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The Cyberiad | 
 enlarge | Author: Stanislaw Lem
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.00
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Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 18513
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 312
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0156027593
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780156027595
ASIN: 0156027593
Publication Date: December 16, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. They travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their employers. “The most completely successful of his books... here Lem comes closest to inventing a real universe” (Boston Globe). Illustrations by Daniel Mr—z. Translated by Michael Kandel.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Hugely disappointing July 15, 2008
ostawookiee (Winston-Salem, NC USA)
This book received such great reviews, but I found it incredibly boring. Particularly because every story followed the same format, and there were no "rules" to his universe.
Basic story outline:
Protagonists: "Let's go visit planet ABC!"
King of ABC: "I have a problem you need to solve, it might be considered a riddle!"
Protagonists: "We'll just create a machine to do it, because we can build machines that can do absolutely anything!"
King of ABC: "Alas, you have outsmarted me!"
Protagonists: "That was troubling! Let's not go to ABC again!"
If you can create a machine that can do anything, then basically the machine and its creator are basically gods, and therefore there will be nothing interesting in their stories. There is no conflict worth telling a story about when everything can be solved by the snap of a finger.
Furthermore, even though the stories are about robots and space travel, this book is NOT science fiction, it's just space fantasy. The stories seem like they were written by someone with just a passing understanding of science. Granted, you have to take Lem's time era into consideration, but the pulp magazines of early last century did a much better job of creating stories about future technology.
You could replace Lem's robots with summoned demons and his space ship with a horse and the story would not change, because there are zero rules in his universe, and that is an incredibly unforgiving fault.
 Philosophical gem June 5, 2008
faethon
This is an ultimate classic for those that love Kafka, mathematical games and philosophy. In a series of fantastic stories Lem shows to be a master in crafting compelling stories, all vivid and laden with simple yet deep wisdom. All stories do leave philosophical traces that may positively linger on in your head for days.
The translation is outstanding. Originally written in Polish, yet the translation of Michael Kandel is perfect. If you wouldn't know better, you'd think the book was natively written in English.
Where Are We Coming From? Where Are We Going To? October 29, 2007
Michel
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Lovely book dealing with several philosophical issues. A collection of falsely simple short stories with deep insights. Recommended both to adults and children.
 Stories held down held down by fixation on hollow science aesthetic August 27, 2007
Dan M.
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
Two stars, ouch. Don't get me wrong, The Cyberiad is filled with episodic comedy that I wouldn't crabbily dismiss. The presentation though gets heavily weighed down, or even flattened, by an overwhelming amount of limp techno-posturing. (I'd give some stars to the translator personally, I think-- sometimes I was shocked when I stopped to consider that the endless wordplay was a labored translation from the Polish. It really seemed that the Polish must have had a large amount of English loan words already in it. If that's not the case, somebody needs to buy this translator a cigar.)
I first read a single story from this book when I was younger ("Gargantua"), and only read the rest of the collection years later. At the time I loved that story-- it stayed on my mind for a long time and that's why I sought out this book-- but my opinion has taken a reverse course.
First, Lem ruins his world by overdoing it with ham-fisted puns. He populates his robotic universe with cyber-creatures. Throughout the narrative, instead of referring to earth dogs, Lem will refer to "St. Cybernards and Cyberman pinschers"-- with an exclamation point. (He means St. Bernards and Doberman pinschers.) Lem ham-fistedly puts "cyber-" in front of many many other words in the book. Why would a completely robotic and cybernetic world use the prefix "cyber-" for anything? It would be redundant, since that aspect would be taken for granted. (We could likewise prefix the names of all creatures on our planet earth with "bio-" and have the same effect.)
For that and similar reasons most of the punning comes off as only so many groaners to me. If you like Richard Lederer's work and puns in general, you'll like this book. No harm done. (A successful one is an inexplicable dragon, or "draganomoly" which even now I laugh at, but it's funny because of the scene, not the pun itself.)
Secondly, even though Lem superficially creates a unique robo-world from his imagination, he strangely resorts to tropes and cliches for much of the book. All the characters and locales have a feudal, ancient aesthetic-- that's fine and good, even great. But he re-imagines it all with an overblown cybernetic veneer. If Lem wanted to write fairy tales about the middle ages, which is what many of these are, he could have ditched the cybernetic veneer and been less distracting. The cliches (a character's "wire-hair stood on end") were tiring but went on endlessly.
Thirdly, the rest of the text is made up of strings of misused terminology from calculus and physics. In all seriousness they seem to have been pulled out of a glossary with no purpose or rationale. Some readers may enjoy that, since there is a newly emerged "math aesthetic" within some segments of popular culture that has no connection to the actual study or understanding of math or science (Real-world example: putting up on the wall a framed painting of a physics formula-- a painting of the formula itself in black and white, looking just like it would look when typed in a textbook).
A critic's blurb on the back cover says "Lem plays in earnest with every concept [...] from free will to probability theory", but asinine rhymes containing the word "stochastic" is the extent of the so-called "probability theory" you'll experience in this book. That is a prime example of the shallow science aesthetic: "probability theory" is referred to explicitly only because that term is oh-la-la techno-babble, not because it has any role in the narrative. The word lazily carries vague connotations of the higher-functions of human thought, that's all.
In summary, too much of the book is based on thematic overbearing wordplay that loses its freshness almost right away. The has a higher concentration of groaners than any book ever written, I'm pretty sure. (Example: Lem describes things as "informational and transformational", which in context has no justification other than that the two words form a (forced) rhyme, and that they have a loose floppy air of "technology" about them.)
Lem's Solaris was better than this, even in an English translation that came through French from the original Polish. In Solaris too there's some shallow scientific/techno posturing, but it was negligible since it made up a thinner layer of the book's content. Plainly put, the scientific bent of Solaris was a straw man, but the psychological core of the story was excellent and stayed with me. Or I'd suggest skipping The Cyberiad and getting Lem's THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS. Lem's indulgent there too, but with enjoyable results. You also might want to check out Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, which is distantly similar to The Cyberiad in its spacey themes but which I liked a lot more. Other than that I strongly recommend Kurt Vonnegut if you're looking for imaginative faux-sci-fi amazements. Vonnegut had and has no rival to the deftness he brings to fictional and non-fictional scientific concepts. (And for the record, the blurb by Vonnegut on this edition of The Cyberiad is a blatant misquote. Any discerning reader would do a double-take.)
If the puns and hollow misused jargon were stripped out, the residue could be commendable. The book isn't terrible. Afterall, I got through it. Meanwhile there are thousands of books out there that have no right to bring anyone past the first page. If I looked way past the drawbacks I have harped on, I could say Lem finds a creative and likeable thread.
 When I'm down, I just re-read this book May 4, 2007
Eugene V. Gill
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I first discovered this book as a teenager, more than 30 years ago. Since then I have read it many times. Recently, I finished reading it aloud at bedtime to my two sons, 11 and 8. They were enthralled. I will never tire of this book and was sad to hear of Lem's death in 2006.
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