Lem was not alone in passing through this kind of crisis: examples abound of works planned by literary celebrities, but never completed. It would be a hard work to convert ideas into narration, and that was one of the main reasons I went for such cruel abridgements of the books'.

Lem wrote: 'With years passing a great impatience grew in me.

Some of the reviews are parodies, or the books being reviewed are parodies or complete impossibilities, others are quite serious and can be seen almost as drafts for novels that Lem never got around to write. Some of the reviews are lighthearted, concentrating mostly on the story others, however, read more like serious, academic reviews. In his own words: 'I tried to imitate various styles – that of a book review, a lecture, a presentation, a speech (of a Nobel Prize laureate) and so on'. While reviewing nonexistent books, a modern form of pseudepigraphy, Stanisław Lem attempted to create different fictional reviewers and authors for each of the books. Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books may be found in his following works: in three collections of faux reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum ( Doskonała próżnia, 1971), Provocation ( Prowokacja, 1984), and Library of 21st Century ( Biblioteka XXI wieku, 1986) translated as One Human Minute, and in Imaginary Magnitude ( Wielkość Urojona, 1973), a collection of introductions to nonexistent books.

Stanisław Lem pictured at a typewriter in 1966

Imaginary Magnitude by Stanisław Lem