Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50147 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Review
Trurl the constructor whose inventions tend to make life complicated for anyone in the vicinity and his cohort Klapaucius make their welcome appearance in this attractive collection by Polish SF writer Lem (translated by Michael Kandel). Asking the machine that can do everything to do nothing almost destroys the universe and a more benevolent creation wipes out war or at least one battle; and there are various other wonders worth pondering. The intelligent, ironic Lem is a real find. (Kirkus Reviews)

Language Notes
Text: English, Polish (translation)

About the Author
Stanislaw Lem is the most widely translated and best known science fiction author writing outside of the English language. Winner of the Kafka Prize, he is a contributor to many magazines, including the New Yorker, and he is the author of numerous works, including Solaris.

Customer Reviews

This should be renamed: The Cyberetard.
I actually managed to wade through several of the "stories" in this book before I gave up.

For the most part, books should be enjoyable to read.

This one by Lem (like many others) requires a lot of work on the readers part to sort though the jumble of non-sense words.

I've never done drugs; however, I believe you have to in order to read one of his books.

I understood all the words he used - I guess he just didn't put them in the right order; because it sure was tiresome to read...

Better than His Masters Voice - Not by much though.

Hugely disappointing
This book received such great reviews, but I found it incredibly boring. Particularly because every story followed the same format, and there were no "rules" to his universe.

Basic story outline:
Protagonists: "Let's go visit planet ABC!"
King of ABC: "I have a problem you need to solve, it might be considered a riddle!"
Protagonists: "We'll just create a machine to do it, because we can build machines that can do absolutely anything!"
King of ABC: "Alas, you have outsmarted me!"
Protagonists: "That was troubling! Let's not go to ABC again!"

If you can create a machine that can do anything, then basically the machine and its creator are basically gods, and therefore there will be nothing interesting in their stories. There is no conflict worth telling a story about when everything can be solved by the snap of a finger.

Furthermore, even though the stories are about robots and space travel, this book is NOT science fiction, it's just space fantasy. The stories seem like they were written by someone with just a passing understanding of science. Granted, you have to take Lem's time era into consideration, but the pulp magazines of early last century did a much better job of creating stories about future technology.

You could replace Lem's robots with summoned demons and his space ship with a horse and the story would not change, because there are zero rules in his universe, and that is an incredibly unforgiving fault.

Philosophical gem
This is an ultimate classic for those that love Kafka, mathematical games and philosophy. In a series of fantastic stories Lem shows to be a master in crafting compelling stories, all vivid and laden with simple yet deep wisdom. All stories do leave philosophical traces that may positively linger on in your head for days.

The translation is outstanding. Originally written in Polish, yet the translation of Michael Kandel is perfect. If you wouldn't know better, you'd think the book was natively written in English.