"We are going to speak of the future," the Polish writer Stanisław Lem wrote, in "Summa Technologiae," from 1964, a series of essays, mostly on humanity and the evolution of technology. "Yet isn't discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now?" Lem, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four, is likely the most widely read writer of science fiction who is not particularly widely read in the United States. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, many millions of copies of his books have been printed, and yet, if I polled a hundred friends, 2.3 of them would know who he was. His best-known work in the U.S. is the 1961 novel "Solaris," and its renown stems mostly from the moody film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. Among Lem's fictional imaginings are a phantomatic generator (a machine that gives its user an extraordinarily vivid vision of an alternate reality), an opton (an electronic device on which one can read books), and a network of computers that contains information on most everything that is known and from which people have a difficult time separating themselves.

The science-fiction writer and futurist Stanisław Lem was well acquainted with the way that fictional worlds can sometimes encroach upon reality. In his autobiographical essay "Chance and Order," which appeared in The New Yorker, in 1984, Lem recalls how as an only child growing up in Lvov, Poland, he amused himself by creating passports, certificates, permits, government memos, and identification papers. Equipped with these eccentric toys, he would then privately access fictional places "not to be found on any map." Some years later, when his family was fleeing the Nazis, Lem notes that they escaped certain death with the help of false papers. It was as if the child's innocent game had prophesied a horrific turn in history, and Lem wonders if he'd sensed some calamity looming on the horizon--if his game had sprung "perhaps from some unconscious feeling of danger."