SOURCE: “Stanislaw Lem: A Stranger in a Strange Land,” in A Stanislaw Lem Reader, Northwestern University Press, 1997, pp. 1–19.

In the following essay, Swirski provides an overview of Lem's wide-ranging publications and the development of his philosophical, literary, and sociopolitical concerns.

A stranger in a strange land. Ever since Elizabeth Ashbridge coined this phrase to express her sense of alienation on arriving in America, it has become a standard metaphor for describing someone's sense of wonder and estrangement. These days the phrase appears equally frequently in works of fiction and of philosophy that target the future.

Robert Heinlein adopted this metaphor as the title of one his most popular novels about contact with the alien. Following H. G. Wells's (and especially Orson Welles's) War of the Worlds, contact with the alien conjures up images of extraterrestrial invasion, these days ossified into a tradition of low-budget, Ed Wood-type, Hollywood pictures...