Customer Reviews

Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Imagine a mixture of Borges, Calvino, Saint-Exupéry, Pynchon, Douglas Adams, Samuel Beckett, L. Frank Baum, Dr. Seuss, Lewis Caroll, and perhaps a little Philip K. Dick. That's what this is like, sort of. It is a collection of stories, some profound, others 'merely' entertaining, written by a man who was clearly drunk on sheer linguistic exuberance. The sheer virtuosity of the language is breathtaking: the book is packed to the gills with puns, rhymes, nonsense words, and general verbal japery. Huge amounts of credit must of course go to the translator, Michael Kandel, on this score. I wish the book included translation notes; he must have had to rebuild innumerable language formations from scratch in order to make them work--and work dazzlingly well--in English. Particularly impressive in this regard are 'The Fifth Sally (A), or Trurl's Prescription,' a delightful bit of frippery driven almost entirely by verbal dexterity; and an extraordinary mathematical love poem related in 'The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electric Bard.' The centerpiece of the collection, however, must surely be the 'Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius,' which, as you would expect, includes a flurry of internal stories, some of which in turn have stories inside them. One of these internal stories, that of Mymosh the Self-Begotten, is in my opinion the book's highlight. If Sam Beckett had turned his hand to science fiction, this is what he would have written. It's as strange and unsettling as any of Sam's short novels. Finally, some mention must be made of the highly stylized illustrations by Daniel Mroz scattered throughout the book; they complement the action to perfection.

Lem is clearly having fun with The Cyberiad, and it's contagious. I had tried, some time ago, to read Tales of Pirx the Pilot, but I found the first tale so mind-numbingly dull that I couldn't bring myself to finish it. This, on the other hand, is a truly excellent collection, and you can rest assured tha I'll be checking out more of Lem in the near future.

More than anyone else, Stanislaw Lem understands the unique potential of the Science Fiction genre. His depictions of non-human intelligences, whether alien or artificial, are consistently compelling. His insight into humanity and our role in the Cosmos is unmatched (at least among SF authors). As far as I can tell, Lem has never written a bad book, and his reservoir of fresh ideas is limitless.

However, this is a review of a book, not an author :-), so...

I have read and enjoyed most of Lem's work, but I still go back and re-read The Cyberiad every year or so. I always hope to find something new, and I am never disappointed. It amazes me to see how many of the deepest ideas from Lem's other books are echoed somewhere in these stories. And their style is Lem's best: The futuristic "fable", mixing intellectual slapstick, brilliant wordplay, and deep philosophy as only Lem can.

I guarantee The Cyberiad will make you laugh hard and think harder. What more could you want from your reading?

First, the Cyberiad is an absolute hoot. It works on the highest literary levels with humor and insight. My only complaint is that Lem didn't write more of these cyber fables (I've got almost everything he's written that's been translated over the years and he's written quite a lot in this vein nd IT IS NOT ENOUGH - I WANT MORE!!). He's probably most famous for his book Solaris which I found an intriguing bore (personal taste only and could be a bad translation since I don't read in his native Polish). People who read Solaris as their first Lem book will find little in common with the Cyberiad. I avoided Lem for years because I pegged him as the author of Solaris and didn't realize what a virtuoso author he was. He will never win the Nobel because he's been stamped as a "Science Fiction" writer, sort of like Vonnegut, Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick are/were. He's different from all of them ... Read Solaris, The Invincible, and the Cyberiad and you'll see the range of his skills (good and bad). An aside: I was astounded when my 9 year old picked up the Cyberiad and read it obviously not getting a lot of the finer points) and then asked if he could find more books about Trurl and friends. He thought it was one of the funniest things he's read (and he likes the Harry Potter books also). Now, I wouldn't recommend Lem to most 9 year olds ...

I have head the great opportunity to read this novel in both English and Polish - Lem's native tongue. It contains great word play, clever ideas, and the ability to make you wonder about the limitless value of the world.

Greatly written prose in both languages - the translator into English deserves much credit. When you read it, you will taste every word and find it synonymous with fresh rasberries with whipped cream and chunks of pistachio nuts (or whatever floats your boat).

The Cyberiad is a mixture of humor parallel to one exhibited in the creations of Julio Cortazar and Douglas Adams. To ponder the existence of things as well as the presence of the most common objects is Lem's domain. Although I do not usually like to provide quotations for take out of context, they do not mean much, this one provides a great example of Lem's clever style:

"Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way ... "

In addition, if you as a reader know anything about the social attitudes of the late 70's in Poland, you will find this book to be a weird and exciting commentary on the Polish people of that particular period.

The Cyberiad is worth a read for many reasons, and it must be re-read on a regular basis. I highly recommend this collection of short stories for long reads, short reads, one-pagers, reading backwards, making codes by skipping every other word, and reading with your eyes closed. Once you have this book in your hands, you cannot go wrong from there.

I am baffled at how the previous reviewer could reduce the Cyberiad to a collection of name puns and logarithms jokes. The Cyberiad was sophisticated, humorous, profound and utterly original. Witness the pastoral poem on love and tensor algebra (with a little topology and higher calculus): Come let us hasten to a higher plane/ Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn/ Their indices bedecked from one to n/ Commingled in an endless Markov chain." And even though Lem wrote the Cyberiad in Polish, the translation is excellent - there is no caveman like grammer! I'm a fan of the Herbert-Niven school of science fiction but the Cyberiad showed me that science fiction can be so much more than the ubermensch and space battles. I think the comparison to Swift is apt though Lem doesn't have Swift's um, bathroom humor. Some stories reminded me of the Canterbury Tales. I think Lem is a far superior humor writer than Douglas Adams (why is he so famous?) whose Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy is threadbare and juvenile compared to the Cyberiad. Anyway, to the point: dear reader, please purchase The Cyberiad, it is in a class of its own.

These tales for the cybernetic age are just as thoughtful and hilarious today as they were in Polish in 1972! The Cyberiad is a collection of short stories including the Seven Sallies of Trurl and Klapaucius. They are two "constructors" who unleash hilarity and destruction across the universe as they attempt to outdo one another in inventiveness.

As I read this book I was amazed that it was originally written in Polish. The translator has done a superb job of rendering it in colloquial English appropriate to the story and the humour. A must read not primarily as science fiction but as humorous social commentary.

I remember reading an article in Omni magazine in 1982 just before Tron came out where Steven Lisberger was talking about how free he was to invent computational mythology because it just did not exist. He was dead wrong. Lem already wrote it.

There are few books that make the geek in me smile as much as The Cyberiad does. Read it to your children.

I loved this book, although I'm unwilling to give a full 5 star rating because I didn't really like the characters, although they were often funny and Lem used them perfectly in the stories.

I am amazed that the book is actually translated from Polish. The language is so clever and well used that I'm sure that the translator probably deservers almost as much credit as Lem does.

My favorite is the Electronic Bard who is asked to write a poem: "This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!"

and the bard came out with:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

etc...

read the rest, it's well worth your time.

So it takes a Polish SF writer to craft a literary response to George Herriman's "Krazy Kat"? Actually, that probably wasn't the intent but the similiarities of this book to one of the newspaper's greatest comic strips is interesting. Herriman crafted his masterpiece around a simple concept, the cat loves the mouse, the mouse wants to hit the cat in the head with a brick and the cop wants to arrest the mouse while being in love with the cat. It's utterly simple and yet for years he found almost infinite variation in the premise.

And here we are, with another vastly simple premise. Trurl and Klaupacius are robot inventors, the best around. And they spend their time careening around the universe trying to out-invent each other. Most writers would find simply play it for straight comedy or saddle each story with a heavy-handed "message". Lem, brilliantly, does both and neither and manages to sustain for the length of an entire book. From the opening tale where they learn what happens when you tell a machine that can make anything to make nothing to the last strange and wonderful love story, Lem keeps finding inventive ways to tell the same tale.

And what a way he tells it. Also much like Herriman, Lem clearly loved the pure sound of words and using them much like you use sound effects to color a good movie, as cadence and rhythm and atmosphere, coming up with names that make no sense but read perfectly well and probably have multiple meanings if you know six different languages. It approaches Joyce in its virtuosity and what makes it even more amazing is this isn't even the book's native language . . . it was written in Polish and translated later and the fact that the translator was able to take all this, the wordplay and the nonsense syllables and the rest, and make it into something readable, is worth mentioning on all its own.

But what about the stories? In a word, fantastic. Those expecting straight science-fiction are liable to be disappointed because while the inventors live in a universe where you can hop planets with ease and build giant robots and the like, most of the "science" comes perilously close to technobabble or just Lem making things up for the sheer heck of it. Trurl and Klapacius live in a universe stuffed with kings and bizarre aliens and the impossible happening all the time and yet a certain sense of reality hangs over it. The characters know when to take it seriously and know when to go "Gosh, this is all rather ridiculous" and as such forces us to kind of accept that reality.

And boy, is it fun. Most of Lem's books, while having their moments of humor, are clearly serious affairs, generally him finding a way to use the story to make a comment on the genre or its conventions. Here, he's doing the same but letting his hair down in the process, having fun with words and language and not afraid to go for the absurd if the story calls for it. Gleefully so. As I mentioned in my title, they end one war by shooting babies out of cannons. And it's not horrible at all, and its kind of funny but at the same time feels like the most logical solution possible. So you go, "Of course, that's how it has to be." Gloriously so!

What I thought might be an interesting slog through a clearinghouse of ideas winds up being perhaps more substantial than most of Lem's works I've read so far. Yes, some of the stories are slight and probably just intended to make you laugh, there's a number of them that are making serious points underneath all the robot creating goofiness and strange words. The first page notes that these are "Fables for the Cybernetic Age" and while that age is way closer to us now than when Lem originally wrote the stories, that doesn't make them any less timely or more appropriate. We need to live in a world where the worst problems can be solved not only by ingenuity and determination, but by a good story. And barring that, entertaining us until we figure out how to make the bad times go away. As Lem says in the final tale, "There are certainly fables enough in this world. And yet, even if the story isn't true, it does have a grain of sense and instruction to it, and it's entertaining as well, so it's worth the telling." We need more stories worth the telling.

I was initially wary of this book. As a teenager, I tried to read something by Lem (The Tales of Prix the Pilot or something like that?), and was completely unimpressed. But as soon as I started this book, I found myself both pleased and attentive. Pleased, because it touched the humor in me in much the same way that Douglas Adams did in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and, given how much I love that book, this is high praise). In places, I wondered if maybe Adams had read Lem and decided to do him one better, for many of the set pieces in Hitchhiker seem to be exaggerated and elongated versions of some of the thrown-off bits here. And I was attentive, because I started to follow how the stories were constructed--how Lem built these fables from the simple beginnings of his two robot constructors into a long, elaborate study of what it means to be an inventor in a world that combines feudal elements and modern technology (i.e., somewhat similar to our own, if you bunny-hop over to the world next door). Funny, almost to the laugh-out-loud level, and very, very interesting.