Note: The title means Man from Mars. According to his 1989 afterword this was written at the end of World War II - while Lem was still living in Lwów - and first published in the weekly youth fiction magazine Nowy Świat Przygód (The New World of Adventure) in 1946. There was a pirated/underground publication in 1985 but the first official publication of the Polish text in book form was in 1994 with the publishing house Nowa, situated in Warsaw. Per a qualified estimate the word count lies in the range between 34,000 to 35,0000, making this a novella per ISFDB standard, though the book publications were marketed as novels.

Synopsis: A small group of scientist and engineers examine a living, but almost totally robotic visitor from Mars who has crash-landed in the Northern East of the USA, and encounter dangers and wonders while trying to establish some sort of contact. The only worthwhile end they achieve is that they are shown a short - and devastating - vision of Martian civilzation.