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Janusz Andrzej Zajdel was a prominent Polish science fiction author, second in popularity in Poland after Stanisław Lem. His writing career started in 1965. His novels were recognized as the best in science fiction in Poland in 1982 and in 1984. He was a Trustee of World SF. He died of cancer after three years of fighting the disease.
Zajdel's most important works are of social and dystopian fiction. In his works, he envisions totalitarian states and collapsed societies. His heroes are desperately trying to find sense in world around them, sometimes, as in Cylinder van Troffa, they are outsiders from a different time or place, trying to adapt to a new environment. The main recurring theme in his works is a comparison of the readers' gloomy, hopeless situations to what may happen in a space environment if we carry totalitarian ideas and habits into space worlds: Red Space Republics or Space Labour Camps, or both.
His works have been translated into Belorussian, Bulgarian, Czech, Esperanto, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Russian and Slovenian.
Frederik Pohl dedicated the anthology Tales From The Planet Earth to Zajdel and A. Bertram Chandler. This book also contains the English translation of one of Zajdel's short stories, "Particularly Difficult Territory". It is his only work to have been translated into English to date.
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