Mortal Engines

A robot-themed collection (hence the title) selected by the translator, Michael Kandel, who in the intro divides Lem's work into three categories:

  comic-satirical fantasy
  realistic SF
  philosophy

About half the stories in this volume come from the Polish collection, Fables for Robots, which fall into the first category. They are light and silly reading, with titles like:

“Three Electroknights”
“How Erg the Self-Inducing Slew a Paleface”
“Tale of the Computer that Fought a Dragon”

They're sprinkled with whimsical terms: thinking powder, a knot in space, an ultradragon, an antimatter blunderbuss, a supernova extinguisher.

Characters plug their heads together to wrestle with a problem, and make remarks such as, “Something feels wrong inside, I must have blown a tube.”

The stories are very similar to those in The Cyberiad, though without (at least not in this edition) any of Daniel Mroz's delightful illustrations.

Consciousness Is Suffering

In the intro Kandel refers to his editorial strategy as being “a general progression from light to dark, from comic to tragic, from robot to human.”

This progression begins with the final three stories in the group mentioned above. They are more a little more weighty than the rest:

 "Automatthew's Friend”
  King Globares and the Sages”
 "The Tale of King Gnuff”

The next two stories, “The Sanatorium of Doctor Vliperdius” and “The Hunt” reunite us with two of Lem's favourite characters, Ijon Tichy and Pirx. “The Hunt” is a refreshing change of pace, as it not only falls into the category of realistic SF, but also features Pirx's distinctive voice. (It also appears in More Tales of Pirx the Pilot.)

The final story, “The Mask,” is the longest at nearly 50 pages, and together with “The Hunt” takes up more than a third of the book. Elements in it reminded me of Zelazny and Kafka, Alien and Terminator. I found it rather heavy going despite some fine turns of phrase. The ending is ambiguous, unsettling, and therefore typically Lem.

It is the most clearcut example of Kandel's remark that Lem is similar to Dostoevsky in the belief that “consciousness is suffering.”

Ijon Tichy

The Star Diaries (321 pages)

Ijon Tichy is the hero of this collection of absurd, fantastic, playful, and satirical tales. Many are as cartoonish as the Jetsons or anything on Saturday morning TV. Indeed, one of Tichy's forbears has his head flattened by a steam roller.

Tichy flies about in a jalopy of a rocketship. It has a rudder, and needs new brakes and a paint job. He cooks his meals on the atomic pile, and when he passes too close to a star he climbs into the refrigerator to cool off. When he runs out of fuel he dives his ship into a volcano, causing an eruption which propels him back into space. Someone goes by riding on a meteor.

Some of the supporting cast are robot friars, feral furniture, intelligent potatoes, edible space ships, dogs in spacesuits, and "interstellar vagabonds known as Gypsonians" who hire themselves out for the cleaning of moons, and whose children throw stones at comets.

Time Travel

Voyage 7 – The ship becomes packed with so many versions of Tichy they have to form committees in order to make decisions.

Voyage 12 – He uses a time machine to speed up evolution on a primitive planet, but breaks off a knob and sets it in reverse, causing him to revert to a baby.

Voyage 20 - He is recruited by his future self to head up a project to improve history with disastrous results. Mars is burnt to a crisp.

Strange Societies

Voyage 13 – A political allegory about a repressive regime that convinces people they are fish, and another where everyone wears an identical mask and individualism is forbidden. People are interchangeable right down to the family level, with mothers, fathers, and children trading places every day.

Voyage 23 – The planet of the Whds is so crowded its people reduce themselves to their constituent atoms to order to get some sleep at night, and to travel by mailing themselves in a cassette. "Look out, you’re spilling my daddy," Tichy is warned by a youngster. When he tries the process, there is an error of some sort and he is reconstituted as Napoleon.

Memoirs of a Space Traveller
Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy (153 pages)

The rather convoluted publishing history of these stories is mentioned in a note at the end of Star Diaries, which appeared in English in two volumes, the second being this one, Memoirs of a Space Traveller. It contains two further voyages as well as several stories of the mad scientist variety.

Voyage 18 - Tichy creates the universe using a chronocannon. Two of the members of his team are Lou Cipher and Eve Addams. The universe, a scientist declares, "is an illegal loan of matter and energy." It is a "Debtor to Nothingness."

Voyage 24 – A planet runs into a multitude of civic problems when machines put people out of work. A Governing Machine is created to restore harmony, which it does by transforming people into "solid beautiful durable forms" and arranging them into "pleasing symmetrical designs."

Mad Scientists

Denser and more serious in tone, these stories are rather like thought experiments about the nature of perception and reality. Tichy visits a number of scientists whose misshapen appearance is representative of their unbalanced attempts at playing god. One creates a synthetic soul, another electronic brains in boxes ("Leibnizian monads") unaware of the true nature of their existence. A third has secretly been replaced by his own clone, and a fourth creates a fungoid creature that begins experimenting on the scientist.

The Washing Machine Tragedy

This story appeared in The New Yorker and describes the development of advanced washing machines. They mend and iron clothes, then progress to doing the children’s homework, interpreting dreams, singing lullabies, eventually becoming less capable of performing their original duties. Some are weaponized and associate with criminal elements. Others end up on the streets panhandling. Illegal parts factories spring up, and self-defence courses teach people how to defend themselves using a canopener or a pair of pliers.

Let Us Save the Universe
Ijon Tichy decries the ill-effects of cosmic tourism -- billboards and space garbage, graffiti on asteroids, comets without tails. Women exceed the speed limit because they will age slower. The impact on fauna in a Preserve is particularly harmful, and the story morphs into an illustrated bestiary of weird creatures whose lives have been disrupted by human contact. One is a bird called the sribblemock:

...the counterpart of the terrestrial parrot, except that it writes instead of talks. Often, alas, it writes on fences the obscenities it picks up from tourists from Earth. Some people deliberately infuriate this bird by taunting it with spelling errors.

The Futurological Congress (142 pages)

According to the translator's note at the end of Star Diaries, this novella was also part of that original collection.

It takes place on Earth and begins in Costa Rica where Tichy is attending a futurological congress. There is much unrest, which is combated by the use of a calming drug in the water of the hotel where he is staying, and which results in a hallucinatory experience involving giant rats.

When he comes to his senses he finds that he has been cryogenically preserved and resuscitated in the future where society has solved its problems chemically. It is a pharmocracy in which people vote on the weather and eat books instead of reading them. Poets use sonnetol and "children learn their reading and writing from orthographic sodas." Tichy is told, "We keep this civilization narcotized, for otherwise it could not endure itself."

Ijon Tichy appears in at least one other book: Peace on Earth.

Links

Tichy's adventures became the subject of a German TV series loosely based on Star Diaries. If you go to Youtube and do a search for Ijon Tichy, you'll find a few episodes with English subtitles. His rocket ship is a coffee press.

Lem's Official Site
Ijon Tichy Raumpilot

Tales of Pirx the Pilot

Unlike the whimsical fantasy of The Cyberiad, these five stories attempt to portray space travel realistically during a time of routine interplanetary voyages.

There are no aliens, no space battles. Instead the plots turn on malfunctioning equipment: a short circuit, a burnt-out condenser, a "loose charge" in a CRT screen.

Although the stories are more than 40 years old and often sound dated, the overall effect is not as negative as one might expect.

The attempt at realism has already been undercut by the author’s use of a likeable but somewhat bumbling hero, and by language that is often folksy and jocular, resulting in a semi-comic feel. At one point Pirx wonders:

"What were those rockets firing, anyway? Dumplings?"

It's an odd but interesting combination, and gives the stories a retro feel (e.g. a pilot smoking a cigarette on his acceleration couch, his ship "a relic of atomic architecture" with "scars of old radiation leaks") that goes well with the subversive use of humour, whose purpose (I think) is to camouflage a deep pessimism. If space travel becomes possible, it will only give us a larger stage on which to demonstrate our shortcomings.

The Test – The opening story is the most comedic, with Pirx a chubby cadet who must take a ship to the Moon and perform a series of maneuvers, during which he is tormented by a couple of flies.

The Conditioned Reflex – Pirx is assigned to a Moon station whose construction was marked by bickering and wrongheaded engineering decisions. Pirx and his partner are replacing two men who died under mysterious circumstances, and unexpectedly find themselves recreating their final moments. This is the longest story in the book and the Moon is described in great detail.

On Patrol – Two men are lost on patrol, and Pirx comes close to suffering the same fate.

The Albatross – While travelling in a luxury liner, a distress call is received and Pirx becomes witness to a disaster in space. In the middle of a botched rescue effort, the passengers want to know when they can resume dancing.

Terminus – Pirx is assigned to a rebuilt tub following an accident in which the entire crew perished, save a robot now suffering from post traumatic stress. It has "oily wrists" and is "so old it was almost blind and deaf." One of its duties is looking after the ship's mice, which are used as "live radiation gauges." The story and the book end with the following observation:

[Pirx] began thinking about the innocence of machines, about how man had endowed them with intelligence and, in doing so, had made them an accomplice of his mad adventures. About how the myth of the golem – the myth of the machine that rebelled against its creator – was a lie, a fiction invented by the guilty for the sake of self-exoneration.

More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

The original Tales of Pirx the Pilot was first published in 1966. The English translation arrived in 1979 but contained only half of the stories. The remainder appeared in 1982 under the title More Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

Pirx is now an older and more respected figure but the mishaps continue, mainly due to human foibles and a misplaced confidence in technology.

Pirx's Tale - While hauling space junk from Mercury to Earth, Pirx witnesses an abandoned alien craft making a swing through the solar system. Unfortunately his ship is so beaten-up that "every lift-off or landing was a violation of the laws of physics," and his crew has just come down with the mumps.

The Accident - In the only story that takes place beyond the solar system, Pirx is "stuck in the mountains of an utterly worthless planet" with two feuding colleagues. Just as their mission is coming to an end, a robot fails to return from a routine task. When they go out in search of it, Pirx makes surprising discovery, one that he keeps to himself.

The Hunt - Damaged in an accident on the Moon, a mining robot turns a laser on its makers. Pirx is one of several men sent out to destroy it, but when he comes face-to-face with it he finds danger coming from a different direction.

The Inquest - In the longest and most complex of the stories, Pirx is on trial for an accident that occurred on a flight to Saturn, during which he was to test a new model of robot -- in fact, an android indistinguishable from a human being. During the flight several crew members attempted to tip off Pirx about the robot's identity. One person even claimed that he himself was the robot, and gave reasons why he wanted to fail. Who could Pirx trust?

Ananke - The first of a new class of super-freighters crashes while attempting to land on Mars. Was it a freak accident or does the same fate await the next two ships already en route?

Pirx also appears in a later novel, Fiasco.

Official website

The Cyberiad

Tales for the Cybernetic Age

In this collection of whimsical nonlinear tales, vanity gets a pair of friendly rivals into a number of ridiculous predicaments, often at the expense of a good shellacking.

Trurl and Klapaucius are "constructors," but everything they build has unforeseen effects or does not work properly. Some of their contraptions are:
-an electrobard
-a kingdom in a box
-a probability amplifier for summoning up dragons
-a machine that can create anything beginning with the letter n.

While not all the tales are equally good, the language throughout is imaginative and fun. There are photon schooners, ion crumpets, antimatter sabres, and three Voltaic brothers. There is also a Battery Age and an Empire of the Cold Welders. Someone wears a semi-permeable cummerbund. Another is "innocent as a brand new fuse."

As the stories progress it becomes apparent that Trurl and Klapaucius are robots, and gradually a serious, if not bitter, undertone creeps in. In the penultimate story a philosopher describes the utter failure of robotkind's godlike powers to bring peace and happiness to the universe.

The last tale in the book (and the only one that does not include Trurl and Klapaucius) concerns a princess who spurns "every suitor who seeks her radioactive hand." She will marry no one but a human. Infatuated, a neighbouring prince dons a disguise that is "flaccid, drooping, doughy." His description of human customs is hilarious.

Misc

The Cyberiad was first published in 1967. This edition was translated by Michael Kandel, and illustrated with delightful line drawings by Daniel Mroz. There is no introduction or afterword, which could have illuminated some of the challenges in translating Lem's prose, which contains many made-up words.

The book's subtitle might easily have been Don Quixote in Space, for the tales take place in an "age of electric errantry." Indeed, Lem uses the same word as Cervantes when he describes these adventures as "sallies."

The author, a famous and prolific Polish writer of SF, passed away in 2006. His work has been compared to that Kafka, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams.

Official website