If Sam Beckett had turned his hand to science fiction, this is what he would have written. One of these internal stories, that of Mymosh the Self-Begotten, is in my opinion the book's highlight. Particularly impressive in this regard are 'The Fifth Sally (A), or Trurl's Prescription,' a delightful bit of frippery driven almost entirely by verbal dexterity and an extraordinary mathematical love poem related in 'The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electric Bard.' The centerpiece of the collection, however, must surely be the 'Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius,' which, as you would expect, includes a flurry of internal stories, some of which in turn have stories inside them. I wish the book included translation notes he must have had to rebuild innumerable language formations from scratch in order to make them work-and work dazzlingly well-in English. Huge amounts of credit must of course go to the translator, Michael Kandel, on this score. The sheer virtuosity of the language is breathtaking: the book is packed to the gills with puns, rhymes, nonsense words, and general verbal japery. It is a collection of stories, some profound, others 'merely' entertaining, written by a man who was clearly drunk on sheer linguistic exuberance.

Seuss, Lewis Caroll, and perhaps a little Philip K. The English translation of Summa thus invites new and rich interpretations of The Cyberiad, perhaps Lem's most well-known work in the Anglophone world.Imagine a mixture of Borges, Calvino, Saint-Exupéry, Pynchon, Douglas Adams, Samuel Beckett, L. Ideas mentioned but scorned in Summa as being too much like ungrounded sf speculation form the bases for several of The Cyberiad's stories, appearing there as witty satires that explore the ethical, cultural, and linguistic significance of scientific and pseudoscientific ideas mentioned in Summa. The same kind of mirror relationship is apparent in the conceptual structures of the two texts. It is as if the strain of writing a text that Lem hoped would establish his credibility as a serious thinker in the international scientific community registered stylistically as ponderous prose, creating a kind of inverted mirror text to the linguistic creativity and freedom on display in The Cyberiad. Whereas the prose of Summa is serious to the point of being stilted and awkward (according to Summa's translator), the language of The Cyberiad is pyrotechnic, with allusions, puns, neologisms, metaphors, and alliterations abounding.

Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae (1964), published for the first time in English nearly fifty years after its first publication in Polish, is of interest today primarily for the ideas Lem formulated that have not yet been taken up in a serious way, and for the light it sheds on his fiction, especially The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, published a year after Summa.

The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem