Stanisław Lem

Lem survived the Nazi occupation of his native Lwów using forged papers that concealed his Jewish family's identity, then trained in medicine after the war but deliberately failed his final exams to avoid being drafted into the postwar Polish army. He turned instead to writing, producing not just novels like Solaris and the playful robot fables of The Cyberiad but dense works of technological philosophy, including Summa Technologiae, which anticipated ideas resembling virtual reality and the internet decades early.

His books sold in the millions across the Eastern Bloc and West Germany alike, making him one of the best-selling science fiction writers in the world despite his contempt for most of the genre, American pulp especially, which he considered intellectually lazy. Philip K. Dick, in one of the era's stranger literary episodes, wrote to the FBI alleging that 'Stanislaw Lem' was actually a committee operating under Communist Party direction, an accusation Lem found more amusing than insulting.