Stanisław Lem (staˈɲiswaf lɛm (listen) (help·info); 12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish science fiction, philosophical and satirical writer. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is perhaps best known as the author of Solaris, which has twice been made into a feature film.

In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon claimed that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humankind's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books.

Translations of his works are difficult and multiple translated versions of his works exist. Lem was born in 1921 in Lwów, Poland (now Ukraine). He was the son of Sabina Woller and Samuel Lem, a wealthy laryngologist and former physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army.

While Lem was raised a Catholic, he later became an atheist "for moral reasons ...the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ...intentionally".

After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, he was not allowed to study at the Polytechnic as he wished because of his "bourgeois origin" and only due to his father's connections was accepted to study medicine at Lwów University in 1940. During World War II and the Nazi occupation, Lem survived with false papers, earning a living as a car mechanic and welder, and becoming active in the resistance. (Lem's family had Jewish ancestors, and thus was in greater danger than they would have already been as Polish citizens and intellectuals.) In 1945, Polish eastern Kresy were annexed into the Soviet Ukraine and the family, like many other Poles, was resettled to Kraków where Lem at his father's pressure took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University.

Since he refused to tailor his answers to the prevailing Lysenkoism, Lem failed his final examinations on purpose so as not to be obliged to become a military doctor. Earlier he had started working as a research assistant in a scientific institution and writing stories in his spare time.

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