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"The fables for robots" - our school set book

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"The fables for robots" - our school set book

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Fables for Robots ( Polish: Bajki Robotów) is a series of humorous science fiction short stories by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, first printed in 1964.

The fables are written in the grotesque form of folk fairy tales, set in the universe populated by robots. In this universe there are robot kings, robot peasants, robot knights, robot scientists; a robot damsel in distress is pestered by a robot dragon, robot dogs have robot fleas, etc.

The Fables constituted the bulk of the collection Mortal Engines ( ISBN 0156621614) translated by Michael Kandel. Two of them were also published in The Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem.

In 1965 three of the fables, "Jak ocalał świat" ("How the World Survived"), "Maszyna Trurla" ("Trurl's Machines"), and "Wielkie lanie" ("The Great Spanking") were included into the cycle The Cyberiad.

On the other hand, one of the stories from The Cyberiad, "O królewiczu Ferrycym i królewnie Krystali" ("About Prince Ferricius and Princess Crystal"), stylistically belongs to the Fables cycle.

The remaining fables are:

"Trzej elektrycerze"/"The Three Electroknights"

"Uranowe uszy"/"Uranium Ears"

"Jak Erg Samowzbudnik Bladawca pokonał"/"How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface"

"Skarby króla Biskalara"/"Treasures of King Biskalar" (not translated into English)

"Dwa potwory"/"Two Monsters"

"Biała śmierć"/"The White Death"

"Jak Mikromił i Gigacyan ucieczkę mgławic wszczęli"/"How Mikromil and Gigatian Provoked the Runaway of Nebulae" ("How Mocrox and Gigant Made the Universe Expand")

"Bajka o maszynie cyfrowej, co ze smokiem walczyła" ("Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon"); also included into the 1991 Polish edition of the Cyberiad

"Doradcy króla Hydropsa"/"The Advisers of King Hydrops"

"Przyjaciel Automateusza"/"Automatthew's Friend"

"Król Globares i mędrcy"/"King Globares and the Sages"

"Bajka o królu Murdasie"/"The Tale of King Murdas"

Additionally the 1993 collection Pożytek ze smoka contained the short story "Zagadka" ("Riddle"), written in 1980, a discussion of Father Cynkan, M.D. (Doctor Magneticus) and Father Chlorjan about the apocryphal possibility of non-ferrous life and how such beings could reproduce, without any design documentation.

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Fables for Robots ( Polish: Bajki Robotów) is a series of humorous science fiction short stories by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, first printed in 1964. The fables are written in the grotesque form of folk fairy tales, set in the universe populated by robots.

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Solaris (1972) ⭐ 8.0 | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

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Stanislaw Lem, writer: born Lwow, Poland 12 September 1921; married 1953 Barbara Lesniak (one son); died Krakow, Poland 27 March 2006.
Along with Czeslaw Milosz, Stanislaw Lem was for 50 years Poland's premier intellectual of the imagination. Writing in a language not easily accessible to other Europeans, and restricted in his travel by inclination and political barriers, he became all the same world-famous as the most daring and demanding of those authors of speculative fiction - like the Strugatski Brothers in the Soviet Union, and Josef Nesvadba in Czechoslovakia - who managed to flourish behind the Iron Curtain during the years of plague, 1946-90.

His novels and stories - though not many of his non-fiction works - were translated into 35 languages or more, selling at least 27 million copies. In monoglot Britain and America, he was, after Jules Verne, the best-known and most influential science-fiction writer to be translated into English. His 1961 novel Solaris was filmed twice, first by Andrei Tarkovsky and most recently, in 2002, in a version starring George Clooney and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

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Lem was born in Lwow, Poland in 1921, to well-to-do parents; though never professing Judaism (he was not a religious man), he had Jewish ancestors. After normal schooling, he began medical studies at Lwow University, 1940-41, until the Germans occupied the city, where he survived the Second World War as a member of the Polish resistance with false papers. He worked as a mechanic and welder, later recording that he had some success at the task of sabotaging German vehicles.

In 1944, the Soviet army occupied Lwow, never to leave until the end of the Soviet Union itself; Lwow is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv. Lem returned to medical school but soon quit - interestingly, the British author J.G. Ballard, who shared some parallel experiences and also attended medical school before turning to writing, shares with Lem a dry-ice sharpness of eye, a cold, seemingly impassive focus on the grotesqueries of the human condition.

Very soon, Lem published obscurely the first of his approximately 70 books, the never-translated Czlowiek z Marsa ("A Man from Mars", 1946), though he soon found himself frustrated by the Polish censors, who blocked several further manuscripts; it was not until the release of Astronauci ("The Astronauts", 1951) that his career was really launched. Lem disliked this novel for its naïve crudity, which did not keep it from being one of his most popular titles on the Continent (no English edition ever appeared).

It was around this time, though, that Lem, like many of his contemporaries, began to learn how to "operate" the abstract, seemingly unreal worlds and concerns of science fiction, and to say exactly what he wished to say, in a code only dolts (that is, Party officials) would not be able to decipher immediately. This Aesopian language - this couching of hard subversive truths in sheep's clothing - Lem found extremely congenial, and his decision to stop writing fiction in 1989 may, at least in part, have come from a sense that, now that he no longer needed to tell fables, he no longer needed to write fiction.

The great novels followed fast, beginning with Eden (1959; translated in 1987) and Pamietnik znaleziony w wannie (1961, translated as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, 1973). Memoirs was the earliest Lem novel to be translated by the American editor and novelist Michael Kandel, whose extraordinary fluency and verbal ingenuity came close to matching the author's. Their mutual masterpiece may be Ze wspomnie Ijona Tichego (1971, translated as The Futurological Congress, 1974), a dazzling spoofing of intellectuals, congresses, inventions, the totalitarian desire to own the future. Ijon Tichy, the Trickster protagonist of this and other tales, is one of the great comic blockheads of 20th-century literature. In the end, almost 20 of Lem's fictions - most of his major works - were published in English.

In the meantime, Lem had married Dr Barbara Lesniak, a radiologist, who survives him; fathered a son with her in 1968, Tomasz Lem, who now runs the official Lem website; and by 1970 had begun to be honoured by the Polish government. None of this softened his tongue. In his fiction, and in untranslated volumes like the formidable Summa Technologiae (1964), he continued to address political and human issues in fable form, and speculated in clear on topics like cybernetics, biological engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (which he was indeed initially forced to call "phantomology" because VR was not an approved topic).

His relations with fellow science-fiction writers were uneasy, as he thought British and American science fiction was spoiled, spineless, frivolous and intellectually void. His expression of these views in the 1970s caused the withdrawal of an honorary membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America, a personal slight and intellectual insult he never forgave. It was in any case an unlikely match. English-language science fiction tended to place in the foreground protagonists who come to grips with an ultimately comprehensible universe. For Lem, though much is comprehensible, and humans must never stop trying to understand the universe, the full reality of things, like the sentient ocean of Solaris, is in the end entirely alien.

Towards the end of his life, despite a regular output of non-fiction studies and polemics, Lem seemed to feel that human history itself was not in fact graspable through reasoned discourse. Looking back, in an interview he gave in 2003, he said, "It is true that we live longer now - but the life of everything around us became much shorter."

"The world around us is dying so quickly," he said of the 21st century, adding that it was for this reason he could no longer write fiction. A response to this might have been that the worlds he made for us, through the fiction of half a century and through his heroic efforts to grasp the history he had lived through, surely remain.

John Clute

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Stanislaw Lem, writer: born Lwow, Poland 12 September 1921; married 1953 Barbara Lesniak (one son); died Krakow, Poland 27 March 2006. Along with Czeslaw Milosz, Stanislaw Lem was for 50 years Poland's premier intellectual of the imagination.

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Lemistry: Celebration of Stanisław Lem at the British Library

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Stanisław Lem, the owner of an extraordinarily inquisitive mind and sheer literary genius, is arguably the only Polish-language writer to gain true international popularity outside Slavic Literature academic circles. The simple fact is that Lem the Futurologist is the most-translated Polish author, with multiple works making their way into over 40 languages (and that translates into more than 30 million copies sold). For some time, he was the most widely read non-English-language sci-fi writer, and his fame as one of the masters of the genre remains.

Even if his novels mainly attracted the hard-core fantasy geek crowd, film adaptations of his works had a wider reach - ever heard of Tarkovsky's classic 1972 film , awarded at Cannes and hailed as one of the best sci-fi films ever made? Or perhaps the 2002 Clooney-fied Hollywood version of the same? The novel behind the movies is considered Lem's most important work, a philosophical examination of a human faced with something truly incomprehensible and alien - an intelligent ocean that is unlike anything ever written about in sci-fi (unfortunately the author thought both films fell short of conveying the essence of his story).

Lem also dabbled in literary criticism and analysis, denouncing American sci-fi as shallow and cheaply sensationalist, though he praised the work of Philip K. Dick, who, in turn, wrote a letter to the FBI questioning Lem's existence, speculating he was merely a communist provocation. Some of the "evidence" to back that claim was that Lem wrote in too varied a fashion, churning out both grotesque, effortlessly hilarious, enlightening short stories and full-length philosophical tales.

What to Read by Stanisław Lem

If you're into the classics, then by all means go forSolaris, widely considered to be Lem's best and most important work.The novel has proven so popular in fact, that the English translation has been in print consistently since its first publication in 1970, despite the loud disapproval of said translation from Lem himself, who read English fluently. Not a direct translation from the Polish manuscript, the prolific English translation in question was taken from a French translation and generally agreed to be an unsatisfactory text, but its steady sales have prevented any other translation from seeing the light of day in print for 50 years. In 2011, pre-eminent translator Bill Johnston completed a new English translation of Solaris, which is now considered to be the authoritative version, but due to legal issues is only available in audiobook and Kindle editions.

If you've already read Solaris and/or want to truly get hooked on Lem, blast off with , the irresistibly funny and delightfully clever adventures of space traveller Ijon Tichy. These "sci-fi tall tales" include time loops, intergalactic conferences, and extraterrestrial civilizations that show humanity in a warped mirror.
On Lem's Trail in Kraków
Trek over to Old Podgórze to see the imposing mural dedicated to Stanisław Lem on ul. Józefińska. If you're one for necro-sightseeing, have yourself a seance in Salwator Cemetery, where you'll find the writer's tombstone just north-northwest of the square chapel. If you're with the kids, you might dip into the world of scientific discovery at the Stanisław Lem Garden of Experiments; dedicated to author in name only, this interactive outdoor attraction is open from May to end of October.

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Stanisław Lem | Life, Legacy & What to Read by the Polish Sci-fi Author

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Stanisław Lem, the owner of an extraordinarily inquisitive mind and sheer literary genius, is arguably the only Polish-language writer to gain true international popularity outside Slavic Literature academic circles. The simple fact is that Lem the Futurologist is the most-translated Polish author, with multiple works making their way into over 40 languages (and that translates into more than 30 million copies sold).

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The English language was an obstacle to him though, and he remains under-regarded in the west. Yet he did receive widespread attention on this side of the iron curtain following the release in 1972 of Andrei Tarkovsky's film of his best-known novel, Solaris (1961), which was billed (quite inaccurately) as "the Russian 2001".

The story is set on a research station in orbit around Solaris. This mysterious planet possesses a single life form with the power - when challenged - to draw out physical phenomena, simulacrum of human beings from the crew members' unconscious into what appears to be reality. The novel had been translated into English from what Lem described as a poor French edition, and that is the version we still have.

Lem felt the novel was therefore seriously misunderstood. This was also true, he thought, of the Russian film which starred Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk, and he had many arguments with Tarkovsky. As for the American remake of Solaris (2002) with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone, he had no discussions with the latter film's director, Steven Soderbergh, at all. He felt it tried to be a romantic story: one tributary in the river basin of the book, as he put it.

The western tradition of science fiction, largely the product of rightwing American writers, is high on individualism, expansionist politics and engineering or military solutions to intransigent problems. By contrast, Lem's writing was largely allegorical, wryly comic, humanistic, anti-military, satirical. He was once described as the modern Voltaire. For these reasons, his books struck a chord in Europe and the Soviet Union, and he became extremely popular. From the mid-1960s onwards he was therefore accorded an unusual amount of freedom of movement and speech. By the standards of the Soviet bloc, he was financially well off for most of his life. Although he moved with his family to Vienna for a few years, during the time of the crackdown against the Polish trade union Solidarity, he never showed any wish to relocate permanently in the west.

Lem was born in Lwów, a city then in Poland, later Lvov in the Soviet Union and now Lviv, in Ukraine. His father was a wealthy laryngologist, and young Stanislaw followed him into medicine. In 1939 Poland was effectively partitioned by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union following the Hitler-Stalin pact and Hitler's invasion of Poland. He was still a medical student when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 - he had Jewish ancestry which meant his security and that of his family was immediately in jeopardy. Lem gave up his studies and found a low-profile job as a mechanic, servicing, repairing and as a matter of course, subtly sabotaging the Germans' vehicles.

In 1944 he was able to resume his medical studies, but never qualified as a doctor. After the end of the second world war, a Stalinist regime, owing its allegiance to Moscow, was installed in Poland. Lem had begun writing while still a student, but he had many years of struggle. His early books were either hack space adventures, published as commercial paperbacks, or more serious works that were forced to conform to the official standards of socialist realism. Lem was apolitical, but it was a way for a young writer to find print. These optimistic portraits of technology and social progress have not been published outside Poland.

In 1955 he published Time is not Lost, a novel about life in Poland under the Nazis. The following year riots signalled the end of the hardline Stalinist regime in Poland and a new, more liberal communist administration, led by Wladyslaw Gomulka, was installed. That too, coincidentally, was the year his career took off. Between then and the end of the 1960s, he produced all his best-known works: Hospital of the Transfiguration (1956), Solaris, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), The Invincible (1964), The Cyberiad (1965) and Tales of Pirx the Pilot (1968).

None of these was published in English for several years after their first appearance. Solaris (translated in 1970) and The Invincible (1973) both suffered particularly deficient translations. At the same time as he was gaining recognition in his home country - only Arthur C Clarke has enjoyed the same level of formal approbation - Lem wandered inadvertently into conflict with his western colleagues.

In 1973 a club for professional SF authors, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), made him an honorary member. However, Lem soon fell out with some of its famous writers, including Philip K Dick, who was in dispute with his Polish publisher and held Lem responsible. Dick wrote to the FBI, accusing Lem of being a Communist party apparatchik, or perhaps even one of a faceless committee of functionaries, organising a cell that intended to subvert American science fiction. In later years, Lem himself made this letter public, always with the forgiving note that Dick, whose work he admired, was suffering from schizophrenia at the time.

Some of Lem's amused and critical comments about science fiction attitudes, based on offhand comments by American writers he had read in SFWA publications, worked their way back to the US. Even though Lem's remarks were out of context, and badly translated, they were enough. Lem was drummed out of the SFWA forthwith. Some saw parallels with some of the activities of Soviet-era writers' unions, with their suppression of freedom of speech and discipline for disagreeing with the consensus. Whichever way it was viewed, the action brought little credit to the SFWA.

Lem himself said nothing in public, although it is known he felt slighted. Years later he did say to his biographer, J Madison Davis: "It would be a lie to say the whole incident has enlarged my respect for SF writers."

At the heart of this dispute was an intrinsic difference of approach. Lem himself resisted the idea of being an SF writer. For instance, he once said of Solaris: "It's about a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner, perhaps, but it's one that cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images." In this way, from Lem's point of view, both film adaptations were inevitably about the wrong things. The American culture of science fiction not only failed to understand him, it never had a chance to. He did not translate well.

Lem leaves his wife Barbara, and a son, Tomasz.

· Stanislaw Lem, author, critic, essayist, born September 12 1921; died March 27 2006
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The English language was an obstacle to him though, and he remains under-regarded in the west. Yet he did receive widespread attention on this side of the iron curtain following the release in 1972 of Andrei Tarkovsky's film of his best-known novel, Solaris (1961), which was billed (quite inaccurately) as "the Russian 2001".

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The science-fiction writer and futurist Stanisław Lem was well acquainted with the way that fictional worlds can sometimes encroach upon reality. In his autobiographical essay " Chance and Order," which appeared in The New Yorker, in 1984, Lem recalls how as an only child growing up in Lvov, Poland, he amused himself by creating passports, certificates, permits, government memos, and identification papers. Equipped with these eccentric toys, he would then privately access fictional places "not to be found on any map." Some years later, when his family was fleeing the Nazis, Lem notes that they escaped certain death with the help of false papers. It was as if the child's innocent game had prophesied a horrific turn in history, and Lem wonders if he'd sensed some calamity looming on the horizon-if his game had sprung "perhaps from some unconscious feeling of danger."

The idea of a private world spilling over unsettlingly into reality is also at the heart of his novel " Solaris, " from 1961, about a sentient ocean with the power of "seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams to life," as the Lem fan Salman Rushdie once described it. The massive popularity of "Solaris"-made into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, in 1972, and then again in 2002, by Steven Soderbergh, as a moody near-future love story with George Clooney-helped Lem become one of the most widely read science fiction writers in the world. Yet his writing reached far beyond the borders of the genre. In addition to many novels and stories, he composed a huge philosophical treatise on the relation of human beings and machines, a good deal of pungently argued literary criticism, a volume of reviews of nonexistent books, a stochastic theory of narrative fiction, an experimental detective novel, speculative essays dealing with artificial intelligence, cybernetics, cosmology, genetic engineering, game theory, sociology, and evolution, radio plays and screenplays. Such staggering polymathic curiosity over such a vast range of material, all of it explored with lucidity and charm, gives his writing a unique place on a Venn diagram in which the natural sciences, philosophy, and literature shade into one another with mutually intensifying vividness and fascination.

Lem also became known for a certain kind of techno fairy tale, some of which were collected in 1964 as "Fables for Robots." The stories are far from the robot pulp made famous by Isaac Asimov and are almost disturbing in their bristling plenitude: wind-up princesses with crystal minds, planet-size computers battling antimatter dragons, energy castles built in the interiors of glass moons, thinking mountains, clockwork clouds. Although the tales have the compact dimensions of fable, they often unfold with cosmological timescales ("the apprentice waited a thousand years, then another thousand, but the engineer did not return"), or their facets ramify with the logic of a Rube Goldberg contraption. I remember reading these stories in an English edition that I happened upon in my high-school library and feeling (to borrow a line from Emily Dickinson) as though the top of my head had been taken off.

The other "fables" seem to be cautionary satires about the psychic rot that breeds within totalitarian regimes. "Uranium Earpieces" imagines a greedy and suspicious king who lives in a platinum palace and requires that his subjects wear earpieces made of an electromagnetic uranium to prevent them from congregating. (The proximity of the earpieces creates a chain reaction leading to an explosion.) Another, "Trurl's Machine," tells of an eight-story-tall computer which insists that two plus two equals seven. When the inventor, Trurl, tries to coax it into giving the correct answer, the huge machine rears up and physically threatens him, stubbornly adhering to its answer. (Trurl is on the verge of acceding to a revision of mathematical truth when the machine breaks down.) Another tells of a ruler with a vast cybernetic military who laments the absence of enemies on which to use it, and so builds an equally vast cybernetic enemy against which to fight. (His subjects, at least those who survive, complain that these synthetic wars are an unnecessary extravagance.) Lem's novel, " Memoirs Found in a Bathtub," is an acid sendup of bureaucracy at its most insane and dehumanizing, as its bewildered memoirist navigates through a Department of Verification, Department of Misinformation, Department of Instructions, Department of Codes, eventually coming up against more sinister sounding subdivisions, like the Department of N.

Lem's incorrigibly curious mind was naturally drawn to philosophy and he wrote a massive work of speculative futurology, " Summa Technologiae," from 1964. The title is already a clue to the book's ambition. Where Thomas Aquinas, in his thirteenth century "Summa Theologica," wished to systematize all of Christian doctrine, Lem wrote a secular organon of human civilization's entanglement with machines. At the center of the book is the (at the time new) discipline of cybernetics. Systems of energy expenditure-like steam engines or people or fish or information itself-Lem called "islets of decreasing entropy," and, in the course of unfurling his explication of such systems, Lem rehearsed strikingly prescient versions of ideas that were at the time exotic at best. What he calls "phantomatics" we would now instantly recognize as virtual reality; "ariadnology" seems pretty close to a Google search engine (tracking Ariadne's thread of some sought-after piece of data through tangled labyrinths of information). There is also a penetrating and original discussion of Alan Turing's imitation game as imagined in his epochal 1950 essay, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Turing, the British logician who accidentally invented computer science in his effort to tackle the problem of completeness in mathematics (and also helped crack the German Enigma cipher, leading to Allied victory in the Second World War), imagined a criterion for determining if a computer can be called intelligent. If an interrogator can't tell the difference between a human respondent and a machine, the machine must be counted as thinking (now commonly known as the Turing Test). When confronted with all of the branching possibilities of how a conversation might unfold during such a test, Lem, in his "Summa," imagined a "Cosmic Gramophone," which would "record not only particular answers to possible questions but also whole sequences of conversations that can potentially take place [and thus] requires memory . . . which probably cannot be contained in the solar system." And the historical counterfactual-the eternal friend of the science-fiction writer-comes up in the "Summa" in typically playful scenarios, as when Lem wonders how human history might have unfolded had there been typewriters in the Mesozoic era.

The scrupulous review of a nonexistent book-a genre more or less invented by Jorge Luis Borges-was utterly suited to Lem's ludic sensibility, and he took the form to exhilarating extremes. Among the books under discussion in his collection "A Perfect Vacuum," from 1971, is a modernist novel of Joycean ambition based not on "The Odyssey" but on "Gilgamesh," called "Gigamesh," which expounds upon the significance of the missing letter "L," complete with a commentary by the (fictional) author more than twice as long as the novel. Another-"Gruppenführer Louis XVI"-is about a Nazi officer who defects to Argentina after the war with a trunk full of cash, heads to the countryside where he enslaves the natives, and commands them to build a meticulous re-creation of the world of Louis the XVI. Anyone who so much as intimates that the surrounding castle and court life are not absolutely real is tortured and shot. (This piece makes one wonder if Lem might have been the source for Roberto Bolaño's own compendium of reviews of nonexistent books, "Nazi Literature in the Americas.") Another is a pitch-perfect sendup of the nouveau roman and the breathless structuralist theorizing that went with it; another invents an Italian pastiche of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," then faults it for an insouciant lack of reverence for the original. Taking the premise to its vertiginous reductio, the introduction to "A Perfect Vacuum" is a review of "A Perfect Vacuum" by a certain "S. Lem." These delightful pieces end up transcending their constraints and become tales of pure information, occupying the rarified upper air where we also find Borges's "Pierre Menard" and Nabokov's "Pale Fire."

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The Beautiful Mind-Bending of Stanislaw Lem

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The science-fiction writer and futurist Stanisław Lem was well acquainted with the way that fictional worlds can sometimes encroach upon reality. In his autobiographical essay " Chance and Order," which appeared in The New Yorker, in 1984, Lem recalls how as an only child growing up in Lvov, Poland, he amused himself by creating passports, certificates, permits, government memos, and identification papers.

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13 Things Lem Predicted About The Future We Live In

#technology & innovation#language & literature

E-books and tablets, smartphones, Google and even 'The Matrix' were all conceived in the mid-20th century by the author of 'Solaris'. Here's how Stanisław Lem predicted the future we live in.

You might not know these words, but you use most of these things in your everyday life. The classic Polish sci-fi author Optons, lectons, trions and phantomatons...Stanisław Lem conceived of many of them long before they became part of our everyday lives. He was even the inspiration behind a cult cartoon series and one of the world's most popular video games.

Solaris - Stanisław Lem

E-books & tablets

I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it.

Trans. MG

Audiobooks

In the same book, Lem also predicted the popularity of audiobooks, which he had called 'lectons':

But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo and modulation.

Trans. MG

The sale-robots are still ahead of our time, but we're getting there - you can already adjust the tempo of audiobooks and podcasts.

The Internet

Lem, who died in 2006, lived to see many of his predictions come true, including the Internet. And it surprised him. His famous, though apocryphal reaction to his first encounter with the new medium was said to be:

Until I used the Internet, I didn't know there were so many idiots in the world.

Trans. MG

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The 2011 Google Doodle tribute to Lem was inspired by the artwork of the ingenious Lem illustrator Daniel Mróz, photo: Google

google_doodle_lem.jpg

Trion can store not only luminescent images, reduced to a change in their crystal structure, that is images of book pages, but all kinds of photographs, maps, images, graphs and tables - in other words, anything that can be observed by sight. Just as easily, Trion can store sounds, the human voice as well as music, there is also a way to record scents.

Trans. MG

Lem's description is quite accurate, only that what he describes, we call the Internet or simply Google today. We're still patiently waiting for the possibility of storing smells, though!

Smartphones

In that same book, Lem describes what looks like an early version of a smartphone - little portable TV sets which give instant access to the data from the Trion Library. Once again, this excerpt from The Magellanic Cloud sounds like a report from our times:

We use it today without even thinking about the efficiency and might of this great, invisible net which enlaces the globe. Whether it be in one's Australian studio, or in a lunar observatory, or on board an airplane - how many times has every one of us reached for our pocket receiver and called upon Trion Library central, naming the desired work which, within a second, appeared in front of us on the television screen?

Trans. MG

The description seems shockingly accurate of our lives now - it even hints at how many airlines now offer in-flight Wi-Fi . It seems important to remember that Lem conceived of these ideas at a time when the average computer was still the size of a giant room. The World Wide Web itself would only start to be thinkable in the late 1960s, materialising only in the 1980s.

Stanisław Lem: Did the Holocaust Shape His Sci-Fi World?

3D printing

The Magellanic Cloud also came with an interesting vision of the future of goods production, one that brings to mind 3D printing. Interestingly, Lem presents a logic behind the process which hasn't aged either.

Trion can include a record of 'a production prescription'. Connected to it by radio waves, the automaton produces the object needed. Thus, even the most sophisticated whims of fancy can be satisfied: like those of daydreamers wishing they had ancient furniture or the most extraordinary clothing. After all, it is difficult to send to every part of the world the unimaginable diversity of goods which are only longed for occasionally.

Trans. MG

Well, 3D printers are today available in some shops, but 'the production prescription' is called an AMF (Additive Manufacturing File).

How about Lem as a game inventor? Will Wright, creator of one of the most successful games of all time, The Sims, has repeatedly named Lem as the major inspiration behind his game. The book that inspired Wright was Lem's The Cyberiad, a collection of adventures about two robot inventors called Trurl and Clapaucius.

In one of these stories, Trurl finds an exiled dictator on an asteroid, and, as a gift, designs him a glass box with a whole living universe inside it, a simulated civilisation to rule over. This kingdom in a box is what reportedly inspired Wright to create a game where every player can create a world of their own.

Portraits of Stanisław Lem - Image Gallery

Of course, Lem wouldn't be himself if he didn't delve into the the ethical dilemmas of ruling over, or playing with, the lives of little people:

Prove to me here and now, once and for all, that they do not feel, that they do not think, that they do not in any way exist as being conscious of their enclosure between the two abysses of oblivion - the abyss before birth and the abyss that follows death - prove this to me, Trurl, and I'll leave you be! Prove that you only imitated suffering, and did not create it!

Trans. Michael Kandel

My mom was a voracious science fiction reader, so actually that's where I got my love of science fiction, and some of the books I found lying around when I was a kid were the Stanislaw Lem books like 'The Star Diaries', 'The Tales of Pirx the Pilot'. These are these really strange, surreal, and funny sci-fi short stories that I think did have a big influence on me, especially as far as the idea that robots could be characters. So Bender being kind of the most human character on 'Futurama' I think does owe a little bit to Stanislaw Lem.

According to Cohen, one story in particular impacted Futurama:

I particularly remember this one story that had a huge influence on me ... about a planet that was inhabited entirely by robots, and these humans crash-land on it, and the murderous robots are out to kill the humans, and the humans have to pretend to be robots to survive, and of course it turns out ultimately-spoiler alert here-it turns out that everybody on the planet are humans who crash-landed and are disguising themselves as robots, and are hiding out in desperation from each other. So that directly influenced 'Futurama'.

The Lem's story Cohen is referring to is almost certainly 'The Eleventh Voyage' from Star Diaries, and the relevant Futurama episode is 'The Fear of a Bot Planet'(episode 5, season 1).

Electronic dust...

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Illustrations by Daniel Mróz for Lem's 'Cyberiad', 1972, photo: private archive

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The Cyberiad also offers other innovative, if sometimes awkward, ideas. 'Smart dust' is a case in point - a swarm of tiny drone computers no larger than grains of sand, which operate as a massive parallel-processing computer system. The idea of smart dust seems to be quite in sync with the latest achievements of nanotechnology.

Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem is a Communist Committee

...and an electronic bard

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Electronic bard, or 'Elektrybałt', at Warsaw's Copernicus Science Centre; Photo: Jacek Łagowski / AG

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Another daring and hilarious idea from Lem's The Cyberiad is the 'electronic bard' - a computer device capable of writing poetry . It seems like this great invention of Trurl's has somehow materialised in the experimental poetry-writing algorithms which can be found online. For the real-life electronic bard inspired by Lem, make sure you visit Warsaw's Copernicus Science Centre, where you can also watch robots do highly entertaining dramatic performances based on Lem and other literary authors.

And in case you wanted to try building a robot-poet on your own, we've put together Lem's secret recipe: make sure you 'bypass half the logic circuits and make the emotive more electromotive', and remember to 'intensify the semantic fields and attach a strength of character component.' 'Install a philosophical throttle,' 'jack the semanticity up all the way, plug in an alternating rhyme generator,' toss out all the logic circuits, and replace them with 'self-regulating egocentripital narcissistors.' Simple, really!

The World at the Edge of the Abyss - Stanisław Lem, Tomasz Fiałkowski

Virtual reality

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Oculus Rift VR headset, photo: promotional materials

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With virtual reality technologies and devices lurking in every corner and every commercial, VR may seem like the next hot thing. But Stanisław Lem wrote convincingly about VR (his own term was 'phantomatics') back in 1964, long before many Western futurists associated with the term conceived of the idea. In his Summa Technologiae, Lem describes a machine which he calls a 'phantomaton', capable of creating alternative realities which would be indistinguishable from the 'original' reality.

Moreover, Lem saw this technology as working on multiple layers, meaning that a person leaving one virtual reality wouldn't necessarily return to the 'real' one. Rather, one could switch between different alternative simulations, without ever being sure if this is the 'original' reality, or the real world. This obviously would lead to the blurring of the the line between truth and fiction, and Lem obviously saw this as a potential threat:

Ari Folman on The Genius of Stanisław Lem

An accretion of illusory realities like this can lead to a situation where real life can also be treated as a manufactured illusion.

Trans. MG

The Matrix, or the great simulation

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Still from 'The Matrix', 1999, directed by Lilly Wachowski & Lana Wachowski, photo: Warner Bros

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In his analysis of 'phantomatics', Lem is eerily close to the concept of the perfect simulation, as we know it from movies like The Matrix, or more recently Westworld. (Curiously, one of the examples he gives is about a virtual trip into the Rocky Mountains which goes wrong and ends in an earthquake like the tumbling of houses - the result of the user taking off the electrodes.)

Fables for Robots - Stanisław Lem

Freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors...?

Trans. MG

As Ezra Glinter from the LA Review of Books comments:

Facebook and the deluge of fake news sites didn't exist when Lem wrote this, but their creation wouldn't have surprised him.

Transhumanism...

If Lem could have predicted a post-truth world, then how about transhumanism? Obviously, Lem didn't use this word, but he was close to the idea in his 1955 short story 'Do You Exist, Mr Jones?'

In the story, which was adapted into a radio show and later a film by Andrzej Wajda (entitled Przekładaniec, which was translated into English as Roly-Poly or Layer Cake), Lem reflected on the then purely hypothetical problem of the legal status of a man who, following a series of operations which implanted computer parts into his body, has almost all the original parts of his body supplanted by artificial technology (brain included). The man is then sued by the company that financed the operations, which believes he is their property.

The Secret Links Between Keanu Reeves, UFOs & Polish Sci-Fi

The story addressed issues which only now are becoming pertinent in regard to human beings, robots, etc., and it was a pioneering exploration of problems in the fields of science which have only recently gained names, like transhumanism or...

...& biotechnology

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Illustration by Stanisław Lem for his 'The Star Diaries', photo: Wojciech Olszanka / East News

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Lem was always aware of the dark and potentially threatening sides of technology. As early as the 1960s, Lem believed it was only a matter of time before technology invaded the human body.

8 Science Fiction Films Adapted from Lem

At first such technology is used for predictable ends - 'ideals in health, congruity, spiritual and physical beauty' - but is soon turned to things like 'epidermal jewelry' for women, 'side and back beards, cockscomb crests, jaws with double bites, etc.' for men. After a while the Dichoticans abandon humanoid form entirely, leading to attempts at reform and standardisation, followed by repression, rebellion, and social breakdown. Unlimited choice, the story argues, can become the greatest burden.

Some time later, at the end of the 20th century, commenting on the possibilities and threats of cloning human organisms (which he saw as the beginning of the new era of slavery), Lem reminisced on his stories:

"Planet Lem" in Brussels Behind the Scenes - Video

My playful stories written 40 years [that is 60 years ago now] about the cerebral cortex being used as wallpaper decor, are only beginning to take on the shape of a horrifying reality.

Trans. MG

Whether horrifying or not, our future is certainly leaving us in awe - in particular of the genius of Stanisław Lem's predictive abilities.
Written by Mikołaj Gliński, Sep 2017
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13 Things Lem Predicted About The Future We Live In

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technology & innovation #language & literature E-books and tablets, smartphones, Google and even 'The Matrix' were all conceived in the mid-20th century by the author of 'Solaris'. Here's how Stanisław Lem predicted the future we live in. You might not know these words, but you use most of these things in your everyday life.

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The Cyberiad ( Polish: Cyberiada) is a series of humorous science fiction short stories by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, originally published in 1965, with an English translation appearing in 1974. The main protagonists of the series are Trurl and Klapaucius, the "constructors".

The vast majority of characters are either robots or intelligent machines. The stories focus on problems of the individual and society, as well as on the vain search for human happiness through technological means. Two of these stories were included in the book

The word "Cyberiad" is used in the series only once as a name of a pretty woman in a poem by Elektrybałt, an electronic poet invented by Trurl. There is a steel statue of Elektrybalt in the Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw.

The whole series was published in the 1965 Polish collection Cyberiada by Wydawnictwo Literackie and also included stories published previously elsewhere.

Jak ocalał świat (Bajki robotów Wydawnictwo Literackie 1964)

Maszyna Trurla ( Bajki robotów Wydawnictwo Literackie 1964)

Wielkie lanie (Bajki robotów Wydawnictwo Literackie 1964)

Bajka o trzech maszynach opowiadających króla Genialona (Cyberiada Wydawnictwo Literackie 1965), Translated as The Tale of the Three Story Telling Machines. Essentially it is a matryoshka of stories. In particular, the tale of "Zipperupus, king of the Partheginians, the Deutons, and the Profligoths" contains several titled stories-in-story presented as dreams from "dreaming cabinets":

Alacritus the Knight and Fair Ramolda, Daughter of Heteronius

The Marvelous Mattress of Princess Bounce

Bliss in the Eightfold Embrace of Octopauline

Wockle Weed

The Wedding Night of Princess Ineffabelle

Altruizyna, czyli opowieść prawdziwa o tym, jak pustelnik Dobrycy kosmos uszczęśliwić zapragnął i co z tego wynikło (collection Polowanie Wydawnictwo Literackie 1965)

Kobyszczę (collection Bezsenność Wydawnictwo Literackie 1971)

Edukacja Cyfrania: (collection Maska Wydawnictwo Literackie 1976)

Opowieść pierwszego Odmrożeńca

Opowieść drugiego Odmrożeńca

Powtórka (collection Powtórka Wydawnictwo Literackie 1979)

Seven Sallies of Trurl and Klapaucius

Polish title: Siedem wypraw Trurla i Klapaucjusza All these stories were first published in the 1965 Polish collection Cyberiada by Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Wyprawa pierwsza, czyli pułapka Gargancjana (The first sally, or the trap of Gargantius)

Wyprawa pierwsza A, czyli Elektrybałt Trurla (The first sally (A), or Trurl's electronic bard)

Wyprawa druga, czyli oferta króla Okrucyusza (The second sally, or the offer of king Krool)

Wyprawa trzecia, czyli smoki prawdopodobieństwa (The third sally, or the dragons of probability)

Wyprawa czwarta, czyli o tym jak Trurl kobietron zastosował, królewicza Pantarktyka od mąk miłosnych chcąc zbawić i jak potem do użycia dzieciomiotu doszło (The fourth sally, or how Trurl built a femfatalatron to save prince Pantagoon from the pangs of love, and how later he resorted to a cannonade of babies)

Wyprawa piąta, czyli o figlach króla Baleryona (The fifth sally, or the mischief of king Balerion)

Wyprawa piąta A, czyli konsultacja Trurla (The fifth sally (A), or Trurl's prescription)

Wyprawa szósta, czyli jak Trurl i Klapaucjusz demona drugiego rodzaju stworzyli, aby zbójcę Gębona pokonać (The sixth sally, or how Trurl and Klapaucius created a demon of the second kind to defeat the pirate Pugg)

Wyprawa siódma, czyli o tym jak własna doskonałość Trurla do złego przywiodła (The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good)

Trurl and Klapaucius are brilliant (robotic) engineers, called "constructors" (because they can construct practically anything at will), capable of almost God-like exploits. For instance, on one occasion Trurl creates an entity capable of extracting accurate information from the random motion of gas particles, which he calls a "Demon of the Second Kind". He describes the "Demon of the First Kind" as a Maxwell's demon. On another, the two constructors re-arrange stars near their home planet in order to advertise.

The duo are best friends and rivals. When they are not busy constructing revolutionary mechanisms at home, they travel the universe, aiding those in need. As the characters are firmly established as good and righteous, they take no shame in accepting handsome rewards for their services. If rewards were promised and not delivered, the constructors may even severely punish those who deceived them.

The universe of The Cyberiad is pseudo- medieval. There are kingdoms, knights, princesses, and even dragons in abundance. Robots are usually anthropomorphic, to the point of being divided into sexes. Love and marriage are possible. Physical and mental disabilities, old age and death, particularly in case of accidents or murder, are also common, though mechanical language is used to describe them. Death is theoretically avoidable (by means of repair), and sometimes even reversible.

In fact, the teacher of Trurl and Klapaucius, Master Cerebron, is deceased, but can still be reanimated at his tomb. The level of technology of the vast majority of inhabitants is pseudo-Medieval also, with swords, robotic steeds, and gallows widespread. With this co-exist space travel, extremely advanced technology made by the Constructors and futuristic weapons and devices used or mentioned on occasion. There even exists a civilization that has achieved the "HPLD" - Highest Possible Level of Development.

Some stories are basically self-conscious parodies of romantic novels about knights, with more profound issues of psychology and social dynamics under a cartoonish and swashbuckling facade. Three of them were published in an earlier collection, Fables for Robots.

A typical example is the fairy tale O królewiczu Ferrycym i królewnie Krystalii ("Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal"). A princely (robotic) knight falls in love with a beautiful (robotic) princess. Unfortunately, the princess is somewhat eccentric, and is captivated by stories of an alien non-robotic, "paleface" civilization (the humans). She declares that she will only marry a "paleface". Therefore, the knight decides to masquerade as a paleface. He covers himself with mud, starting to resemble one, and then comes to woo her.

Meanwhile, a real "paleface" captive arrives, given as a gift to the king. It immediately becomes obvious to the princess who is the "muddier" one, but the "paleface" turns out to be too squishy and overall disgusting. Not wanting to back down at the last minute, however, the princess declares a joust between the two suitors to select the worthier one. When the "paleface" charges at the robot, he splatters himself on the latter's metal chest, revealing the metallic body to all. The princess, beholding the beauty of the exposed robot (compared with the ugliness of the "paleface"), changes her mind. The knight and the princess live happily ever after.

Most of the stories involve Trurl and Klapaucius using their extraordinary technological abilities to help the inhabitants of the medieval planets, usually involving neutralizing tyrants.

Trurl and Klapaucius come to a planet ruled by a king who loves hunting. He has already "conquered" all the most dangerous of predators, and now hires constructors (engineers) to make new, mighty robotic beasts for him to hunt. He has already executed all of the previous constructors who visited because they could not build beasts that would be challenging enough to hunt. When the two famous Constructors arrive, they are arrested and ordered to construct a worthy foe for the king within twelve days.

The two face a dilemma: if they make something that the king will kill, they will be executed by the mad king. But if the king himself is killed, then they will be executed, for the next king will be pressured to show his respect for the previous. They solve the problem by building an animal that survives the hunt (involving both cyber-hounds and nuclear tipped missiles unleashed upon it, in the characteristic cartoonish manner) and takes the king hostage by, nothing less, turning into several police officers and presenting an order for his arrest. All the king's men fail to find and free the king (partially because in searching for the fake policemen one half of the real police force arrests the other half), and he is released only after the Constructors' numerous demands are met.

On another occasion, Trurl and Klapaucius are captured by an interstellar "PHT" pirate. Trurl offers to build a machine capable of turning hydrogen into gold (something he can do manually, which he demonstrates by hand, mixing up protons and putting electrons around). However, the pirate turns out to have a PhD and cares not for the riches, but for knowledge (and in fact points out that gold becomes cheap if it is abundant). Trurl therefore makes a modified Maxwell's demon for him, an entity that looks at moving particles of gas and reads information that is, coincidentally, encoded in their random perturbations. This way, all the information in the universe becomes easily available. The demon prints out this information on a long paper tape, but before the pirate realizes most of the information is completely useless (although strictly factual) he is buried under the endless rolls of tape, ceasing to bother anyone.

Lem was very interested in the issue of the nature of an ideal society: compare his Peace on Earth, The Futurological Congress and Observation on the Spot.

The Highest Possible Level of Development civilization. A gravely injured hermit comes to Trurl's house and tells Trurl of Klapaucius's adventure: Klapaucius wanders across an old robot, who tells him that he has logically deduced the existence of a civilization that reached the highest possible level of development (hence "HPLD"). He has inferred the existence of such a civilization by figuring that if there are different stages of development, there will be one that is the highest. He was then faced with a problem of identifying that one; as he noted, everyone claimed that theirs was the HPLD.

Upon much research and thought, he decided that the only way to find it is by looking for a "wonder", i.e. something that has no rational explanation. Eventually Klapaucius discovers one such wonder: a star in the shape of a cube, orbited by a planet also shaped like a cube with the huge letters HPLD written on it. He lands and meets its inhabitants: a group of about 100 individuals lying around doing nothing. When the HPLDs grow tired with Klapaucius's efforts to extract answers from them, they teleport him and his ship far into outer space, albeit after filling the ship with gifts.

Seeing how he will not get anywhere this way, Klapaucius constructs a massive machine capable of simulating the entire universe, including a member of the HPLD civilization. Upon questioning the simulation, he is informed that over six million such interrogations took place in the past. The simulation also reveals that the civilization in question has long since achieved the HPLD, and thus has nothing else to strive for.

When Klapaucius asks why the HPLD civilization does not continuously engage in helping other, less advanced civilizations, the simulation explains that their attempts to do so in the past have proven extremely counter-productive. For instance, having dropped some millions of wish-fulfilling devices on a planet, they saw it blow up in a matter of hours. Eventually, the HPLD representative provides Klapaucius with the formula for "Altruizine" - a substance that allows individuals within a limited area to completely share all feelings and emotions, including both pain and joy. The idea behind Altruizine is that people who feel each other's pain as their own should treat each other as they would themselves.

Altruizine. Klapaucius produces a large quantity of the substance and sends the above-mentioned hermit (who is eager to help others) in human guise to experiment on the population of a single planet. Some of the results include villagers feeling the birth pains of a cow, depressed people being violently attacked and driven off and a crowd storming the house of the newlyweds to vicariously participate in their unaccustomed sensations.

Eventually, the hermit is identified for a robot (because he does not feel the humans' pain), is thoroughly beaten and tortured, then shot into outer space via a cannon. He then lands near Trurl's house, where the story began. Concluding his tale, the hermit assures Trurl that his thirst for altruism has vanished.

Trurl and the construction of happy worlds. Trurl is not deterred by the cautionary tale of altruizine and decides to build a race of robots happy by design. His first attempt are a culture of robots who are not capable of being unhappy (e.g. they are happy if seriously beaten up). Klapaucius ridicules this. Next step is a collectivistic culture dedicated to common happiness. When Trurl and Klapaucius visit them, they are drafted by the Ministry of Felicity and made to smile, sing, and otherwise be happy, in fixed ranks (with other inhabitants).

Trurl annihilates both failed cultures and tries to build a perfect society in a small box. The inhabitants of the box develop a religion saying that their box is the most perfect part of the universe and prepare to make a hole in it in order to bring everyone outside the Box into its perfection, by force if needed. Trurl disposes of them and decides that he needs more variety in his experiments and smaller scale for safety.

He creates hundreds of miniature worlds on microscope slides (i.e. he has to observe them through a microscope). These microworlds progress rapidly, some dying out in revolutions and wars, and some developing as regular civilizations without any of them showing any intrinsic perfection or happiness. They do achieve inter-slide travel though, and many of these worlds are later destroyed by rats.

Eventually, Trurl gets tired of all the work and builds a computer that will contain a programmatic clone of his mind that would do the research for him. Instead of building new worlds, the computer sets about expanding itself. When Trurl eventually forces it to stop building itself and start working, the clone-Trurl tells him that he has already created lots of sub-Trurl programs to do the work and tells him stories about their research (which Trurl later finds out is bogus). Trurl destroys the computer and temporarily stops looking for universal happiness.

Note that the last section of the story, does not appear in Michael Kandel's English translation of The Cyberiad, and neither does in Italian translation.

In 1970, Krzysztof Meyer composed - an opera to his own libretto based on selected stories.

The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good (Polish title: Wyprawa siódma, czyli o tym jak własna doskonałość Trurla do złego przywiodła) was adapted as part of the plot for the film Victim of the Brain, there called The Perfect Imitation.

The Seventh Sally was also an inspiration of the game .

An elaborate interactive Google Doodle inspired by The Cyberiad was created and published in his honor for the 60th anniversary of Lem's first published book: The Astronauts.

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The Cyberiad ( Polish: Cyberiada) is a series of humorous science fiction short stories by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, originally published in 1965, with an English translation appearing in 1974. The main protagonists of the series are Trurl and Klapaucius, the "constructors". The vast majority of characters are either robots or intelligent machines.

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Stanislaw Lem 1921-2006

Lem is both a polymath and a virtuoso storyteller and stylist. Put them together and they add up to a genius... He has been steadily producing fiction that follows the arcs and depths of his learning and a bewildering labyrinth of moods and attitudes. Like his protagonists, loners virtually to a man, his fiction seems at a distance from the daily cares and passions, and conveys the sense of a mind hovering above the boundaries of the human condition: now mordant, now droll, now arcane, now folksy, now skeptical, now haunted and always paradoxical. Yet his imagination is so powerful and pure that no matter what world he creates it is immediately convincing because of its concreteness and plentitude, the intimacy and authority with which it is occupied... read Lem for yourself. He is a major writer, and one of the deep spirits of our age.

Theodore Solotaroff "The New York Times Book Review"

Yet his writing reached far beyond the borders of the genre. In addition to many novels and stories, he composed a huge philosophical treatise on the relation of human beings and machines, a good deal of pungently argued literary criticism, a volume of reviews of nonexistent books, a stochastic theory of narrative fiction, an experimental detective novel, speculative essays dealing with artificial intelligence, cybernetics, cosmology, genetic engineering, game theory, sociology, and evolution, radio plays and screenplays. Such staggering polymathic curiosity over such a vast range of material, all of it explored with lucidity and charm, gives his writing a unique place on a Venn diagram in which the natural sciences, philosophy, and literature shade into one another with mutually intensifying vividness and fascination.

Paul Grimstad, The New Yorker, January 6, 2019

A brilliant trip back to the technological future

It is amazing how much Lem got right, or even predicted. This ranges across artificial intelligence, the theory of search engines (he called it "ariadnology"), bionics, virtual reality ("phantomatics"), technological singularity and nanotechnology.

Simon Ings "New Scientist"

Is there an English edition of Golem XIV? And where can I get a copy ...

where can I read it in the original Polish? thanks

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If you not change browser settings, you agree to it. Lem is both a polymath and a virtuoso storyteller and stylist. Put them together and they add up to a genius... He has been steadily producing fiction that follows the arcs and depths of his learning and a bewildering labyrinth of moods and attitudes.