Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #380871 in Books
• Published on: 1990-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Polish

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

Oddly Fascinating Space Adventures
This collection of stories by Lem is based around a chubby cadet by the name of Pirx. The character is plucky and gets into all sorts of fixes. I found the first short story the most surprising and fun to read. It's most vivid antagonist are two insects, and it's wildly creative. Another very good story is this one about a robot re-living over and over the last few hours before the death of an entire ship (this was before Pirx's time). A very haunting tale. Overall, a great collection!

The standard by which 'hard' sf should be judged
By intelligently (and often humorously) deflating many conventions and cliches of sf, the author reminds us that it is, first and foremost, a literature of ideas and not an escapist genre. In this collection of short stories, we follow protagonist Pirx through his training as a cadet and go along with him on a few routine space flights, most of them plagued by red tape. Lem seems to almost take glee in de-glamorizing space travel, but the fact remains that something about it fascinates and terrifies us, as it does his character Pirx. The truth of the matter, as the author so deftly illustrates in these tales, is that space is a void. The only thing that makes it come alive as a place of adventure or peril is the human imagination, which puts our hero Pirx in more jeopardy than any naturally occuring dangers. _Tales of Pirx the Pilot_ ranks as a top-notch book because, like all good sf, it does not allow a reader to run away from reality but makes one confront it thoughtfully

The Real Deal
Lem's Pirx is compelling and cool. The science is barely fictional and always thought provoking. The plots, however, are a little more predictable than the sequel. If you're going to read one of these, I'd recommend "More".