That isn't entirely true, Lem praised the work of Philip K. Dick (American)[0][1] and Olaf Stapledon (English). He has two essays in which he analyzes Stapledon two great works: Last and First Men, and Star Maker[2].
I think you might also be suffering from a filter. The best of Polish writers were translated, whereas you have access to the glut of all American writers. It is probably true that there was a greater number of bad American writers.
[0]: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
[1]: Dick returned the favor by reporting Lem to the FBI as a communist conspiracy against the west. Arguing that Lem was in fact a committee and not a person. Read the letter here: http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick
[2]: http://dpuadweb.depauw.edu/icronay_web/lem%20stapledon.html
I suspect that there is a slight conspiracy: "the first rule of science fiction writers club is that you don't talk about Stapledon". It inspired most of modern science fiction but very few outside of the field have heard about it. Accelerando, The Shape of Things to Come, 1984, That Hideous Strength, 2001, Blindsight, most of HP Lovecraft, etc... all borrow from him.
To C.S. Lewis and AC Clarke's credit, they do acknowledge the importance of Stapledon to their work.
Do you think 'Last and First Men' changed your perspective?
The timescale of the book is staggering. It's like that 'pale blue dot' picture.
http://www.wscribe.com/parables/pass.html
For those that haven't read the book or that don't have access to it, the book follows the 'first men' (us) and their successors across billions of years. Not all movement in time is progress and not all change is natural. Very much recommended, I won't write any more here to not spoil the book for future readers.
Cut them some slack. If they say anything different it's likely some lunatic will label them "unamerican". While the country, as it presently stands, will not endure for long in a planetary timescale, we'll be fortunate if some of the core ideals behind its foundation last for a longer time and help guide our descendants into the deep future.
There is this misconception popular even among young Poles that the communism in Poland was a period of hardship and oppression. Sure, many things were bad, but if one talks to one's parents and grandparents, they seem to be mostly happy with that period and in many ways would gladly trade it for what we have today.
Especially censorship in Poland was mostly a façade. The system paid lip service to it, but generally people were free to criticize the government, communist reality and made a great lot of self-criticizing works of art.
Living might have been harder in other Soviet states. It definitely was bad in Russia. But here in Poland, we had as benevolent socialist system as one could be. You could be known as a religious person and not a member of the Party, and still hold a top accounting position in a strategic government enterprise.
Poland had a ton of things that were very very wrong, look no further than the SB and their victims. The fact that 98% of a nation experienced no significant hardships does not detract from that at all.
It is very well possible to have a totalitarian dictatorship in which everybody has a job and there is food on the table and an outward appearance of relative prosperity, but totally rotten underneath.
Poland did not have a 'benevolent socialist system' by any measure.
I'll just leave this link here, you can research the SB and Jaruzelski on your own good time:
Ex: While living in Poland, once I commented to a friend that my grandparents could barely read and one grandmother couldn't read at all. He thought I was joking. Or another example: my grandfather got his first shoes when he went to military service. These situations were unthinkable in Poland during communist times. In Poland at the same time lots of people were having university education and most people from lower classes were having holidays.
I think he would call himself 'futurologist'. Scifi on west was defined by laser-guns and girls in bikini on comic covers. East scifi just adored soviet ideal of future. Hard scifi was recognized much later.
Lem had complicated approach to technology. From his wiki page:
> His criticism of most science fiction surfaced in literary and philosophical essays (Fantastyka i futurologia) and interviews.[24] In the 1990s Lem forswore science fiction and returned to futurological prognostications, most notably those expressed in Okamgnienie (Blink of an Eye). He became increasingly critical of modern technology in his later life, criticizing inventions such as the Internet.[25]
Funnily enough, his robots were actually androids - biological, rather than mechanical, beings.
He also wrote, in 1922, a pantheistic gem called The Absolute at Large: mankind finds out how to get energy from matter annihilation. But that frees up "the absolute", which inspires religious devotion ...
(Pierre Boule, in "Les jeux de l'esprit", probably wrote up the opposite premise, general triumph of rationalism, with pretty much the same result, general conflict.)
I love Lem's work but that's the extent of my familiarity with Eastern Bloc sci-fi.
Another good one is "We" by Evgenii Zamyatin. It's a dystopian novel Orwell cribbed from for 1984.
Karel Čapek (pre soviet)
František_Běhounek (part of Italia north pole expedition) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franti%C5%A1ek_B%C4%9Bhounek
J. M. Troska https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Ondřej Neff (post soviet) and his stories around Clarkes monoliths.
He mostly writes hard sci-fi with political and philosophical elements, often about transhumanism, but he also did weird philosophical alternative history book - "Lód" (Ice).
Some English reviews of his books:
http://greglewicki.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/perfect-imperfec...
http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2012/02/10/black-o...
Is there any more recent Russian sci-fi that you recommend too?
I've heard some good things about Metro 2033 by Gluhovskiy, a post-apocalyptic novel about survivors living in Moscow underground train system after the nuclear war in 2013, but haven't read it myself.
I wholeheartedly agree that the need to read between the lines politically, and the belief that science fiction is a serious literary endeavor, put Polish and Soviet scifi on a completely different level of quality than in the West. (The same is likely true for other countries in the Eastern Bloc, but I'm out of my depth there).