Many years ago, I read some short stories by the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem.\u00a0 I remember they had futuristic elements like interstellar travel but they also included a certain amount of communist doublespeak about socialist this and soviet that.\u00a0 And that seemed really odd.<\/p>\n
But recently War Dog mentioned favorably the \u201cThe Cyberiad\u201d collection of stories and its mathematical love poem so I decided to give Lem another whirl.<\/p>\n
The stories in this book are the adventures of two robot inventors, or as they are called in their world Constructors, named Trurl and Klapaucius.\u00a0 And when I say robot inventors I mean to say that they are inventors who are themselves robots.\u00a0 They are friends and rivals and from time to time enemies.\u00a0 They go on assignments together or separately taking on contracts to build just about anything imaginable.\u00a0 And sometimes they build things for themselves that don\u2019t always seem to be very sensible.\u00a0 For instance, one- time Trurl constructed a machine that could create anything starting with the letter n.\u00a0 It could make needles, negligees, nepenthe, narcotics, nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads but not natrium.\u00a0 And why not?\u00a0 Because natrium is Latin for sodium and in English sodium starts with s!\u00a0 Later on, being told to make nothing<\/u><\/strong> almost puts an end to the universe but luckily Trurl stops the machine just in time.<\/p>\n So as you can see this is comic science fiction. It\u2019s something sort of in the same vein as Douglas Adams\u2019 The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy\u201d but what it also reminds me of is Lewis Carroll and his Wonderland stories.\u00a0 There is an enormous amount of wordplay and punning going on in the stories.\u00a0 The interesting thing is that a lot of the word play is specific to English and these stories were written in Polish which makes me wonder if the translator had to find English equivalents for Polish puns.<\/p>\n The Constructors become involved in adventures that take them all through the cosmos fulfilling contracts for kings and emperors and pirates and sometimes for common people who just really need help.\u00a0 They build monsters and demons and story telling machines and even machines that know everything about the whole universe.\u00a0 Interestingly it seems most of the universe is populated by robots and other cybernetic beings.\u00a0 Organic beings exist and seem to be pretty generally looked down upon by the robots.\u00a0 But the robots are very human in their foibles and behavior and none more so than our heroes Trurl and Klapaucius.<\/p>\n Mixed in with the zaniness of each of their adventures is a good dose of irony about the human condition.\u00a0 The selfishness and cruelty of many of their employers and the vanity and greed of the Constructors themselves is often the point of the stories and the fantasy setting is there to add humor and interest to the tale.\u00a0 And also Lem is enjoying the poetic aspect of the words.\u00a0 Sure, we can\u2019t hear the Polish words to know it\u2019s poetical but based on the English words you can see that Stanislaw Lem is like a \u201cdrunken lord of language\u201d always using twenty words for effect where one is needed for meaning.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an example:<\/p>\n \u201cMultitudinous are you?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are!\u201d\u00a0 they shouted, bursting with pride.\u00a0 \u201cWe are innumerable.\u201d<\/p>\n And others cried:<\/p>\n \u201cWe are like fish in the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLike pebbles on the beach.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLike stars in the sky.\u00a0 Like atoms!\u201d<\/p>\n You get the idea.\u00a0 Lem is a poet.\u00a0 And his stories are parables.\u00a0 And because of this I find that it needs to be broken up and digested in small chunks.\u00a0 Each of the chapters is a separate story and should be approached as such.\u00a0 With all of the word play and digressions you can lose track of the nub of the story if you\u2019re tired and not paying attention so I wouldn\u2019t suggest reading them at night before going to bed.\u00a0 This happened to me once or twice and I realized this wasn\u2019t the kind of material that can be enjoyed at high speed like an adventure novel.\u00a0 But if you give each story some time and attention it will reward you with a smile and a chuckle.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad now I was made aware of The Cyberiad.\u00a0 I will enjoy returning to the adventures of the two intrepid Constructors Trurl and Klapaucius on some cold night in January when my world needs something lighthearted and clever to get me through the short days and long nights of winter.\u00a0 But if you don\u2019t like an airy, poetical style of writing this might not be for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many years ago, I read some short stories by the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem.\u00a0 I remember they had futuristic elements like interstellar travel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,237,4,242],"tags":[68,168,38,1355,265,2601,2602],"class_list":["post-11624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-book-review","tag-humor","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-science-fiction","tag-stanislaw-lem","tag-the-cyberiad"],"yoast_head":"\n