The Strugatsky brothers from Russia incidentally wrote the story that later was turned into the film "Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky, who had previously made the first film version of Lem's "Solaris". Both films confirm that SF themes can be successfully used for "highbrow" films, if the director and producer treat the subject with the respect it deserves. Kubrick's "2001", while brilliant, was very cold compared to Tarkovsky's two films.

In "The Futurological Congress" the Philip K. Dick-type "reality reversals" are brought on by psychoactive chemicals. But Lem obviously considered other forms of cheating subjective reality, long before "The Matrix": In his non-fiction "Summa Technologiae" (1964) -unfortunately never translated to English- he suggested a new technology he called "Phantomatics" which is what we today would call "Virtual Reality"! BTW in the same book Lem also considered the possibilities of micro- and nanotechnology. Bear in mind that the censorship in communist Poland meant Lem never had an opportunity to read Richard Feynman's ideas on the subject, and had to "re-invent the wheel" on his own. Without the language- and ideology barriers he could have become a major source of inspiration in the 1960s and maybe accelerated the development of science fiction to reach beyond the usual topics of the genre. Lem was inspired by authors such as Olaf Stapledon and felt SF should not be confined to a literary ghetto, but be used to address those deep issues authors and philosophers would find hard to approach in ordinary mainstream fiction.