The Cyberiad

Now The Cyberiad completely got me back on board the Stanislaw Lem fan train. It was absolutely hysterical. This is a collection of short stories all about the adventures (or rather misadventures) of 2 (in)famous constructors as they make their way across the universe. (These journeys are called sallies which is a detail I adore.) Our heroes, Klapaucius and Trurl, are constantly trying to one-up each other not only with their creations but also with their status as constructors and benefactors to the cosmos. These robots are constructed for all kinds of constructive and inane reasons like storytelling, poetry, making war, etc. And the words that Lem makes up! I'm trying to think of a better word than delightful to describe my reading show more experience but honestly it was a treat to read a bit of this every night before bed. (If you don't laugh at the depiction of 'palefaces' i.e. humans then you have no sense of humor at all.) An absolute 10/10 for me. (And wait til you read the twist. O_O) show less

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Halfway the book, I started thinking about narrative voice. I don’t know how he did it, nor what the qualities are that make it so, but in this collection Lem sounds completely in control and authentic, even though he writes about future goofy rusty robots, doing completely impossible stuff, in situations that are, at times, insane. On top of that, he does so in a seemingly effortless, haphazard way – not at all like the polished stories of Borges or Chiang – even though Lem’s stories are clearly thought out as well.

Maybe it is the mixture of a future setting and the medieval stuff that makes for a voice that is timeless? Maybe the short story format helps the quasi mythical vibes that imbue the collection? Maybe it is show more Lem’s oblique portrayal of certain truths about the human condition that manages to make his authorial voice ring utterly true, and resonate with my own conception of reality?

I have a hard time parsing it, but, even in translation, Lem has managed to write something singular, authoritative, something that commands attention, and that quality becomes clear very quickly, after having read a few pages only.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It show less

Early in my experience with Unix-like systems I discovered `fortune`. This program would occasionally provide me with a clever passage attributed `-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"` "Who is this Stanislaw Lem fellow and what is a Cyberiad," I wondered. And then, because it was the mid-90s and search engines didn't exist yet, I did nothing.

A few years later, I started collecting quotes to add to my random signature program. A great many of them came from `fortune`, since it gave me a quip every time I logged in or out. The first Cyberiad quote that made it on the list was "[The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical.] They show more were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way." Different modes of nonexistence, a fantastic puzzle for a philosophy minor like me. I wanted to find and read this book.

There are a few books and authors I keep in the back of my mind for eventual purchase. It gives me direction when I find myself in a bookstore: check the D section of Classics for The Vicomte de Bragelonne, check the A section of Sci-Fi for the HHGTTG radio series scripts, check the L section of Sci-Fi for Stanisław Lem… You would think it wouldn't be too hard to find a book by "the most widely read science fiction writer in the world," yet ten years went by without finding one of his books between Le Guin and Lewis. Tantalizingly, Google ran a fantastic narrative doodle (http://www.google.com/logos/lem/) based on The Cyberiad. I finally found a copy when I chanced to stop in to Red Letter Books in Boulder, enticed by a book about mangoes on the shelf out front. "Before I buy this, I need to see if they happen to have any Lem." Sure enough, my Quixotic quest found its goal, wedged in a dense shelf of mass market paperbacks.

The Cyberiad is a book of short stories about machines who build machines. The central character is Trurl, a constructor. He and his good friend Klapaucius the constructor build all manner of robots and devices, often on commission from rulers of distant worlds. Unlike the science fiction school led by Asimov, the engineering details of the machines and their scientific mechanism of action are of little importance. The stories are not about the machines but about the philosophical considerations and allegorical implications of such a device in a world not entirely dissimilar from ours. The first story, How The World Was Saved (http://english.lem.pl/home/bookshelf/how-the-word-was-saved) concerns a machine that can create anything starting with N. After creating concrete and abstract nouns, they ask the machine to do Nothing, whereby it starts to eliminate the universe.

Originally written in Polish, the book has a lot of rhymes and wordplay with sciency terms which works surprisingly well in translation (to English, at least.) The sidebar to the right has a poem produced by Trurl's Electronic Bard. Lem has a great facility for technical naming in a way that's fun rather than dry: The second, newer trail was opened up by the Imperium Myrapoclean, whose turboservoslaves carved a tunnel six billion miles in length through the heart of the Great Glossaurontus itself.

What I like best about The Cyberiad is how it resonates with my experience as a constructor of sorts. The book was written in 1967, when hardware was still the king of technology, before we realized that software eats the world. Yet the story Trurl's Machine and other passages describe the foibles of building, debugging, and otherwise producing a computer program better than any software-focused essay I've read. Throughout the book, Trurl displays the three cardinal virtues of the programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. If more tales were added to the Cyberiad today, perhaps the constructors would be programs which write other programs.

All makers and builders and coders and creators would do well to read The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age. A hypermedia book report (http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/Cyberiad.html) claims the book inspired Will Wright to create SimCity; what might it do for you? Acquire it in cybernetic digital form or via a musty-bookstore-quest for a well-loved copy. show less

While I was initially tempted to treat this collection of 1965 short SF stories with kid gloves because I was already a huge fan of Solaris, I didn't quite understand that this collection was already a heavyweight of humor, satire, and delight.

Where the hell have I been? I should have read this back when I was a kid! Alongside Hitchhiker's Guide! As I read this, I gave a constant chuckle-rumble, especially with the Seven Sallies of Trurl and Klapaucius. These two master-builder robots get along with their wits and near-infinite capability to make things. Anything. And they are tricksters. Very funny tricksters.

The one time that Trurl made a poetry machine, I was f***ing spoiled by some of the best math poetry I've ever read, and here's show more the kicker: This was translated from Polish. Hell, it was translated into several dozen languages. But the English translation retained ALL its flavor. :) It was honestly funny.

All of this was light, clever, and always to the point. These are traditional fables, almost like the old Chivalric tradition, but add the element of gods granting everyone's wishes to the downfall of the wisher, and you've got a very good idea about what's going on here. Oh, and almost every character is a robot. The wisecracking kind.

I admit I've read a number of things *like* this, but never to this one's high quality. This is a perfect cure for grimdark malaise. :) show less

This book is so goofy! On one hand, it's a short story collection with consistent characters and something close to resembling a plot that ties everything together. On the other, it's an entire book of unapologetic technobabble.

Billed as a book of fables, and as such the morals of the stories are pretty heavy-handed. But since we have a lot of them with the same two folks there's a surprising amount of character development, even if there's an infinitesimal amount in each individual story.

The technobabble is great. You can dip in and out of it as you read - if you're feeling like reading some clever nonsense it's fun, and if you're not, you can skim through it knowing that most of it is just for flavor anyways.

In many ways this show more reminds me of Labyrinths by Borges, but I liked this book and didn't like that one. I think the difference was this: when reading Labyrinths I felt like the author was so proud of how clever the ideas in his stories were, and the Cyberiad is mercilessly skewering cleverness at every turn. show less

This is one of the best books I've ever read, encapsulating so much of what I love about speculative fiction and perhaps a highlighting what I miss about the transition into "science fiction" as we currently understand it.

It's hard to talk about this book without giving away its most beautiful moments, for Stanislaw Lem has written a book which unwraps itself with most beautiful coordination.

As you can imagine from its name, the book is to be read like the epics of a civilization, possibly a civilization long in the past ... except that in this case, the civilization is that of robots that have spread themselves across space, making this possible a post-human future.

The stories centre themselves around two "constructors", Trurl and show more Klapaucius. We don't know much about them, except that they seem to to be hardware engineers who can build basically any contraption and they are highly revered.

These characters are not particularly noble, but very few beings in Lem's universe are in our modern sense. Their constructions are flawed, but then the problems being solved are themselves the kind that are probably best not solved with technological approaches.

This book would probably frustrate the reader who expects every word in the fiction to be scientifically feasible; this book is more like Dune, using an envisioned future universe to explore the humanity of today rather than exploring the ins and outs of some technology in detail. But that's the fascinating bit ... what if a post-human culture was so advanced compared to us that it didn't really know how it spread across galaxies? What if our future was so ancient to them that it could only be expressed in myth? What would the myths of mechanical successors to humans be like?

I cannot tell if it was purposeful or not, but there's something about Trul and Klapaucius's non-hero antics and personality that I enjoy from a software developer point of view, even though I'd argue they are more hardware engineers. It evokes something that feels to me (admittedly someone who never lived it) like the tales of computing during the 60s and 70s. I wonder how a TV series of this book would, if presented properly, compare to the mythologies we watch in the form of "Silicon Valley" and "Halt and Catch Fire". Would we find similarities in the characters?

If you're the kind of person who likes Dune, or you're the kind of person who really enjoyed the Simillarion, or you're the kind of person who reads the epics of Gilgamesh and/or Homer or I don't know enjoys the bible or other religious texts as a narrative of a people, I highly highly highly recommend this book.

Kudos to the translator for making the english version as full of life and wit as the Polish version must have been; I cannot imagine that having taken anything but a lot of work and care. show less

(Original Review, 1980)

Some people’s complaint about "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is reminiscent of a friend's complaint about Stanislaw Lem's "Cyberiad: Tales for a Cybernetic Age". He thought it was just a series of disconnected tales that were "everything that sf is ridiculed as being", petty, and demeaning. Then one day I snuck up on him and read him the start of the story on Dragons and Probability, and he burst out laughing. Then he reread the book and enjoyed it immensely. All this is presented for just two reasons: (1) Maybe me friend was looking for too much or something the book was not intended to be (I found the little I've read of it to be rather humorous), and; (2) This seemed like a splendid opportunity to plug show more a great book. The only book I know of which makes jokes about the Laws of Thermodynamics, computers, robotics, atomic physics, and still is funny and very philosophical politically (Stanislaw Lem is a Polish author whose works are translated into English brilliantly).

P.S. I should warn that none of the other four books of his I've read have even come close, and most aren't even worth buying (though the intro to "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" is quite good). If you've been disappointed by his other works, don't let that stop you from reading "Cyberiad".

P.P.S. The story about the electronic bard is probably the best.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] show less