Book Review: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

This book is a series of short stories featuring two "constructors" named Trurl and Klapaucius. They are robots that build other machines for their own entertainment or at the requests of others. Often, those others are government officials or royal personages, the sort of beings who can pay handsomely for the work. The two robots have many comic misadventures as they try to satisfy customers and to make the customers pay for their services.

The stories are mostly satirical. Rulers want ultimate power (with which they might oppress their people and dodge paying the robots) or fantastic entertainment. Trurl is usually the one to deliver, being both more egotistical and more gullible than Klapaucius. They travel all over the galaxy, like Aeneas in The Aeneid (hence this book's title). They encounter strange worlds (like the square planet with a square sun) and even stranger requests. The comedy has the wit of Jonathan Swift and the whimsy of Douglas Adams and the intellectual bent of Umberto Eco. Lem satirizes ideas from science, philosophy, and literature.

I found the book entertaining, though sometimes Lem goes overboard in making up words or being extremely silly. I laughed out loud a few times and was surprised by the light and comic touch. After reading Solaris, this book gives a very different experience of what the author can do.

Recommended, especially for some Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy humor taken to an Umberto Eco level.

Sample text, a minor character explaining why it can't impose Universal Happiness on others:
"If I understand you correctly, you wish us to bestow happiness upon everyone. Well, we devoted over fifteen millennia to that project alone--that is, eudaemonic tectonics, of which there are basically two schools, the sudden and revolutionary, and the slow and evolutionary. Evolutionary eudaemonic tectonics consists essentially in not lifting a finger to help, confident that every civilization will eventually muddle through on its own. Revolutionary solutions, on the other hand, boil down to either the Carrot or the Stick. The Stick, or bestowing happiness by force, is found to produce from one to eight hundred times more grief than no interference whatever. As for the Carrot, the results--believe it or not--are exactly the same, whether you use an Ultradeifact, Hypergnostotron, or even an Infernal Machine and Gehennerator." [pp. 266-267]

Book Review: Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage by J. Muth et al.

Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage adapted by Jon J. Muth and translated from Stanislaw Lem's short story by Michael Kandel

Spacefarer Ijon Tichy's spaceship is hit by a tiny rock which destroys the guidance system and puts a hole in one of the rudders. When he goes outside the ship to fix it, he realizes the job requires two people. He gets back in the ship, lamenting his fate, as the ship is headed through a region of gravitational vortices. The vortices cause time loops. One night, Ijon is woken up by a future Ijon, whom the first Ijon assumes is a dream. The second Ijon is really frustrated because they could fix the ship if they would just work together. Later, Ijon experiences the encounter from the other side and then encounters another one of himself. While he is trying to work out what is going on, his future self bemoans his own prior stupidity. When the ship hits more complex vortices, even more Ijons show up. But will the ship ever get fixed?

This story is a comic masterpiece and a well-thought out time travel story, for the most part. Ijon lives through both sides of incidents several times, sometimes lying to himself in moments of panic or confusion. Ijon is both too smart for his own good and too quarrelsome to get along with himself. I laughed out loud several times. The watercolor-style drawings fit the tone quite well.

Highly recommended. Ijon Tichy has many stories by Lem (from the supplementary material, I gather Tichy is a bit like Gulliver from Gulliver's Travels) and I am inspired to seek them out, even if they are only text!