Lem Stanislaw download all books 16 books

Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. Over the course of their adventures in , they travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their unsuspecting employers. Playfully written, and 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.

In this bold and controversial examination of the past, present, and future of science fiction, internationally acclaimed grand master Stanislaw Lem informs the raging debate over the literary merit of the genre with ten arch, incisive, provocative essays. Lem believes that science fiction should attempt to discover what hasn’t been thought or done before. Too often, says Lem, science fiction resorts to well-worn patterns of primitive adventure literature, plays empty games with the tired devices of time travel and robots, and is oblivious to cultural and intellectual values. An expert examination of the scientific and literary premises of his own and other writers’ work, this collection is quintessential Lem.

A former astronaut turned private detective is dispatched to Naples to discover the pattern in a mysterious series of deaths and disappearances occurring at a seaside spa.

In three scathingly humorous reviews of not-yet-written books, Stanislaw Lem brings us insights into the life of the 21st century. “One Human Minute” summarizes the activities of every person on earth during a single minute. “The Upside-Down Evolution” depicts a battlefield devoid of human activity, where synthetic bugs—synsects—vie for supremacy. “The World as Cataclysm” unfolds the universe as a crooked roulette wheel, where cosmic catastrophe prevails over orderly evolution. All reflect the speculative imagination and dark humor that have made Lem a grand master of the science fiction genre.

Commander Pirx, who drives space vehicles for a living in the galaxy of the future, here faces a new series of intriguing adventures in which robots demonstrate some alarmingly human characteristics.

Five more tales featuring Pirx — a bumbling rookie in the original (1979), now a seasoned and level-headed (but coolly cerebral) space jockey. The first three pieces are short, ironic, and somewhat thin on ideas: Pirx fails to intercept a drifting alien hulk thanks to a shipboard comedy of errors; he searches for a robot that has inexplicably cut loose to go mountain climbing; and he survives a close encounter with a berserk mining robot. The two long yarns, unfortunately, are not so much fiction as rather pedantic reflections on the nature of artificial intelligence: a choppy and overinvolved Turing test, in which Pirx must identify (and foil the murderous plans of) the robot among his crew as they fly through the rings of Saturn; and a talky, motionless analysis of why an intelligent computer aboard an experimental ship went neurotically haywire and crashed on Mars. A ruminative, often discursive bunch, wanting in urgency and drama — without the mature idea-wrestling of last year’s . ()

It is 1939; the Nazis have occupied Poland. A young doctor disturbed by the fate of Poland joins the staff of an insane asylum only to find a world of pain and absurdity to match that outside.

Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Are the self-programming robots on the moon ensuring “peace on Earth,” or are they secretly plotting a terrestrial invasion of their own? Only Ijon Tichy, sent on a dangerous mission to report on the robots’ activities, knows for sure. But, as luck would have it, he is caught by a highly focused ray, which severs his corpus collosum and leaves the left side of his brain at odds with the right.

Has he returned to Earth with the secret that could save all humanity? His left brain can’t remember, and his right brain can’t tell. Agents from the East and the West race to get to Tichy’s forgotten but priceless information first; Tichy, whose left hand keeps punching him and pinching ladies’ bottoms, struggles for control of the lost memory and of his own two warring sides.

Stanislaw Lem, called by a reviewer “one of the jewels of twentieth-century literature,” is internationally renowned for his science fiction, satire, philosophy, and literary criticism. He was born in Lvov, Poland, and lives in Krakow.

Space wasn’t half so scary, half so strange, or even half so alien, as what Hal Bregg returned to. He had been away from Planet Earth for ten years space-time. But that was 127 years back home and a lot of things had changed. Sex. Money. Transit. Violence. There’s no more violence. Everyone gets it “betrizated” out of them in childhood. And that’s just the beginning…

Naturally, Hal refuses to be acclimated by the “Adapt” people. He prefers to figure it out all by himself, be a stranger in a strange land, draw his own conclusions. And he does.

“In the unlikely event that a science-fiction writer is deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize in the near future, the most likely candidate would be a Pole named Stanislaw Lem,” states THE NEW YORK TIMES. And FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION writes, “One of the world’s finest writers… Lem has accomplished the difficult illusion of showing us a future world which may be distasteful to us, but which may be seen as quite legitimate and even desirable by its own people, and by us, if we were to change certain ways of seeing and understanding.”

In this widely acclaimed sequel to , Ijon Tichy, space traveler of future centuries, discovers that “out there” isn’t very different from “down here.” Especially when he finds a galactic society over which the Plenum Moronicum presides, which appoints as ruler a ruthless Machine; the inhabitants, docilely cooperating in their own destruction, go by the name of Phools.

Tichy seems to attract inventors of splenetic genius, such as the madman who has invented the soul, or another who invents kitchen appliances so good at their jobs they might as well be wives or slaves. Throughout these nine wild adventures, surprise follows witty surprise for the discerning reader of riotously imaginative fiction.

STANISLAW LEM, who “knows science well enough to be playful about it” (), lives in Poland and is the author of books translated into nearly thirty languages, including and .

In this sequel to , Ijon Tichy, space traveler of future centuries, discovers that “out there” isn’t very different from “down here.” Throughout these nine wild adventures, surprise follows witty surprise.

Line drawings by the Author.

A powerful sublight interstellar space ship, a “class two cruiser” called , lands on the planet which seems uninhabited and bleak, to investigate the loss of sister ship, . During the investigation, the crew finds evidence of a form of quasi-life, born through evolution of autonomous, self-replicating machines, apparently left behind by an alien civilization that visited the planet a very long time ago. The evolution was controlled by “robot wars”, and the only form that survived were swarms of minuscule, insect-like micromachines. Individually, or in small groups, they are quite harmless to humans and capable of only very simple behavior. However, when bothered, they can assemble into huge swarms displaying complex behavior arising from self-organization, and are able to defeat an intruder by a powerful surge of EMI. Some members of the spacecraft crew suffered a complete memory erasure as a consequence. Big clouds of “insects” are also able to travel at a high speed and even to climb to the top of troposphere. The angered crew attempts to fight the perceived enemy, but eventually recognizes the meaninglessness of their efforts in the most direct sense of the word. The robotic “fauna” has become part of the planets ecology, and would require a disruption on planetary scale (such as a nuclear winter) to be destroyed.

The novel turns into an analysis of the relationship between different life domains, and their place in the universe. In particular, it is an imaginary experiment to demonstrate that evolution may not necessarily lead to dominance by intellectually superior life forms. The plot also involves a Conrad-like dilemma, juxtaposing the values of humanity and the efficiency of mechanical insects. In the face of defeat and imminent withdrawal of , Rohan, the spaceship's navigator, undertakes a trip into the 'enemy area' in search of 4 crew members who went missing in action — an attempt which he and captain Horpach see as probably futile, but necessary for moral reasons. Rohan struck into mountains covered by metallic “shrubs” and “insects” and found these crewmen dead. He gathers some evidence and returns to the ship unharmed because of successful operation of the anti-detection device they managed to create for that purpose.

Pilot Pirx is an astronaut, a fresh-faced physical powerhouse, but no genius. His superiors send him on the most dangerous missions, either because he is expendable, or because they trust his bumbling ability to survive in almost any habitat or dilemma. Follow Pirx now through a world of hyper-technology and super-psychology from his early days as a hopelessly inept cadet soloing with a pair of sex-crazed horseflies… to a farside moon station built by bickering madmen… to a chase through space after a deadly sphere of light… to an encounter with a mossy old robot whose programming has slipped.

Pilot Pirx is an astronaut, a fresh-faced physical powerhouse, but no genius. His superiors send him on the most dangerous missions, either because he is expendable, or because they trust his bumbling ability to survive in almost any habitat or dilemma. Follow Pirx now through a world of hyper-technology and super-psychology from his early days as a hopelessly inept cadet soloing with a pair of sex-crazed horseflies… to a farside moon station built by bickering madmen… to a chase through space after a deadly sphere of light… to an encounter with a mossy old robot whose programming has slipped.

Pilot Pirx is an astronaut, a fresh-faced physical powerhouse, but no genius. His superiors send him on the most dangerous missions, either because he is expendable, or because they trust his bumbling ability to survive in almost any habitat or dilemma. Follow Pirx now through a world of hyper-technology and super-psychology from his early days as a hopelessly inept cadet soloing with a pair of sex-crazed horseflies… to a farside moon station built by bickering madmen… to a chase through space after a deadly sphere of light… to an encounter with a mossy old robot whose programming has slipped.

The “Back Cover” information for this book is quite misleading. This is only “science fiction” in the most literal sense of the phrase — it is fiction about science. The single fantastical element is only theorized — a Sender of the message in question. The book is cerebral in nature, which makes me question why exactly it is referred to as a “thriller” on the back cover. . though there is a tension in the book, like in most good literature, I would not choose to describe it as a “thriller”. The most thrilling thing about this book is that there exists an author who is willing to explore topics as diverse as psychology, morality, linguistics, physics, mathematics, ethics, and philosophy in one book. This is a more thoughtful, realistic, and rewarding book than others in the same vein such as Sagan’s .

These fourteen science fiction stories reveal Lem’s fascination with artificial intelligence and demonstrate just how surprisingly human sentient machines can be.