As far as I know Stanisław Lem was not allowed to like anything from US. These days the soviet propaganda in Poland disallowed people to like anything that came from "the rotten west"
A lot of his work emphasises how this tendency fails in the face of the sheer unknowable alienness of the outer universe. e.g. Solaris, The Invincible, Fiasco.
Lem liked Phil Dick though, because Dick's work was more sceptical and mind-bending: more like his own work than it was like the spaceship heroics.
Truly a fascinating character, and an author in his own right, responsible for the story that John Carpenter would adapt for his film The Thing. I don't share his taste in science fiction, but he had a massive impact on the genre.
See Jeannette Ng's "2019 John W. Campbell Award" acceptance speech on the topic, and commentary that followed.
Such statement would hold somewhat true for the Soviet Union until the 80s, but not for Poland, whose society never stopped seeing itself as a part of wider European community, and because of significant migration in the XIX and XX century, also felt a connection with the US. Poland took advantage of Stalin's death to wrangle itself somewhat free of Soviet hegemony and starting with Gomułka's Thaw [1], adopted a more liberal model. It was still a dictatorship, but in comparison with the Soviet Union itself and also a few of the more repressive regimes in other satellite states, it was significantly more open. Edward Gierek's [2] rule only reinforced that course.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all roses. The inflow of Western culture faced many obstacles still, but those were often more of economical nature — in general books were translated, movies were shown in cinemas, the TV was filled with (somewhat dated) American and Western European TV shows, and Polish artists followed world trends in music (although with significant delay). The „rotten west” mindset never took root in Polish society and the authorities didn't enforce it with much zeal once the most repressive era ended in the mid-50s.
Sometimes they allow things to rise and present themselves as alternative media, but the ones that get wide broadcast (millions of views etc) almost always have a built-in limit that supports US interests implicitly, particularly with respect to foreign policy.
1: China Is a Communist Success Story. Kinda. (2015) — He talks about how China’s state-owned enterprises and central planning have achieved huge economic growth, and says that while central planning has its limitations, China’s approach shows that it can work to a certain extent.
2: Xi Jinping vs. Macroeconomics (2023) — he analyzes Xi's shift of Chinese resources from the real estate sector to advanced manufacturing, and concludes that it's an attempt to address economic imbalances by promoting high-tech industries. Smith suggests that under certain ideological frameworks (like China's), that kind of policy could be seen as a sound response to economic challenges.
¹ https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-30/china-is-...
² https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/xi-jinping-vs-macroeconomics
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/78912/manufacturing...
https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Reality-Politics-News-Media...
"Not allowed" by whom? There is a big difference between silencing journalists and a branch of the entertainment industry self-selecting for some current "meta-consensus" (dependent on their target consumers).
Personally, I think calling Putin a dictator is stretching it a bit, but I have come to realize that honest, independent media is an absolutely essential cornerstone of an "actual" democracy: As soon as political leaders can prevent their mistakes from being reported to their voters, the whole thing becomes a farce.
You see a similar facet of this problem in the US, but not because governments have secured media control, but because the media landscape has completeley stratified (with a very strong partisan bias), and a lot of voters are basically never exposed to reporting "from the other side" at all (and are saturated with appropriate "outrage-bait" all day instead).
If you are talking about Russia, then I'd say that highly critical/adversarial reporting in the west is to be expected; this is basically "play imperialist games, win imperialist prices". Just compare WW2 era US messaging/reporting on axis power (before it even got involved itself).
But I'm curious about your perspective. What do you think should the US press say about the "east" that it does not?
That's highly debatable, and it most certainly depended on the writers. I can speak for Romania (from where I'm from), where the works of Faulkner or Hemingway were held in very high esteem starting with the early 1960s, when translation of most of the stuff they were famous for started to be translated. The same goes for most of the Anglo (and Western) literature. Yes, in the second half of the '80s stuff was less rosy in that domain, but that mostly because of the self-imposed austerity we were going through, almost nothing of note was getting published anymore, with rare exceptions (such as a wonderful translation of Proust in 1987-1988, something like that).
Asimov is one prominent case because the translators had to figure out how to deal with his obviously Jewish name at the time when that became a red flag. This is why it's traditionally transcribed phonetically as Айзек rather than the more straightforward Исаак.
So it existed but was changed when being translated back, for political / antisemitic reasons?
And then you have USSR with its periodic antisemitic campaigns. The relevant one here is the one that started under Brezhnev in late 1960s, which is also when sci-fi in general became more popular in the USSR prompting more translations. So, publishing an author whose first name is Isaac would immediately draw attention from the censors. Seeing how anything Western was already on shaky grounds - sci-fi being allowed in the first place because it would often critique contemporary Western societies - translators played it safe by transcribing the American English pronunciation of "Isaac" into Russian, which made it Айзек (Ayzek). Which helpfully looks nothing like Исаак (Isaak), and doesn't "sound" Jewish at all to Russian ears.
This translation stuck, and it's how he is commonly known in Russian to this day.
"Na początku 48 roku wyjechałem na miesiąc do Pragi, gdzie zostałem zatrudniony w rządowej klinice im. Klimenta Woroszyłowa (wyobraźcie sobie u nas szpital imieniem Hermanna Goeringa). I ledwo wytrzymałem ten miesiąc. Codziennie jak nie masówka na stołówce, to agitka w szpitalnych garażach. W moim rodzimym krakowskim szpitalu na Montelupich byłoby to nie do pomyślenia. My byliśmy jednak najweselszym barakiem w obozie..."
"In the beginning of 1948 I went to Praga for a month, where I worked in government health clinic named after Kliment Woroshylov (imagine a hospital named after Goering in Poland). I barely managed to survive that month. Every day either a general meeting in the dining hall or political agitation in the hospital's garages. In Kraków Montelupi's hospital where I usually worked it would be unimaginable. We indeed are the merriest barrack in the [socialist] camp..."
Poles often called themselves that because censorship was the least strict there and we had some contact with the western culture (mainly through the "Kultura Paryska" - a Polish emigrants in Paris printed a newspaper that was very influential in Poland despite being theoretically banned - it was smuggled in en masse - it was so influential that to this day the political program developed by Giedroyć and Mieroszewski in that newspaper is serving as the core for Polish foreign policy - and it's working very well so far).
It changed depending on the period (50s were the worst) - but western culture was usually pretty well known and admired in communist Poland. We had very lively jazz scene, Beatles and other rock bands were played in radio (for example in Polish Radio 3 there were whole auditions based on showcasing western music - it was considered a "safety valve for Polish youth" by the communists).
We even had yearly indie punk/rock festival in Jarocin where all the anti-mainstream western-inspired kids went to drink and sing punk songs against the system.
Don't get me wrong - communism was obviously evil. But it wasn't competent/diligent enough to be 100% totalitarian in Poland. That would take too much effort and for what? You'd get paid the same either way. If you were unlucky you could definitely go to prison for a wrong joke or song. But most people didn't.
Anyway.
Lem definitely would have written that he liked American sci-fi if he did liked it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goulash_Communism
Although that was after the Hungarian Revolution.