The Cyberiad’s protagonists are mainly anthropomorphic robots that live in a medieval-like world, robotic knights and dragons that exist in a highly technologically advanced civilization and that serve Lem to analyse the relationship between individual and society.Ĭover of Cyberiada (Krakw, 1965)

This summarises one of the stories that form part of the Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem, a Polish writer of science fiction who died 14 years ago, on 27 March 2006. Illustration from Cyberiada (Kraków, 1965) So it brought back nausea, narrow-mindedness, nonsense, necrophilia… But the machine could recreate only the things that started with n.

The terrified constructor and his friend begged it to stop and restore everything that had disappeared. And it set out to remove all the things from the world in order to create Nothing. The machine had a very good understanding of abstract philosophical concepts. The machine seemed inactive and the constructor’s friend decided that the experiment was a failure:įor Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme, in its very own nonperson! His friend wanted to put the machine to a test, and, after it successfully fulfilled his wishes, he asked it to do Nothing. The constructor decided to try it out and, following his orders, the machine produced needles, noses and nuclei.

Read more original illustrations.Once upon a time, a genius robotic constructor built a machine that could create anything that starts with the letter n. This edition includes all of Daniel Mroz's hallucinatory. Charming, mind-bending and anarchic, it is perhaps Lem's greatest work. The Cyberiad is oddly reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. 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. '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.

Description for The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback.

The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem