The Polish writer Stanisław Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novelSolaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. In Summa Technologiae - his major work of nonfiction, first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time - Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms.