By Eva Krafczyk Mar 27, 2006, 16:36 GMT
Warsaw - Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, author of 'Solaris', 'His Master's Voice' and 'The Cyberiad', died Monday aged 84, Poland's PAP news agency reported.
Lem, whose works are reckoned to be among the most famous of the science-fiction genre, died in Krakow, southern Poland, after a long illness.
Often written in comical style, his works examined serious moral aspects of technological progress. Like Jules Vernes, whose books he loved as a boy, Lem's works centred on the possibilities and limits of technology and its influence on man.
Born in Lvov, present-day Ukraine, he achieved fame far beyond his Polish homeland, with his works translated into some 41 languages and 27 million copies sold.
Lem tried to continue the family tradition and studied medicine for a time only to have his studies disrupted by World War II after Nazis closed the universities when they invaded Poland.
Lem, who concealed his Jewish identity with forged documents, managed to survive by working as a car mechanic and was a member of the resistance fighting against the Germans.
After the war, he recommenced his medicine studies and worked as a doctor for a time.
In the early 1950s, Lem began work as an author and became world famous as a champion of science fiction literature. 'Solaris' was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1971.
In Germany, where Lem had the biggest readership outside his native Poland, he was considered a philosopher and visionary. His fellow Poles loved his at times grotesque humour which manifested itself as an escape from reality especially in his early novels.
'Most of my books were written during Communism and I had to deal with censorship,' Lem once said in an interview.
'I never loved totalitarianism and the idea of making humanity happy seemed crazy. I tried to show its absurdity.'
Nevertheless, his early works were characterised by the optimistic belief in man's capabilities. However, his belief in progress soon bowed to scepticism.
While Lem had enjoyed an extensive scientific education apart from medicine, he conceded: 'I never foresaw the almost complete subjugation of science to commerce.'
Most scholars worked not from an inner passion, but with the Nobel Prize in mind and research on new weapons was paid best, he said.
Almost 10 years ago when referring to the guiding principle underlying his literary work, Lem said: 'People are terrible and the future is bleak.'
He no longer believed in his earlier, greatest dream of a different kind of humanity.
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