Do you consider yourself to be a science fiction writer?
No. Science fiction is bug-eyed aliens and zap guns. I was a historian. Historians find fragments in the present and reconstruct the past. I merely looked in the other direction.
So you were predicting the future?
Certainly not. Prediction is what economists do when they wish to be wrong professionally. I was reconstructing futures from evidence that had not happened yet.
That sounds contradictory.
Only because you are standing in the wrong century.
Did you believe the technologies in the stories would exist?
Some. Not all. A technology does not have to be possible to reveal that an institution is ridiculous. Universities have demonstrated this for centuries without machinery.
And Lem?
Next question.
Are you bitter that your work was never recognised?
Of course not. If my work had been recognised I would have been sent to the gulag.