The Invincible

They found the Condor.
From a distance the rocket looked like a leaning tower. Everywhere inside the hollow around the foot of the spaceship was scattered a vast quantity of all kinds of things: cans of food, oxygen bottles, cameras, tripods, cannisters. As if, someone had thrown the whole mess helter-skelter out of the rocket.
They found skulls and human bones in the fine sand.
The inside of the ship was also in a state of indescribable disarray. It looked as if the Condor had been invaded by a herd of rampaging apes.
The entire affair was terribly puzzling. All the filters were in perfect working order, the water supply untouched, oxygen tanks full, an abundance of food—the crew was never attacked . . . they simply went mad.
Anybody who likes a tight, increasingly tense plot-line rising to scenes of dramatic violence will be satisfied, anybody who likes a mystery will find it here—and its solution. The reason for Lem's great popularity in Eastern Europe is brilliantly clear with' this publication: he is a story-teller … Invincible is straightforward, active, a classic adventure . . .
—Ursula K. LeGuin
Literary critic, screenwriter, novelist, essayist, and futurologist, Polish author Stanislaw Lem is one of Europe's most prolific and articulate writers, with translations in close to thirty languages and a total sale around the world of over six million copies (twenty-eight titles to date). His writing represents an extraordinary range of subject and style, most frequently dealing with the confrontation between human values and other, alien (nonhuman, random, mechanical) systems.
Lem was born on September 12, 1921, in Lvov (now part of the Soviet Union). Originally trained in the field of medicine, he has been writing since 1946. Lem is co-founder of the Polish Astronautical Society and a member of the Polish Cybernetics Association, and serves on the advisory board of the Science Fiction Research Association of the College of Wooster, Ohio.