A year ago, I was approached by the Munich-based publisher Matthes und Seitz with a request for an answer to the following question, which they had put to various well-known figures, mainly West Germans: how would I react to the news that aliens from outer space had landed on the planet Earth? I didn’t want to take part in their survey, so I wrote back explaining that I don’t believe such an event is at all possible, and I’d rather not make up my own reaction to an impossibility. The publisher included a photocopy of my letter in a book containing the responses to the question, which was very funny, considering that everyone else they had asked had provided an answer, and the only person to have refused was the writer who makes a living out of science fiction. So began my collaboration with this publisher, who in early spring this year came up with another survey. This time they included plenty of people from outside Germany too. We were asked to reveal our three most personal wishes, regardless whether or not they could possibly come true, and so we were in the position of a child with a fairy godmother. My answer was published in a book titled Inseln im Ich: Ein Buch der Wünsche (“Islands in Myself: A Book of Wishes”). It was sincere enough for me to publish it now, translated back into Polish (as I wrote the original version in German). I should add that this gave me my first taste of the problems that usually fall to the lot of my translators, because while they work themselves to death translating my Polish neologisms into foreign languages, this time I had to devise equivalents in Polish for the things I had made up in German.

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