The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem

Staff review by Chris Saliba

A cast of wise cracking robots, electronic bards and storytelling machines discuss philosophy, physics, notions of free will, existence and cyber ethics. Endlessly brilliant, funny and innovative.

Stanislaw Lem’s 1965 book, The Cyberiad, is a work of fiction, but what type is hard to classify. For the most part it is the adventures – both physical and philosophical – of two ‘constructors’, Trurl and Klapaucius. They are builders of robots, smart machines and other electronic devices. The book starts with three stories featuring Trurl and Klapaucius, the middle section is called “The Seven Sallies of Trul and Klapaucius” and a last section of three stories brings The Cyberiad to an end.

The stories all consist of mad plots involving wise cracking robots, electronic bards, storytelling machines, lovesick princes, fussy bureaucrats and tyrant kings (one is named King Kroul, also known as “His Boundless Kroulty”.)  What elevates Lem’s fiction above all the rest is its sheer unbounded and uninhibited inventiveness. His prose, with its endless references to scientific phenomena, dances on the pin of a needle. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know the technical details of the language. In fact, perhaps Lem doesn't know either. He’s inordinately fond of creating so many nonsense words and expressions, his own buoyant vocabulary. Reading Lem you are taken for an exuberant intellectual, speculative and imaginative ride. For example, a computer tries to explain his history:

“A trillion years ago we were a civilization like any other. We believed in the transmittance of souls, the Virgin Matrix, the infallibility of Pi squared, looked upon prayer as regenerative feedback to the Great Programmer, and so on and so forth.”

Or try this wise cracking robot:

“Matrix-schmatrix. Look pal, I’m not just any beast. I’m algorithmic, heuristic and sadistic, fully automatic and autocratic, that means undemocratic, and I’ve got loads of loops and plenty of feedback so none of that back talk or I’ll clap you in irons, that means in the clink with the king, in the brig with the green gig, get me?”

This kind of talk goes on for 300 pages. Lem has his robots and humans constantly bounce ideas off each other, discussing philosophy, physics, notions of free will, existence and cyber ethics. Some of the longer passages read like a sci-fi Socratic dialogue. The Cyberiad is perhaps closest to Gulliver’s Travels in the often perilous journeys Trurl and Klapaucius take to other planets, where they are forced to evade the bad tempers of tyrants and must suffer the endless dead-ends of state bureaucracy. The stories all add up to a kind of existential comedy, an absurdist literature, an intergalactic theatre of ideas by a genuine genius.

Utterly brilliant!

The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Penguin. ISBN: 9780141394596 RRP: $24.99

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