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Wednesday, March 29, 2006

There Are Some Places Man Is Not Ready To Go

Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, best known for his novel Solaris, died in his home city of Krakow on March 27 after a battle with heart disease, the Reuters news service reported. He was 84.

Lem, whose books have sold more than 27 million copies and have been translated into more than 40 languages, won widespread acclaim for The Cyberiad, stories from a mechanical world ruled by robots, first published in English in 1974.

Solaris, published in 1961 and set on an isolated space station, was made into a film epic 10 years later by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and into a 2002 Hollywood remake shot by Steven Sodebergh and starring George Clooney.

Born on Sept. 12, 1921, in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Lem studied medicine before World War II.

After the war, communist censorship blocked the publication of his earliest writing.

After the fall of communism in 1989 Lem ceased writing science fiction, instead devoting himself to reports on near-future predictions for governments and organizations.

He wrote essays on computer crime, as well as technological and ethical problems posed by the expansion of the Internet.

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