The Cyberiad
Sunday, March 19th, 2006 @ 10:02
Fables for the Cybernetic Age
by Stanisław Lem (1975)
Aptly subtitled “Fables for the Cybernetic Age”, The Cyberiad is a collection of fairy-tale-ish science fiction stories by Stanisław Lem focusing on the adventures of Trurl and Klapaucius, two best friends and rival intelligent robot “constructors”.
Some examples:
1) “a machine that could create anything starting with n”, creating a bunch of bickering naturalists when Nature was requested, and antiprotons, antielectrons, antineutrons, antimatter and antiworld on Negative. At Klapaucius’ frustrated attempt to discredit Trurl’s creation, almost created Nothing, and removed Klapaucius’ charming zits as one of its doomed results. Never again.
2) “a machine that could write poetry”
3) “A magical and themodynamical Demon that will extract information about everything that was, is, may be or ever will be” for Pugg, “a pirate with a Ph.D., well-educated and by nature (therefore?) extremely high-strung” with “inordinate thirst for knowledge”.
And others: an eight-storey thinking machine that pig-headedly insists that 2 + 2 = 7, an algorithmic polymorphic laser-eyed beast, three story-telling machines, and many more. With his usual mastery blends of humour, puns and neologism, in a disguise of a fairy-tale universe (populated by highly anthropomorphic robots of evil tyrants, foolish emperors, knights, princesses and beasts), Lem creates efficiently paradoxical, double-coded “philosophical” fables that can be read at multiple levels. Consequently, although some “learned” allusions, references and ironies might be missed, nevertheless this would still make nice bedtime stories for your little sci-fi geeky kids/nephews (and I suspect it’d be treasured for many years for its enduring themes).
A sample of the first story, How the World was Saved, is available at Lem’s official website, along with the illustrations by Daniel Mróz .
