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The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem , Michael Kandel (Translator

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The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem , Michael Kandel (Translator Read and Download Ebook The Cyberiad... The Cyberiad Stanis?aw Lem , Michael Kandel (Translator) , Daniel Mróz (Illustrator) PDF File: The Cyberiad... 1 Read and Download Ebook The Cyberiad... 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 Solaris. 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 : Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Humor Download The Cyberiad ...pdf Read Online The Cyberiad ...pdf Download and Read Free Online The Cyberiad Stanis?aw Lem , Michael Kandel (Translator) , Daniel Mróz (Illustrator) PDF File: The Cyberiad... 2 Read and Download Ebook The Cyberiad... 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) PDF File: The Cyberiad... 5 Read and Download Ebook The Cyberiad... (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'.
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