Stanisław Lem

Survived the German occupation of Lviv on forged papers, worked as a car mechanic, studied medicine and never practised, and wrote science fiction that mostly argues human beings are incapable of understanding anything genuinely alien.

Solaris gives its scientists an ocean-covered planet that appears to be a single conscious organism and that responds to them by manufacturing people from their memories. Nobody establishes why. Both film adaptations turned it into a love story, which Lem said publicly and repeatedly they had no right to do.

The Cyberiad is the opposite register, comic fables about two robot constructors, and the translation by Michael Kandel is a feat in itself. He was contemptuous of most American science fiction and had his honorary membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America revoked over saying so.