Stanisław Lem

Wrote Solaris, a novel about contact with an alien intelligence so genuinely alien that human psychology can't decode it — a rebuke, deliberate and recurring in his work, to science fiction's habit of making aliens easy to understand. His 1964 philosophical treatise Summa Technologiae anticipated virtual reality and artificial intelligence years ahead of the technology; by the mid-1970s critic Theodore Sturgeon called him the most widely read science fiction writer in the world, with his books eventually translated into more than fifty languages.