An unusual collection of fanciful sci-fi short stories. A mix of fable, allegory and analogy. Underlying themes here are the capriciousness of technology, the dangers of AI, and the arrogance of scientists and technologists who build machines they cannot control.
The Cyberiad follows the adventures (often misadventures) of two robots, Trurl and Klapaucius, who are "constructors": they build other machines and robots. These two characters mock each other, compete with each other, and in one tale they actually beat the shit out of each other. There's a little bit of The Three Stooges in here!
But there's political satire here too--see for example the story "Trurl's Machine" featuring a machine that claims 2 + 2 = 7 and tries to kill its creator for correcting it (a robot's version of Lysenkoism perhaps). There's also a strange sort of medieval setting to many of the stories, replete with kings, princes and princesses, long-suffering lumpenproletariat villagers and so on. It's all part of the satire: note that author Stanislaw Lem wrote these stories in the mid-1960s, when Poland was under Communist control. Kings have no less power over their subjects than dictators.
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The stories are quirky, surreal. There's a bit of the outlandish vibe of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy here, but these stories are darker and much more nuanced. There's much more going on than just the surface-level story.
Finally, Lem was known for his extensive wordplay in this collection of stories. I can't imagine how difficult it was for translator Michael Kandel to convey this aspect of these works into English.
Other works by Stanislaw Lem:
Fiasco
Solaris
The Star Diaries
The Invincible
[Readers, the notes below are here to help me order my thinking and better remember what I read. Feel free to skip!]
Notes:
How the World Was Saved
Trurl makes a machine that can make anything starting with "n"; his friend Klapaucius foolishly asks it to make "nothing" and it begins eliminating entire categories of things from reality.
Trurl's Machine
Trurl constructs a huge but stupid thinking machine that insists 2 + 2 = 7. After insulting the machine for its stupidity, the machine frees itself from its moorings and begins hunting Trurl and Klapaucius down.
A Good Shellacking
Trurl gives Klapaucius a "Machine to Grant Your Every Wish"; Klapaucius asks it to make another Trurl, and then beats the shit out of the "imitation" Trurl--which turns out to be the real Trurl. Note also Trurl built this machine in an effort to rehabilitate his reputation after making the stupid machine from the previous story: ironically this latest machine earns him a decoration from the king himself. Klapaucius can't believe it, and then it turns out that he himself was working on a similar machine. [This story is likely about how scientists and experts attempt to curry favor in a corrupt regime; also interesting to see references here to a type of Turing test, as Klapaucius attempts to determine if Trurl is really Trurl or not.]
The Seven Sallies of Trurl and Klapaucius
The First Sally, or the Trap of Gargantius
Trurl and Klapaucius arrive at a planet with a single continent, divided down the middle into two kingdoms. Trurl goes to one side, a kingdom run by King Atrocitus, where the main source of royal revenue was the nationalization of high treason: they used a staff of traitors who handed over state secrets to the other country's enemy agents in return for money. Klapaucius goes to the other country, a kingdom run by King Ferocitus, and is immediately seized and thrown in jail for Kafkaesque reasons, but then once he is freed he begins helping develop Ferocitus' army, helping to wire up and connect all his soldiers into a unified merged consciousness, acting as one with automatic discipline as well as great wisdom. Trurl helps his king's army likewise. Soon, the armies of both kingdoms reach levels of enlightenment that make them no longer warlike, in fact they become kind of like absent-minded philosophers concocting metaphysical questions, forgetting where they put their weapons, completely forgetting that there was even a war going on. Even the metaphysics of the concept of "an enemy" made no sense to them, it was so full of logical contradictions.
"Consciousness, it seems, formed a deadly trap, in that one could enter it, but never leave... And so, standing on opposite hilltops, their weapons sparkling in the sun, while the drums continued to roll, the two armies smiled at one another. Trurl and Klapaucius were just then boarding their ship, since that which they had planned had come to pass: before the eyes of their mortified, infuriated rulers, both armies went off hand in hand, picking flowers beneath the fluffy white clouds, on the field of the battle that never was." [Interesting satire here of the Cold War. As usual, it's the leadership/deep state that does all the warmongering; the respective peoples rarely bear ill will to each other at all.]
The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard
[This story, quite a good satire of poets and poetry movements, also reminds this reader of the modern debate over AI-driven content, and how we are made deeply uncomfortable, even grossed out, by the idea of using AI to write novels and articles, to produce art and music, and so on.]
Trurl, embarrassed and nonplussed after Klapaucius teased him so much for his machine that wasn't even able to add two and two, decides to make a machine that can write poetry. But he finds in order to do this, he realizes that the machine needs a civilizational, historical and cultural substrate first, which then needs as it own substrate whatever came before that, and so on and so on, until he has to simulate the entire universe, right up until the present moment. [Recall the physicist's joke, that in order to make an apple pie you first have to create the entire universe.] When he finally completes his mammoth project, all it can do is write terrible doggerel. After Trurl works on it some more, Klapaucius tries to give it an impossible task: to write a decent poem in the language of pure mathematics. It produces eight quatrains, starting with:
"Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!" [I share this just to give an example of the (likely many) difficulties in translation from Polish to English that translator Michael Kandel handles here. This is a pretty witty bit of poetry!]
Klapaucius can't believe it. Some of the local poets actually visited the machine and mocked it because it wrote in classical form [of course they were all avant-garde and predictably far too cool for "structure"-- and this reminds me of Ezra Pound and his cry "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave."]
But the machine had "a special ambition-amplifying mechanism with glory seeking circuits" and it began writing poetry so intricate and so charged with meaning that it was totally incomprehensible, which took the the avant-guard poets' breath away. Then machine started writing under several thousand pseudonyms all at once, writing poems for every occasion--which was great for the magazine editors but it caused quite a few poets to commit suicide. Then came attacks and demonstrations against Trurl and his poetry machine, so he decided to dismantle it. But then the machine, seeing its end coming, wrote such an eloquent and passionate plea for mercy that Trurl burst into tears. Finally Trurl unplugged the machine, took it apart, loaded it onto a ship, flew it to an asteroid, and there reassembled it, where it now it constructs poetry and sends it on radio signals any spaceships that happen to pass nearby.
The Second Sally, or The Offer of King Krool
Trurl and Klapaucius are offered a job to create a "prey machine" for planetary ruler King Krool to hunt, but then learn to their dismay that if the prey machine doesn't offer a challenging enough hunt, he'll have them both executed. They build a machine that's sort of like a sorcerer's apprentice: it adds parts, it gets twice as powerful when it's damaged, etc. And the machine--a weird steampunk kind of contraption with all sorts of gadgets--can also produce police officers, who quickly handcuff the king. And then an order goes to detain anyone resembling a policeman, and so one half of the police force arrests the other. The king then asks for Trurl and Klapaucius' demands.
[Some hilarious satire here of the modern totalitarian bureaucratic state, including a scene where Trurl and Klapaucius force this "police kingdom" to give them a performative patriotic ceremony as they depart the planet, right down to having a charming little girl in local costume curtsying and presenting them with flowers!]
The Third Sally, or The Dragons of Probability
[This story was a really intriguing multi-level satire] "Everyone knows the dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind." On the discovery of "three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the comical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, not existence, but each non-existent in an entirely different way." [This appears to be a sort of parody of imaginary numbers and the math built around them, we also see some of the debates here about quantum physics rendered in allegorical form] Trurl begins working on probability experiments on dragons and actually materializes one who tries to eat him. "Fortunately, Klapaucius was nearby and lowered the probability, and the monster vanished." After all these experiments, dragons started to come into existence, making their probability overwhelming, and they began harassing villagers, eating them and burning up their huts thanks to these experiments. [Now we have kind of another metaphor for neofeudalism here where the people get fucked over thanks to the stupid experiments and activities of the totalitarian state.] Trurl and Klapaucius have a discussion on this one constructor who goes around freeing planets from dragons and they suspect that he's actually probabilistically putting them there first and then removing them for a fee, and then they have a discussion with so much technobabble that no one can understand them. [One can't help but see modern pharma here: think of psych meds which have as side-effects the same psych conditions they are supposed to cure for example: if somebody gets suicidal while on an SSRI do you double the dose or cut it in half?? All of this is hidden from the patient under medical technobabble.]
[Funny Shakespeare/Othello reference here] "All sorts of thoughts ran through Klapaucius' head. Annihilate the thing by reversing the sign of its pentapendragonal coefficient from positive to negative, thereby raising these statistical probability of its non-existence over that of its existence? More than one poor soul, seeking to produce the lack of a dragon, had ended up instead with the back of the dragon--resulting in a beast with two backs--and nearly died of embarrassment!"
Finally some dark political satire here as the king refuses to pay for dragon removal, citing all sorts of bureaucracy; likewise the treasurer can't/won't hand over the payment because it wasn't "wages" technically or whatever bureaucratic excuse he could come up with, etc., and so Trurl takes the skin of the dragon, puts it on, and starts lumbering around the village until the people end up paying tribute to the dragon in gold and jewels. [As always "the people" end up having to pay for the greed, impecuniousness or incompetence of their government.]
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
Trural is awkened by a spaceship landing at his home, and robots start bringing out sacks of tribute to him. Then a being comes out of the ship and knocks on his door asking--speaking in flouncing, medieval-style language--if he would come to another planet to help the king protect his heir from an unfortunate infatuation: the prince has fallen in love with the Amarandina, daughter of the ruler of a neighboring enemy empire.
Trurl builds a "femfatalatron": "whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winx, and witchery of all the fairer sex in the universe at once." [The wordplay (as translated) here is hilarious and I'd love to see what it looked like in the original Polish. See for example: "...the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress."] The crown Prince is pushed into the machine to be "decaptivated"; he's forced in there by feather pillows, because his loyal servants wanted "to show proper respect for his royal person," but the machine doesn't work, the prince emerges as in love with Amarandina as ever.
Trurl has an audience with a king and tells her that he sees no other way the prince must marry the enemy emperor's daughter, and the King says the emperor will never agree and then Trurl suggests, "And if he were conquered?" And then the king says, "but would you have me plunge two kingdoms into a bloody war" just for this reason? Trurl answers, "There are wars and there are wars; the kind I have in mind would be absolutely bloodless. For we would not attack the emperors realm with arms; in fact, we would not take the life of a single citizen, but just the opposite!" He whispers his plan into the king's ear. He arranges cannons all around the emperor's kingdom to fire newborn babies at the enemy empire, who begin crawling and drooling over everything, which causes the empire's economy to collapse under the strain. The emperor capitulates and grants the marriage. [I'm struggling to see any metaphor here with this odd ending...]
The Fifth Sally, or The Mischief of King Balerion
An immature king, Balerion, who loves wordplay, puns and riddles [much like the author!], but most of all loves playing hide and seek, offers his crown jewels for anyone who can find the best hiding place. Trurl has the perfect idea, a mind-exchanging machine, that lets you hide in other peoples' bodies! By accident the king and Trurl exchange minds, leading to a harebrained story that's actually pretty cute and funny.
The Fifth Sally (A), or Trurl's Prescription
The author does what must have been a massive translation effort to make this entire story rhyme in a catchy, kitschy way. It reads a little bit like an e.e. cummings poem in meter and rhyme. There's an invader on the planet of the Steelypips, something incredibly large that "doesn't budge," and the Steelypips can't get it to leave, even after using nuclear weapons on it. But Trurl happens by, and defeats it with bureaucracy: sending it forms, denying appeals, rejecting responses by saying "proper forms not attached," assessing fines, etc., until it can't take it anymore and it leaves. [Nobody can beat a good bureaucracy! It devours everything.]
The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg
Trurl reads to Klapaucius from an old, yellowed book about a mystical space phenomenon called the Great Shroud Wastes and the Anonymoid, they have an argument about whether these things are real, Trurl says they should go and see for themselves, and Klapaucius wouldn't have gone at all but "he didn't wish to see his friend perish alone." It turns out that the Great Shroud Waste is just a simple junkyard, disappointing them. But en route they are pirated by the pirate Pugg, a pirate with a PhD, who pirates information. ["He could keep us here for an eon or two before we tell him everything we know. Our knowledge is colossal!"] The information they give him is how to create gold from hydrogen or any other atom, but he's not interested. Finally they persuade him that they can create a demon of the second kind who can extract useful information from randomness that happens in the universe. The pirate begins to read the information produced by the demon, while in the meantime Trurl and Klapaucius escape. Pugg the PhD realizes that all of it is absolutely useless, yet he's getting buried under mile after mile of paper uncoiling from the demon as it documents facts about everything, and eventually Pugg is buried forever under all these facts. [A couple ideas for what this story could be a metaphor for: 1) the information age, which buries us all in too much information, or 2) distinguishing between information and wisdom--more of one doesn't necessarily produce more of the other.]
The Seventh Sally, or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good
Trurl rescues a deposed king from an asteroid and builds him a totally brand new miniature mechanical kingdom [with "the necessary handful of traders, another of heroes, added a pinch of prophets and seers, and one messiah and one great poet each..."] that the king could carry around. Trurl "explained everything so well, that the king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions and, without hesitation, while the constructor watched, issued a few trial proclamations, correctly manipulating the control knobs, which were carved with imperial eagles and regal lions. These proclamations declared a state of emergency, martial law, a curfew and a special levy." On returning home Klapaucius rebukes him for creating a whole civilization of slaves for a brutal despot. They have a discussion about the volition and will (or lack thereof) of a something that was programmed, and Klapaucius draws a parallel to our own existence. [You could read this story as a metaphysical discussion of whether life is a simulation, whether a simulation can actually have feelings/agency or not, even whether a truly perfect simulation could contain beings that "felt" and suffered.]
Trurl decides to take back the kingdom he constructed and destroy it, but then he realizes the terrible implications of doing so, he'd destroy everyone in the simulation. So then he says "I'll hold an election. Let them choose just rulers from among themselves." Klapaucius responds "You programmed them all to be feudal lords or shiftless vassals. What good would an election do?" They arrive to the planet and are shocked by all the signs of intelligent life: it turns out the civilization had broken out of its "box" and overthrown its despotic king, so it did have agency and will after all!
Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius
[Right away we have a cute metaphor for a head of state, a monarch, negotiating a major project, but not being very clear about what, when, or in what form he will pay. This sounds like a Russian Tsar negotiating payment for finished goods from England or weapons from the Turkish Empire or something. Also we have sort of a multiple, nested short story structure here, as the storytelling machines tell circular and self-referential stories. Shades of Godel Escher Bach, or even Borges here!] An agent of King Genius orders three storytelling machines from Trurl. The first machine, when tested, tells a meta-story about Trurl, who is hired to make the perfect advisor for a king, but the king conspires to ask this advisor how to get out of paying Trurl by making him look like a conniving cheater. Then Trurl foments suspicion by sending letters to this advisor that might, or might not, be in code. This story is basically about how a king gets his comeuppance when he orders a machine and doesn't pay for it.
The second machine is likewise tested and tells a story--a nest of stories--about Trurl's adventures. The first story is a strange tale about a robot that other robots dig up, recreate atom by atom, and then beat up, because it is a copy of a machine that wrecked their planet. Trurl debates with them if a copy is the actual person. Neither of the stories really have an ending, and each time the king wants to know what happened.
Trurl then tells a story about a plot to ruin a king by building a cabinet of dreams; it's a device that the king can plug into and experience dreams just like they are real. Each of the dreams is meant to kill the king, but the king keeps escaping: once by cowardice, another time because of his greed, another time because of his stupidity. Finally the last dream is a self-referential, self-repeating dream where the king is doing exactly what he's doing, and thus can't escape; each time he tries to exit the dream it puts him right back where he was before, inside the dream.
Then we learn that Trurl is telling the story to the king, but this is also a story nested within a story, because at this point the storytelling machine--the second one--grinds to a halt, smoking. And then Trurl calls out the third machine to tell a story, and it tells a story about the Great Constructor Trurl: this is a sort of a beginnings of life/beginnings of DNA story, except it's the form of a garbage dump that's exposed to a random piece of junk that arranged itself to form the beginnings of a condenser and a solenoid, which eventually led to the production of a logic circuit, and eventually a being emerged: Mymosh the Selfbegotten, whose father was Coincidence and his mother Entropy. But then he tripped and shorted out and was no more, but then, in another coincidence, a shoe thrown from a spaceship that happened by bumped him into a puddle, completing his circuits once again, and he came back on, thinking about where he came from, who he is and other existential questions.
Then we get the final story, about Klapaucius, who stumbles into a place where there is an old, rusted broken down machine that is a pundit, a frustrated author who nobody appreciates or even recognizes, who resents the fact that he is surrounded by other authors who sell out for money or by writing politically approved narratives, and thus are much more successful. The pundit hurls invective at Klapaucius and then drops dead. Klapaucius then sits down to read his work, and is so shocked by it, that he can't decide whether to reveal it to the world or destroy it. "And he sits there to this day, unable to decide..." [This one is obvious, especially for someone writing inside a Communist regime: the only authors who "make it" are the ones who carry water for the power structure. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!]
The king can't take it anymore. He tells Trurl, I will give you the greatest gift in payment, health and life if you will "hide your truths, too bitter for the world, in the guise of fairy tale and fable." [This was a confusing story but also a fun one: and at the end this is sort of an analogy for the author himself, who is cloaking all kinds of messages inside his own fairy tales and fables. Fun.]
Altruizine, or A True Account of How Bonhomius the Hermetic Hermit Tried to Bring About Universal Happiness, and What Came of It
[As a metaphor, this is a story about how a society with too much empathy won't make it, also on how a society that solves all of its problems quickly becomes decadent and useless. Likewise you can't cure the ails of society by fiat, you only create other, worse problems.] This story is about the search for HPLD's, a civilization of the Highest Possible Level of Development: the most advanced civilization in the universe. Trurl and Klapaucius actually find this civilization, and it is peopled with bizarre looking people with bizarre mechanisms, a mix of human and machine doing all sorts of strange pointless activity; there's a headless being scratching his behind with a solid gold backscratcher--his head is several feet away sitting in the sand for example. It turns out that the HPLD civilization is just a few hundred individuals, not quite people nor robots, who lie around scratching themselves and picking their noses. It turns out all this omnipotence turned them into a decadent society that didn't do anything.
Klapaucius then asks, Why don't you banish misery and misfortune?" They answer that we tried that 64,513 times, and every society either perished in ecstasy, blew itself up, etc. Klapaucius isn't convinced and asks them for some advice to improve the quality of life, and the HPLD robot prints out a description of Altruizine, which duplicates anyone's emotions, sensations and mental states in everyone else within a 50-yard radius. Klapaucius tests it on a city, but finds that everyone quickly starts abusing everybody, fighting, their anger grows to such proportions at the whole city becomes a seething mass, there's even an example here of a newlywed couple getting harassed by everybody who's in their "empathy radius," yelling at them "Get on with it!" "Those suffering from chronic migraines were abandoned by their families, and doctors and nurses fled in panic when they approached..." Klapaucius realizes that the HPLDs were right and he was "cured once in all for all of my desire to render others happy by revolutionary means..."
Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal
[I read this story as a fable for how young people invert the social order, going against the wishes of their families, perhaps in dating outside their class or people, or in finding attractive what their in-group finds unattractive. And yet they come around eventually.] A story about a beautiful robot princess who vows to give her hand in marriage to a human (or "palefaces" as they are pejoratively called by this robot kingdom) to the horror of her father. The palefaces disgust the robots, they are ugly, they are violent and disgusting, they feed themselves, they cry and laugh and make revolting sounds and noises when doing so, etc. Note the amusing comments here about the various apparatuses involved in paleface reproduction. "These apparatuses presented a veritable miracle of technology, yet even the greatest idiot can use them."
The princess however, has sort of an inverted belief in what is disgusting, she things "ugliness is beautiful, and beauty ugly." Then a discussion of a robot, Prince Ferrix, who disguises himself as a paleface to win the princess' hand. She is convinced and immediately arranges wedding plans... but then a real human arrives, brought by one of the counts of the kingdom. But this paleface was so disgusting and such a genuine monstrosity to the princess that she was revolted by him. Ferrix and the human then arrange to fight to win the hand of the Princess...
...and Ferrix quickly wins, but his disguise falls off. The princess, seeing him in his "true steely nature" falls in love and marries him.
"Many pretenders to wisdom say that this is all the trick and make-believe and nothing more, that there's no such thing as paleface cemeteries, doughy-nosed and gummy-eyed, and never was. Well, perhaps it was just another empty invention--there are certainly fables enough in this world. And yet, even if the story isn't true, it does have a grain of sense and instruction to it, and it's entertaining as well, so it's worth the telling."