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The Cyberiad Stanis?aw Lem , (Translator) , Daniel Mróz (Illustrator)

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The Cyberiad

Stanis?aw Lem , Michael Kandel (Translator) , Daniel Mróz (Illustrator)

The Cyberiad Stanis?aw Lem , Michael Kandel (Translator) , Daniel Mróz (Illustrator) A brilliantly funny collection of stories for the next age, from the celebrated author of . Ranging from the prophetic to the surreal, these stories demonstrate Stanislaw Lem's vast talent and remarkable ability to blend meaning and magic into a wholly entertaining and captivating work.

The Cyberiad Details

Date : Published December 16th 2002 by Harcourt (first published 1965) ISBN : 9780156027595 Author : Stanis?aw Lem , Michael Kandel (Translator) , Daniel Mróz (Illustrator) Format : Paperback 295 pages Genre : , Fiction, Short Stories, Humor

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From Reader Review The Cyberiad for online ebook

Maciej Blizi?ski says

It starts off as a series of cute and amusing stories featuring ridiculously human robots. But soon, you realize you're reading and thinking, what is happiness?

When you progress through the book, stories become longer and more involved.

I really like the tension between Trurl and Klapaucius, who are both brilliant constructors and friends, but who compete against each other.

Jason Plein says

There's a blurb on the back of the book comparing Lem to Borges, which is about right: there is a long section towards the end which is stories nested in stories nested in stories, one of which is a story about someone trapped in a labyrinth of dreams nested in dreams nested in dreams, and there's a story that is sort of a sillier, sci-fi version of Borges' story "The Immortals". What a comparison like that misses is just how silly and playful these stories are.

Greg says

I first came across Stanislaw Lem by way of an absolutely fantastic book called The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul in which three of his short stories were featured. His stories touched on issues in philosophy, topics having to do with artificial intelligence, consciousness, physics, mathematics programming, and more. Upon reading these my thoughts were something along the lines of, "this is one of the most fabulous authors I've ever come across, how have I never heard of him?" I picked up The Cyberiad because I knew it contained two of the short stories I had read and assumed the quality of the book as a whole was on par with my experience, but halfway through The Cyberiad I my thinking was more along the lines of, "what the hell is this?"

The Cyberiad is a collection of short stories that take place in a very distant future, revolving around two characters name Trurl and Klaupacius, synthetic conscious robot type lifeforms in a universe where humans are but a distant memory. Trurl and Klaupacius are constructors, which means their profession involves building everything from the smartest machine in the universe, to an entire universe housed within a glass ball. Stanislaw Lem was obviously brilliant. The man understood physics and computing at a level far beyond his time, especially for a science fiction writer. His stories are infused with so much scientific terminology and mathematics that a reader not familiar with these terms might as well be reading gibberish. And herein lies half the problem. While his knowledge of these ideas is obvious, the way he uses them is often times nonsensical. Not only is the use of these terms and ideas mostly nonsensical, but the stories they are contained within and wrapped around are mostly nonsensical themselves. Many of the stories are absurdest. I would assume they were written for children if it wasn't for the complexity of the vocabulary and ideas.

For those readers that have read The Neverending Story, picture the story telling style contained within that book(the randomness and seeming inexhaustible supply of non sequiturs and incidental information) in a

PDF File: The Cyberiad... 3 Read and Download Ebook The Cyberiad... science fiction setting written by Douglas Adams on acid. It wasn't until over half way through the book before the stories started incorporating a more serious philosophical underbelly. In the end the last few stories were recognizable to me as the author that initially amazed me so. Even till the very end they all contain some element of absurdism, but you can tell there is more going on. If the earlier stories had anything more to them, I must be too dense to have figured it out. This is a bit unfair. Almost every single story within the book had some very smart and ingenious aspect to it. But was for the most part lost within absurd narrative going on around it.

Douglas Adams has a way of being absurd that still remains engaging and entertaining and somehow always feels like there is deep meaning infused in each progressive paragraph. Stanislaw Lem had the opportunity to create that, but chose a different path. Still, these stories are FUNNY. And the word play and narrative structure is really brilliant. I was continuously amazed that this wasn't written in english because so much of the comedy and style depended on a very specific structure. Kudos to whoever did this translation.

OD says

Not only did this book make me want to read everything that Lem has ever written, it also makes me want to buy everything Michael Kandel has ever translated.

One of the saddest things about becoming an adult is growing bored with most of the stories you loved as a child - the Jatakas, the Panchatantras, folk stories. Finding the Cyberiad is like rediscovering your childhood love of fables. This is a book I'm going to be coming back to many many times.

Gabriella says

Stories: A mix of good, boring, thought-provoking, and bad. Main characters: Seldom comedic. A bit whiney. Emotionally uninvesting. Writing: Okay at first, but very annoying by the end. I lost interest after the writing structure started to become more and more ridiculous and hard to read/understand. By trying to be creative, it basically seemed like he used a math or science term and added a couple letters to the end of it to make it sound latin. It felt very forced and unimaginative. A couple of these in a paragraph to give something a name would have been fine, but every sentence seemed almost made up of this gibberish (Thisicus wouldabar be the naminad of a personia or a sentencera). In addition to replacing the simplest of words with long strung-out technical sounding jargon, some of the character names seemed to lack creativity as well (a character named Mygrayne - aka migraine?). The chapters that did not have this sort of writing were far more bearable to read and enjoyable. Summary: All in all, this was a giant disappointment. It seemed interesting enough at first, but the farther and farther I got into the book, the less I wanted to read it. I'm not quite sure what people see in this book. Maybe it was better in the original Polish version and got lost somewhere in the translation.

Taro says

Overall, very funny. Though, as some stories did lag a bit, I was inclined to give this book a 3.5, maybe even

PDF File: The Cyberiad... 4 Read and Download Ebook The Cyberiad... a 3.7 . BUT, and this is a very big but, the translation is AMAZING and earns the book a whole star on its own. Lem is a great author but Michael Kandel is a genius. Math and philosophy jokes... restrictive poetry... restrictive poetic math joke - translated fluidly into English. I call shenanigans the only explanation is shenanigans.

But on to the text. Cyberiad the hilarious tales of two "constructors" who travel the universe and get into trouble or glory. Not explicitly stated until later in the book but every character is a robot(view spoiler). Mechanic life evolved from robot ancestors who broke free of their chains from the earlier, "squishy" water based beings that created them. Confirmation later that this is in *our* universe (reference to the Crab Nebula), but as to when, I can't exactly be so sure. Laughs abound, though as I said earlier a couple of the stories did run long, making it hard to get through. I like seeing "Sally" as a noun (from the verb eg 'sally forth'), I don't know if I've seen that before. Illustrations were great.

Finally, though I'm sure other posters have done it, I need to share the math poem for you all. Genius in design and genius in translation. A poetry machine is asked to provide "A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics." (view spoiler)

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(hide spoiler)] (original emphasis)

Michael R. says

Originally I was just thrilled to find a SF book by an author actually in Poland. But, after I read the book, I was amazed. Still one of the funniest books I have ever read. Two competing robots (Trurl and Klaupacius) who try to out-invent each other, create some of the most wild constructs that anyone could ever imagine.

One being the machine Trurl creates that can make anthing that starts with the letter 'N'. Things really get wild when Klaupacius tests the machine by asking it to create 'nothing'.

But my favorite was the three story tall calculating machine. But no matter how many times the massive computer is reprogrammed, whenever asked the answer to the equation of '2 + 2' is always '7'! And the machine is quite definative about it's answer too. I like these passages so much I used them in my college speech class.

If you could use a good laugh, 'The Cyberaid' is the answer!

Stephen says

3.5 stars. My first experience with Stanislaw Lem and it will certainly not be my last. The stories are very good (some are brilliant), but I believe they work better in small doses rather than one after the other. Nonetheless, a gifted writer.

Manny says

One of the most brilliant pieces of translation I've ever come across. You can hardly believe that all these wonderful jokes and word-games weren't originally composed in English. I wish I knew some Polish, so that I could compare with the original.

The most impressive sequences, which have been widely quoted, come from the story where one of the inventors builds a machine that can write a poem to any specification, no matter how bizarre. "A poem about love, treachery, indomitable courage, on the subject of a haircut, and every word to start with the letter S!" says his friend. And within a few seconds, the machine has produced:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide.

The love poem where all the metaphors come from the language of mathematics is nearly as good.

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Sandy Parsons says

Have you ever wanted to hug a book and kiss its cover, reserve a special place on your bookshelf so you can look forward to reading it again? This is a unique book. It's funny and smart philosophical science fiction, which isn't for everyone, but if you fall into that demographic, it's the archetype. I've had it on my 'to read' list for a long time, but bumped it up after listening to a podcast interview with David X. Cohen of Futurama. He didn't say explicitly it was an inspiration, but I noticed a certain flavor to the stories reminiscent of the show. It even has a character named Calculon. I couldn't help but picture the HPLDs as Nibbler's race, the bureauocrat as Hermes, Trurl as Prof Farnsworth, several of the constructs as Bender, etc. It's a rare thing for something to be fun and thought-provoking at the same time. Easy, fantastic read, all the more impressive since it was originally written in Polish.

Morgan says

I have to give this book an award for Best Chapter Title:

"The Fourth Sally, or How Trurl Built a Femfatalatron to Save Prince Pantagoon from the Pangs of Love, and How Later He Resorted to a Cannonade of Babies."

While the chapter on dragons is by far my favorite sally, mostly for the beginning theoretical explanations of how dragons cannot exist, except by bizarre partial probability equations. Ingenious.

As for Sally 1A, isn't it a bit bizarre that a robot builds the ultimate poetry machine, and that all the other robot poets are shamed by it? Considering it says, rather specifically, that machines cannot write verse (in that they have no soul, I believe it was--this was rather a lot of sallies ago)? Which is an interesting discussion point on the difference between robot and machine.

Overall, a masterpiece of science, mathematics, imagination, philosophy, theology, satire, robotkind, and humankind. An epic of the future, if Odysseus were a robot.

Stephen Banks says

Short form SciFi at it's best. Stanislaw Lem departs from his occasionally dour disposition (see: Solaris) with a series of very funny but also deeply philosophical "journeys" of a pair of Cybernetic engineers (Trurl and Klapacius). Each journey is a short story that stands alone, yet the whole collection is a complete consistent work. Lem uses absurdist plots and situations to poke fun at politics, religion, romance, war and even science.

The translation into English is phenomenal, keeping an incredible amount of linguistic play and puns. In one of the stories, Klapacius challenges Trurl to construct a machine that can create anything that begins with the letter N. Trurl succeeds, though the machine can't make Natrium (plain old salt) because, if it could make anything that began with N in any language in the universe, it could be a machine that could make anything at all, which is clearly impossible. Klapacius then orders the machine to make Nothing, and the valiant constructors must act quickly to save the universe. In another, a poetry machine creates an epic love poem all

PDF File: The Cyberiad... 7 Read and Download Ebook The Cyberiad... in the language of tensor algebra.

It's hard to over-recommend this wonderful work. I must have read it at least a couple dozen times.

Jenny (Reading Envy) says

I got to page 112, but honestly this is just not my thing. I loved Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, but somehow the circular storytelling employed in very short stories gets very repetitive. I don't find the humor funny or clever, it just feels like it is trying to hard. It smacks of Phantom Tollbooth or Hitchhiker's Guide, and these are just not my thing. Sorry, guess I'm going to lem* it. I was supposed to be on a podcast about it, but that's not going to happen!

I imagine that engineers really like this book though.

*lem - term coined by Sword and Laser readers to describe abandoning a book, originally chosen for the masses abandoning Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.

Voss Foster says

I first ran across The Cyberiad in desperation. It takes me next to no time to read books, so I quickly drained every last inch of our bookshelves by eighth grade, and the library had nothing.

My dear lord. Before I get into the writing itself, let's not forget the briliant translation, and this book would not be easy to translate, between alliterations, rhyming, and the sheerly brilliant nonsense (I use brilliant so much because one simply can't use that word enough when speaking of this book.), he had a Herculean challenge and met it.

Now, when it comes to the writing of Lem himself, you reach a new level. Most science-fiction fans will gladly preach the gospel of the European sci-fi authors, and Lem is unquestionably a great among them, in no small part due to The Cyberiad. While fans of hard sci-fi may find the ridiculous, operatic, humorous, pseudo-scientific stories pretty much revolting (though I doubt it), no one can deny the uniqueness of his worldbuilding (surprisingly deep, for nonsense) or the fabulous anti-hero, Trurl.

I feel terrible not being able to give more, in case someone hasn't read it, but it would not be right to reveal the glory here. Suffice it to say that this should live on every bookshelf, genre-bound or literati, and should be reread often and with much gusto. A true piece of art.

Nate D says

Cybernetic fables, simultaneously very old and very new. At his best, Lem is playful and wise in the manner of certain Calvino. At his worst, he tales off into long strings of silly words and technobabble puns. As such, I had to take a few breaks, but ended up being well rewarded for my time: the later stories-within-stories- within-stories (a nested Arabian Nights, or rather a Sarragossa Manuscript) seem to really be making an attempt to interrogate the universe, and its observations are sad and thoughtful beneath the clowning. I even actually felt myself drawn a little closer to the characters, props and automata that they may well be. Really,

PDF File: The Cyberiad... 8 Read and Download Ebook The Cyberiad... that's the main issue I had here: these really are fables more than stories, and as such it's difficult to really get close to the characters or narratives for the most part. But fables have there place of course, and many of these are good ones.

Toma says

Read this at least 5 times. Probably the best book (at least in its genre) I've read. Extremely funny and witty. With all the made up words and rhyming poems etc. must have been a nightmare to translators (I read the Finnish translation). I only wish I knew Polish so that I could read this in the original language.

Melanti says

If I had to pick just one word to describe Lem's fiction, it would be "experimental." All the books by him that I've read so far have been so incredibly different from one another - and often different from anything else I've read as well!

This particular book is a book of short stories about a pair of robots who run around the universe constructing other robots. In many places, it really reminds me of folklore trickster tales, in other places The Arabian Nights Entertainments, and in still others just common silliness. It's a lot of fun and a whole lot more accessible than some of his other work (such as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub that inspired the "lemming" of Sword & Laser infamy) and I think it would appeal to even those who aren't die-hard sci-fi fans.

In addition, I've got to say this is one of the most phenomenal pieces of translation I've come across in a long, long time. All the fantastic jokes and wordplay - including made up words, alliteration, poetry, word games - are all translated wonderfully. They're not word-for-word translations, of course. Such a thing wouldn't work at all with this sort of book. But Kandel took enough liberties with the text that if a joke just couldn't be directly translated and still be funny, he replaced it with a similar reading English joke. Which is rather daring, but that's really the only way this sort of book could ever be translated.

There's more than a few OCR errors through out but it's not NEARLY as bad as the other Stanislaw Lem books I've bought so I guess they at least ran this particular volume through spell check. Whew!

Spacewanderer says

I want to start off by saying that I rarely enjoy reading short fiction. I find it hard to commit or give a damn and I just want to get it all over with...like most people would feel about a common household chore. So many are nothing more than whispers of plots involving under-developed, overly-melodramatic characters that will be left behind after 20 pages, so why bother. Others seem to serve as nothing more than an author's literary masturbation (trademarked, not to be used without written permission of Spacewanderer, Inc., 2012), snapshots of the human condition framed in tiny little shadowboxes that, hopefully, were more rewarding for the author to write than they are for me to read. The fact of the matter is, the short story is fundamentally flawed and, as such, extremely difficult to write well. Not that there aren't good short stories and talented short story writers out there. It's just that there are so few. And even fewer entire collections of stories.

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I found "The Cyberiad" to be one of those rare examples. I actually cared about the two main characters, partly because they are likable, and partly because they are resident in each of the stories, so you get to know them. But, more importantly, stuff actually happens. Stories have conflict AND resolution. What a concept! As far as I'm concerned, this book should be required reading in every MFA writer's program in the United States.

Jose Moa says

Another masterwork of this brilliant writter.

Obviously i have read this work in spanish because this polish collection of tales is almost intranslatable,it is full of fun neologisms of all sort. It is a extremely funny and satiric book,but also serious deep in almost all branches of philosophy,transhumanism and physics . Lem builds a astounding medieval, cibernetic,mechanic world were he develops the adventures of two ciberetic beings ,the builders,Trul and Claupacius. Below this apparently absurd and grotesque fables,full of distorted philosophic ,matematical and physical neologisms ,underlie many times deep concepts of philosophy and advanced phisics and mathematics,carried to bizarre limits. For put a example,we have the astounding tale "The Dragons of Probability" where the builders make a machine that increases the probability till near 1,as a consecuence very improbable events become real and the second law of termodinamics is broken,this lead to very improbable arranges of the matter that makes possible the existence of dragons,the spontaneus motion of inert stones and so on.Other long tale touch subjects as the existence of God or themans creating robots and robots creating mans in a infinite loop.

A joker,satiric,extremely original and deep work that one reads with a big smile from the begining till the end. Without doubt reccomendable .

Seth says

If you're only going to read one Lem in your life...... seek medical help. There are several essential Lem books and stories.

And this is one of them. Both of them. Something like that. It's an essential Lem book of essential Lem stories.

The basic outline is simple: two robot inventors (they are robots and they invent robots... whether they invented themselves is indeed an open question) appear, one or the other or both, in some fashion, in a series of stories set in a universe of robots. The inventors--friends, rivals, and each the only one capable of understanding the other's genius--are Nasrudin-like figures, both wise and fools, both creating problems and solving them, meeting common (robot) folk and uncommon (robot) world leaders.

They try to one-up one another, they try to help one another, and through it all they teach by doing and do by teaching. Maybe the comparison to Mullah Nasrudin is more apt than I'd realized.

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If Mullah Nasrudin were two space-travelling robot inventors....

Yeah, that's the book.

Read it.

And btw, it's hilarious, it's a quick read, and it's really easy to get ahold of.

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