Stanislaw Lem received a certificate of completion of medical studies but refused to take the last exams in order to avoid a career of a military doctor:

  The army took all of my friends - not for one year or two, but they were to stay in the army forever.

 
Lem's first novel Czlowiek z Marsa (The Man from Mars) was published in a weekly dime-magazine Nowy Swiat Przygod. Lem's poems and short stories appeared in Tygodnik Powszechny, Zolniez Polski, Kuznica and other magazines. In 1948 Lem started writing his first novel Szpital Przemieniena (Hospital of the Transfiguration) that was halted by the communist censorship and appeared only eight years later:

 

  Every few weeks I had to take a night train and travel to Warsaw - I took the cheapest class since I was quite poor in those times - for endless discussions at the publishing house "Ksiazka i Wiedza". They tortured my Hospital of the Transfiguration, the number of critical reviews was continually growing and all of them proved the book's counterrevolutionary and decadent nature. I was told that this and that had to be redone... And since at the same time they gave me hope the book would eventually be published I kept on writing and revising... Because Hospital of the Transfiguration was considered improper from the "ideological point of view" I was obliged to write further episodes in order to achieve a "compositional balance"...
 

 
 

  In 1950 in the house of the Writers Union in Zakopane I met a certain fat gentleman and one day we went for a walk to the Czarny Staw. My companion was Jerzy Panski from the "Czytelnik" publishing house but I did not know it at that time. During our trip we talked about the absence of polish science fiction... Panski asked whether I was capable of writing such a book. I answered "yes" - not knowing who my companion was, thinking it was just an ordinary fat fellow who happened to be staying at the "Astoria", just as I was. After some time, to my great surprise, I received an author's agreement from "Czytelnik". Having no idea what the book will be about I filled in the blank space with the word "Astronauts"... and in a quite short time I wrote my first book that was soon published.
 
 

  In 1953 Lem married Barbara Lesniak, a medical doctor (radiologist):
 

 
 
 
 
 

  I met her around 1950 and after two or three years of siege she accepted my proposal. We did not have our own apartment at that time; I had a tiny room with mould on the walls and my wife, about to finish her medical studies, lived with her sister at the Sarego Street - so I became a commuting husband.

Science fiction books gained Stanislaw Lem a reputation of one of the greatest writers in the history of science fiction. One can distinguish two categories: Eden (1959), Return from the Stars (1961), Solaris (1961), The Invincible (1964), His Master's Voice (1968), Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1968) are serious novels written according to the classical pattern of the genre that Lem broadened and perfected. The second group: The Star Diaries (1957), Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), Bajki robotów (Mortal Engines) (1964), The Cyberiad (1965), Wizja lokalna (1982), Peace on Earth (1987) consists of grotesque works that are seemingly humorous. Their style often resembles that of traditional literary forms such as fables, memoirs or philosophical tales: 

 

  In those politically uninteresting times... we used to ski in Zakopane for one month. I also traveled to Zakopane in June because of hay fever, for which there were no medications in those times. I stayed at a house of the Writers Union and worked most of the time. During one of such marathons I wrote Solaris. The same method was employed in the case of some other books. Apart from that nothing interesting was going on; my wife worked as a radiologist and I was an ordinary member of the Writers Union... I still remember my first trips to the East German Republic, with the delegation of Polish writers, and later trips to Prague and the Soviet Union - where they adored me.