylist.  Put them together and they add up to a genius...  He has been steadily producing fiction that follows the arcs and depths of his learning and a bewildering labyrinth of moods and attitudes.  Like his protagonists, loners virtually to a man, his fiction seems at a distance from the daily cares and passions, and conveys the sense of a mind hovering above the boundaries of the human condition:  now mordant, now droll, now arcane, now folksy, now skeptical, now haunted and always paradoxical.  Yet his imagination is so powerful and pure that no matter what world he creates it is immediately convincing because of its concreteness and plentitude, the intimacy and authority with which it is occupied...  read Lem for yourself.  He is a major writer, and one of the deep spirits of our age.

  Stanislaw Lem was born in Lvov, Poland in 1921.  His short stories were first published in a magazine specializing in modern prose and science-fiction.   Subsequent books gained him world-wide acclaim and Solaris, His Master's Voice and The Cyberiad belong to the most famous science-fiction works of the twentieth century.  Lem's books were translated into thirty six languages, these editions total over twenty seven million copies.  The particular value of Lem's works lies in the combination of sensory richness of fantastic visions with first-class scientific knowledge and a truly philosophical mind.  Today Lem is regarded not only as an outstanding science-fiction writer but also as a philosopher, a humanist and a universal thinker.

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