Books

Short works

Books : reviews

Stanislaw Lem.
The Cyberiad.
Penguin. 1974

One of the world’s most beloved science-fiction writers, Stanislaw Lem was famed for his wryly comic, outlandish imaginings of the relationship between humans and technology. In this playful cosmic fantasia, two ‘constructors’ compete to dream up ever more ingenious inventions in a universe beyond reality.

Stanislaw Lem.
The Star Diaries.
Orbit. 1976

Cosmonaut, time-traveller and battered hero of The Futurological Congress, Ijon Tichy makes his triumphant return, recording a dazzling array of voyages in time and space. Caught in a time-warp, pleading a shaky case for humanity at the intergalactic United Nations, spying ineptly on a planet whose robot inhabitants speak a grubby version of Chaucerian English, Tichy’s diaries are bizarre, unpredictable, frantic and sometimes deeply disturbing.

Stanislaw Lem.
Summa Technologiae.
University of Minnesota Press. 2013

In Summa Technologiae, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance, resonating with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.