Stanislaw Lem
-
'There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.' The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. The Earth spaceship Hermes arrives on Quinta with the best of intentions towards the humans' 'brothers in intelligence'. But something on the planet has gone terribly wrong...
-
When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others suffer from the same affliction and speculation rises among scientists that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates incarnate memories, but its purpose in doing so remains a mystery . . . Solaris raises a question that has been at the heart of human experience and literature for centuries: can we truly understand the universe around us without first understanding what lies within?
-
A Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age - The New York TimesStanislaw Lem's set of short stories, written over a period of twenty years, all feature the adventures of space traveller Ijon Tichy and recount him spinning in time-warps, spying on robots, encountering bizarre civilizations and creatures in space and being hopelessly lost in a forest of supernovae. This is a philosophical satire on technology, theology, intelligence and human nature from one of the greatest of science fiction writers
-
-
'A virtuoso storyteller ... a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age ' The New York Times 'He was a robot-hypochondriac. On his squeaking cart he carried a complete set of spare parts.' A freighter pilot leads a manhunt across the Moon for a robot gone berserk; a shapeshifting assassin falls in love with the man she's programmed to kill; a paranoid King converts his kingdom into his artificial mind, but his dreams rebel. These stories range from surreal fables that satirically turn the fairy tale on its head, to longer works including the man vs. robot thriller, 'The Hunt', and possibly fiction's strangest love story, 'The Mask'. In Mortal Engines Stanislaw Lem lays bare humanity's clash with machines, masterfully exploring science fiction's furthest frontiers.
-
An astronaut returns to Earth after a ten-year mission and finds a society that he barely recognizes. Stanisaw Lem''s Return from the Stars recounts the experiences of Hal Bregg, an astronaut who returns from an exploratory mission that lasted ten years--although because of time dilation, 127 years have passed on Earth. Bregg finds a society that he hardly recognizes, in which danger has been eradicated. Children are "betrizated" to remove all aggression and violence--a process that also removes all impulse to take risks and explore. The people of Earth view Bregg and his crew as "resuscitated Neanderthals," and pressure them to undergo betrization. Bregg has serious difficulty in navigating the new social mores. While Lem''s depiction of a risk-free society is bleak, he does not portray Bregg and his fellow astronauts as heroes. Indeed, faced with no opposition to his aggression, Bregg behaves abominably. He is faced with a choice: leave Earth again and hope to return to a different society in several hundred years, or stay on Earth and learn to be content. With Return from the Stars , Lem shows the shifting boundaries between utopia and dystopia.
-
'Mission: vertical launch at half booster power. Ascent to ellipsis B68. Correction to stable oriental path, with orbital period of four hours and twenty-six minutes. Proceed to rendezvous with shuttlecraft vehicles of the JO-2 type. There await further instructions.' Tales of Pirx the Pilot imagines a world in which space travel has become routine and boring - an unremarkable aspect of the human condition. Pirx graduates through a series of stories from cadet to captain. He is regaled with anecdoates of the glory days, when space travel was dangerous and thrilling. And yet, even as he sits at the controls cursing that his little puzzle toy won't work in zero-gravity conditions or he makes himself comfy on the luxury space cruise ship Intergalactic , things keep going terribly wrong. As the cyberneticist Professor Taurov sighs: 'We have no choice but to trust to our technology. Without it we would never have set foot on the Moon. But... sometimes we have to pay a high price for that trust'.
-
A charming, mind-bending and anarchic book of imagined civilizations 'Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit to...' Trurl and Klapaucius are 'constructors' - they travel around the universe creating machines of astonishing inventiveness and power and visiting a bewildering variety of violent, peculiar and morose civilizations. The Cyberiad is oddly reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. Charming, mind-bending and anarchic, it is perhaps Lem's greatest work. This edition includes all of Daniel Mroz's hallucinatory original illustrations.
-
'What use to a being that lives beneath a sun are jewels of gas and silver stars of ice?' From a giant of twentieth-century science fiction, these four miniature space epics feature crazy inventors, surreal worlds, robot kings and madcap machines. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
-
-
-
