Book review: Cyberiad
Last night, I finished reading the best book I've read in quite a long time, though that's partly due to a combination of teaching my course in May, which kept me from pleasure reading, followed by wading through the first five Amber novels by Roger Zelazny, which I found good but not great. But the book I've just finished, Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, is quite remarkable.
Now, who the hell, you may be asking, is Stanislaw Lem? Well, he is a Polish science fiction author who is generally regarded as one of the great literary sf writers of this century. He is reviled by much of the sf establishment because of some nasty things he said about most English-speaking sf writers in the 1970s. Most of his material has been hard to find in English since the 1970s, but it has all been reprinted recently. In style, I'd say he's a lot like Borges, only with a strong scientific/technical bent. The Cyberiad is a collection of scientific/political fables about a pair of virtually omnipotent constructor robots, Trurl and Klapaucius, who go around messing with civilizations. It's highly allegorical / fabular in nature, which I think is great, but may be a bit off-putting if you're into adventure or technical sf, but it's quite hilarious and quite easy to read, and the translator has done a very good job in re-working Lem's wordplay.
The only other thing I've read by Lem is Solaris, which I liked, but not quite as much. It had some interesting insights into the nature of scientific research, but didn't quite do it for me. I've learned that Solaris is being made into a movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starring George Clooney. It's coming out later this year sometime. I'm optimistic and scared at the same time, since I can see how you could make an awful movie out of it by removing all the intellectual parts and just turning into an Alien-style action flick.
Now, who the hell, you may be asking, is Stanislaw Lem? Well, he is a Polish science fiction author who is generally regarded as one of the great literary sf writers of this century. He is reviled by much of the sf establishment because of some nasty things he said about most English-speaking sf writers in the 1970s. Most of his material has been hard to find in English since the 1970s, but it has all been reprinted recently. In style, I'd say he's a lot like Borges, only with a strong scientific/technical bent. The Cyberiad is a collection of scientific/political fables about a pair of virtually omnipotent constructor robots, Trurl and Klapaucius, who go around messing with civilizations. It's highly allegorical / fabular in nature, which I think is great, but may be a bit off-putting if you're into adventure or technical sf, but it's quite hilarious and quite easy to read, and the translator has done a very good job in re-working Lem's wordplay.
The only other thing I've read by Lem is Solaris, which I liked, but not quite as much. It had some interesting insights into the nature of scientific research, but didn't quite do it for me. I've learned that Solaris is being made into a movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starring George Clooney. It's coming out later this year sometime. I'm optimistic and scared at the same time, since I can see how you could make an awful movie out of it by removing all the intellectual parts and just turning into an Alien-style action flick.