Trivia / Stanisław Lem

• Author Appeal: Mountaneering. And coffee, in case you were wondering why Pirx drinks so much of it.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: There is a well-know saying attributed to Lem: I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet. While he several times expressed his worries about the state of modern humanity's intellectual level, there is no hard evidence he ever said/wrote these words verbatim.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Against his first published novel The Astronauts and his even earlier short story "Man from Mars".
  • He also tended to hate adaptations of his works. The sole exception is Przekładaniec, a movie based on Lem's script, perhaps partly because it would be a bit silly to hate it, but also because it's just a good movie.
  • He said that The Astronauts (his first sci-fi novel) lacks any value.
  • To the point he sometimes prohibited re-publishing the books he didn't like.
• Executive Meddling: And they were party executives! He was forced to create two sequels of Hospital of the Transfiguration, because happy endings were mandatory at the time. A few paragraphs praising communism in The Astronauts also qualify.
• Genius Sweet Tooth: Loved halvah and marcipane so much he wouldn't give them up even after being diagnosed with diabetes (and he was a doctor by learning).