Stanislaw Lem was born in Lwów, Poland in 1921 (now Lviv, Ukraine), the son of a physician. Lem has some Jewish ancestry, although he was raised a Catholic and later became an atheist "for moral reasons". He studied medicine at Lwów University, but World War II interrupted his studies. During the war and Nazi occupation Lem worked as a car mechanic and welder, and was a member of the resistance fighting against the Germans.

In 1946 Lem "repatriated" from the territory annexed by the Soviet Union to Kraków and started medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. After finishing his studies Stanislaw Lem opted not to take final exams to avoid a career as a military doctor, and received only a certificate of completion of studies. He worked as a research assistant in a scientific institution and started to write stories in his spare time. In 1981 he received an honorary degree from the Wroclaw Polytechnic, later from Opole University, University of Lwów, and finally from the Jagiellonian University.

Themes
One of Lem's primary themes was the impossibility of communication between humans and profoundly alien civilizations. He also wrote about human technological progress and the problem of human existence in a world where technology development makes biological human impulses obsolete or dangerous. In many novels, humans become an irrational and emotional liability to their machine partners, who are not perfect either.

His alien societies are often incomprehensible to the human mind including swarms of mechanical flies (in The Invincible) and a large Plasma Ocean (in Solaris). Issues of technological utopias appeared in Peace on Earth, in Observation on the Spot, and, to a lesser extent, in The Cyberiad. He also sometimes deploys a wicked sense of humor in his descriptions of even the darkest human situations--most famously in The Futurological Congress and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. In this regard, he has sometimes been compared to Kurt Vonnegut.

Controversy
Lem was awarded an honorary membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) in 1973. Lem, however, has never had a high opinion of American science-fiction describing it as kitsch, ill thought-out, poorly written, and interested more in making money than ideas or new literary forms; despite that fact, it is now known that Lem read little of American SF that was not in poor translations or written after the 1950s. Lem's membership was rescinded in 1976 for his highly critical remarks toward American SF. (Lem singled out only one American SF writer for praise, namely Philip K. Dick, whom he lauded in his collection of critical essays, 1986's Microworlds.)

After many members (including Ursula K. Le Guin) protested the SFWA then offered him a regular membership, which he refused. He has also been critical of SF in general, and recently he continues to distance himself from the genre, saying that his young works may have been SF, but his latter ones are more mainstream. He has not written any kind of novel or short story in many years, and his newer works are simply collections of essays, critical of technological progress and pessimistic about the world's future.

Lem is also well-known for criticizing the films based on his work, including the famous interpretation of Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), which he claimed to be "Crime and Punishment in space." He's none too pleased about the Steven Soderbergh (2002) version either, though he hasn't seen the movie (and has no desire to).

There are six million copies of Lem's novels, short stories and plays in print throughout East Europe and the Soviet Union. ver two dozen of his works have been translated into English. Among the best known are Solaris (1970) which has been made into two films, The Cyberiad (1974; perhaps his best work), The Futurological Congress (1974), and The Star Diaries (1976). Trained to be a physician, and "brought up with the scientific outlook" by his father who was also a physician, he subsequently "spent many hours over coffee arguing about God" with his friend Karol Wojtyla who taught theology in Cracow and who is now better known as Pope John-Paul II.

In an interview, Lem indicated his thinking on religion: "for moral reasons I am an atheist -- for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally."