"June 1978. A boy and his grandmother travelled on the A train to the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle. She was a trustee of the Queensboro Public Library, with comp tickets for a regional conference of the American Library Association; he was a 15-year-old science fiction fan. The convention hall's exhibition booths featured lots of plastic slipcovers and display racks, as well as tables full of books from publishers that relied on library sales. That's to say, a lot of reference books, a lot of speciality non-fiction, and a dearth of science fiction. But the boy's antennae were good. At the booth of the Seabury Press (a publishing division of the Episcopalian Church) he spotted four anomalous hardcovers, all by an author with a peculiar name: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Futurological Congress, The Invincible and The Cyberiad. Two – Invincible and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as 'SF art'. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers's designs screamed of the 'paraliterary', of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy's cup of tea. The other two dust jackets – for The Futurological Congress and The Cyberiad – were more restrained, looking like European art-house fiction. Congress featured a drawing by Paul Klee. The boy wasn't fooled: the crazy titles of the two books with 'tasteful' covers were enticing enough. ... Shouldn't I be just the person for a centenary piece on Stanisław Lem? Novelist and philosopher of technology, author of 'Solaris' and scores of novels, stories and essays, one of the great figures in Polish literature, the greatest non-English-language science fiction writer between Jules Verne and Cixin Liu, born a hundred years ago ... The trouble – beyond the fact that I've dawdled beyond that anniversary – is, well, everything. All the unstated premises, all the undefined terms (especially 'science fiction'). As my grandmother would put it, I know bupkis about Polish literature. But, having read Lem all my life – or, more precisely, boasted all my life of having read Lem, since I actually gobbled up the books in a mad spate in my youth – I wanted to jump aboard the centenary train. First, I told myself, I'd read or reread 'all of Lem'. I couldn't. Lem's first, non-SF novel, The Hospital of the Transfiguration, written in the late 1940s and depicting a young doctor's wartime internship in a psychiatric hospital, was translated in 1988. But his earliest SF novels, Man from Mars and The Astronauts, weren't. Lem dismissed them as mutilated by a subservience to Soviet ideology. So his career in English begins with two novels published in Poland in 1959. ..."
London Review of Books
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