THE WRITER WIRT WILLIAMS HAD a theory that novelists--"like quarterbacks," he would add--were most likely to flourish if they were reasonably intelligent but not off-the-scale brainy. ("Look at Terry Bradshaw!") Too much intellection, Williams thought, tended to gum up the works in one way or another. Still, he allowed, there were exceptions.

A case in point is the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, who died on March 27 at the age of 84. Lem's IQ, as he mentioned in passing in an autobiographical essay, was above 180, but no one who read many of his books needed that datum to conclude that here was an unusually powerful and wide-ranging intelligence. The son of a physician, Lem was trained in the sciences. Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a "kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature" in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world. Meanwhile, he was reading widely in literature and philosophy, and he embarked on a career as a writer of science fiction.

A lot of Lem is available in English, but more remains to be translated, both novels and works in other genres. (Let us hope that an enterprising publisher or two are willing to underwrite the Englishing of some of these missing items: That would be a fitting memorial.) His best-known novel is Solaris, thanks to the film version by Andrei Tarkovsky, and the recent remake. It's not a bad book to start with, but I will move

The first, The Investigation (in Polish, 1959; in English, 1976), is neither a parody nor a pastiche, strictly speaking, but has elements of both. (The names of places and characters are clearly parodic.) The template is a mystery novel, featuring Scotland Yard detectives, crossbred with the conventions of the modern Gothic tale. The detectives are investigating a series of bizarre incidents at rural mortuaries in which corpses seem to have been reanimated. Also involved as a consultant is an eccentric academic who subjects these mysterious events to statistical analysis. In its unsettling shifts, its incongruous mix of tones and styles--suspense, metaphysical horror, humor, absurdity, intellectual puzzle--the novel both anticipates and surpasses later works that were trumpeted as the very model of postmodernism.

The Invincible (1964; 1976) has some affinities with The Investigation, though at first it appears to be very different, featuring as it does a classic sci-fi scenario: A spaceship is sent to a distant planet where another ship landed a year earlier, sent one intelligible message, and then apparently encountered some unknown disaster. Here, once again, Lem is working with a clear template and playing against it in various ways, particularly in his brilliant imagining of an encounter with an alien life form, radically different from the familiar aliens of yore. The physical setting is rendered with such virtuosity that it haunts my dreams for weeks afterward every time I read the book. If you like it, go straight to Fiasco (1986; 1987), Lem's most ambitious treatment of the theme of alien contact.