THE CYBERIAD - STANISŁAW LEM

I’ve never read any Lem. Sadly, I’m pretty unversed in the non-American SciFi world. Early this year, I worked my way through all of the Three-Body Problem novels, which were quite good (reviews are obviously up on this website). I’ve heard of Lem, he’s probably the most famous non USAian SciFi author from my vantage point, and I love Solaris (the movie) and I’d heard that this was one of his best works. It did not disappoint. Lem actually solves the Superman problem, ie how do you write a story about a character(s) who have god-like powers, since, it would seem, that these powers would remove all the tension from your story. The Cyberiad takes this on from the very beginning. The book is a basically a series of short stories that follow two “constructors,” named, Trurl and Klapaucius, who are robot-wizards. This means that they can basically build anything they can imagine, at one point they rearrange the stars themselves to advertise their services, and who spend their time working on commission for various entities across the universe. Almost all of the characters in the book are robots or intelligent machines of some sort and they all seem to inhabit a sort of fantasy society of kings and knights and castles, just in space and with machines. Each of the stories cooks up an ingenious scenario to test these robots, from building a predator for a hunting-obsessed king to hunt, to escaping pirates, to meeting the civilization of highest possible development, to building a machine that can write poetry. Given how heavy at least the movie version of Solaris is, I guess I was expecting something more tonally bleak, but this book is all goofs and laughs and silly stuff. Even the language is really punny and full of internal rhyme, which raises some questions about the translation. “Fee-fi-fo-fum, plu-to-ni-um” and the reply: “one moment please, we are the Steelypips, and we have no fear, no spats in our vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon” is a typical example, this stuff is non-stop. Either way, it was a great light read. Trurl and Klapaucius are great characters who inhabit such a fun world I could have read a 10 book long series of these things. It would make a great goofy TV show.