To the Polish author Stanislaw Lem, creating science fiction was itself a form of time travel. “What the science-fiction work presents belongs to one time (most often the future), whereas how it tells its story belongs to another time, the present,” he once wrote. “Even if imagination succeeds in rendering plausible how it might be, it cannot break completely with the way of apprehending events that is peculiar to the here and now.”

Inevitably, the “here and now” ages into “there and then,” and the distance between those two points can be more disorienting than any wild flight into the universe. That’s one of the thoughts that arises for a viewer of the unfamiliar titles in Strange Lands: International Sci-Fi, the Film Society of Lincoln Center series starting Friday that runs the gamut from space-age sex farce to dystopian nightmare and travels to such lost worlds as Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

These Cold War rarities do more than serve as kitschy time capsules, they represent traditions of sci-fi filmmaking as storied, if not as well budgeted, as Hollywood’s.

Image A scene from “Kin-Dza-Dza!” Credit... Russian Cinema Council

The series wanders throughout Europe, but is tellingly weighted toward the former Soviet bloc. With its bent toward theoretical worlds and systems, the genre lent itself extremely well to expressions of socialist utopia, especially after the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first person to orbit Earth, fueled dreams of a Communist galaxy. Such tales often involved assorted comrades banding together to solve interplanetary conundrums, invariably sacrificing self for the sake of society and the universe. In East Germany, the state-run studio DEFA produced seven movies in this mode, two of which appear in the series.