The Cyberiad (1965-1967) ****

The Cyberiad introduced me to Stanislaw Lem at a tender age. I must have been about ten or eleven. My parents knew that I liked science fiction, which, as far as I was concerned, meant Isaac Asimov. One day, my mother saw a copy of The Cyberiad on a bookstore shelf, saw the Stanislaw Fernandes painting of a giant robot on the cover, and figured I might like it. When I started reading, I was astonished; it bore no resemblance to anything I had read before.

This collection of stories is hard to describe to somebody who hasn't read them. They're comic science fiction, but written in the form of folktales or myths (they are also reminiscent of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and of Voltaire's philosophical tales, such as Candide and especially Micromegas). They're set in a far-distant time in which humans are semi-legendary monsters and everyone else is a robot. Two of the most illustrious robots are the hotheaded Trurl and the sage Klapaucius, master engineers, or "constructors," who travel around the universe constructing game beasts, advisers, and storytellers for the benefit of assorted planetary despots.

The stories are sometimes wildly funny and sometimes profound; they are full of convoluted wordplay (it beggars the imagination that some of the stories are translations--Kandel undoubtedly had to do some reconstruction from scratch), meditations on the paradoxes of identity and consciousness, and parodies of courtly, bureaucratic, scientific, legal, philosophical, and mathematical jargon. In one of the most famous, Trurl builds a mechanical poet capable of composing perfect verse in mathematical terminology or words beginning with S; some of its work is displayed for our delectation. In another, he builds a tiny artificial kingdom in a box for the entertainment of an exiled tyrant, and Klapaucius berates him for not considering the issue of at what point a simulated suffering becomes a real one.

Lem takes pleasure in playing with levels of description and making the stories incredibly convoluted. Toward the end, there is "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius," which nearly requires a road map; we hear the stories of each of the storytelling machines, one of which is about Trurl telling a different collection of stories, and one of those is about some dreaming machines, to whose dreams we shall naturally be privy... and one of those dreams is nested more deeply still...

My favorite of the lot is "The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg." Pugg's bad end will be painfully familiar to any avid user of the Internet. A close second is "Altruizine, or A True Account of How Bonhomius the Hermetic Hermit Tried to Bring About Universal Happiness, and What Came of It," in which, among other things, Klapaucius visits the cubical planet of the H.P.L.D.'s, who have reached the Highest Possible Level of Development and have nothing left to do but sit around picking their noses.

The bizarre illustrations by Daniel Mroz fit the tone of the stories perfectly. They depict a world seemingly constructed out of Tinkertoys, sheet metal, whip antennae, caterpillar treads, and disassembled mannequins.

Lem added more stories to The Cyberiad that did not make their way into this English-language version. Some of them are printed in Mortal Engines. Others may have been translated into English, but don't seem to be in print any more.

Most literary critics, like Lem himself (see Microworlds), are deeply suspicious of genre SF. Consequently, critical discussion of Lem tends to compare his writing to books traditionally placed on the Highbrow Literature shelves, such as those of Jorge Luis Borges, or Italo Calvino's Qfwfq stories (or Swift and Voltaire, as I did above). Comparisons with these brilliant works are certainly valid, but another body of work also comes to mind.

Years after my early introduction to The Cyberiad, I convinced some of my high-school friends to read it, and they immediately pointed me in the direction of Douglas Adams' The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its various sequels (less numerous then).

There are certainly similarities between The Cyberiad and Adams' comic SF series. Both have lots of characters with jokey names (Adams' "Ford Prefect," "Vroomfondel," and "Majikthise"; Lem-via-Kandel's "Zipperupus," "King Krool," and "Dodderont Debilitus") and throw around cosmic themes and science-fiction concepts with wild comic abandon.

Adams' "Infinite Improbability Drive" is a dead ringer for the "improbability automatic" with "possibiliballistic destabilizers" that Klapaucius uses in "The Third Sally, or The Dragons of Probability," down to the psychedelic effects of turning the improbability up all the way. The planet of the H.P.L.D.'s is a computing machine, a "Gigagnostotron" covered with intelligent sand; in Adams' universe, the planet Earth is a computer. Adams' Vogons torture their victims by reading them bad poetry; Trurl's electronic bard writes poems that are good enough to kill, but only if you have a modicum of taste. (The Cyberiad came first, but I doubt that these similarities are due to anything other than convergent evolution; they're all the sorts of things a science-fictional imagination would naturally think up when liberated from the shackles of plausibility.)

The difference is one of degree in tone and intent. Lem often (not always) has a serious point to make which determines the direction of the story. With Adams, at least in the early, funny books in the Hitch-hiker's Guide series, the fabulistic content (and it is there, in such passages as the famous one about the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything) is strictly secondary to getting the joke told. I don't think that either approach is inherently superior to the other, but when I write humor, my method is closer to Adams'; it's very hard to make humor serious without killing it. Somehow, Lem pulls it off.