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Title: The Cyberiad Author: Stanislaw Lem Rating: Not available Avg. Score: 5 Submit Comment Hits: 22

Review of The Cyberiad

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Comments for The Cyberiad

• Posted on 2008-06-05
  Philosophical gem
  
  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.
  Score: 4
• Posted on 2007-10-29
  Where Are We Coming from? Where Are We Going to?
  
  Lovely book dealing with several philosophical issues. A collection of falsely simple short stories with deep insights. Recommended both to adults and children.
  Score: 4
• Posted on 2007-10-26
  A Classic
  
  I first encountered, The Cyberiad on an optional reading list in college. I would have liked it even more when I was younger, but this book is a classic. Not all the collected fables in the book are up to the same level of quality, but a couple of them are pure genius, and can be read over and over as the years go by.
  
  The Cyberiad is the story of two robots, Trurl and Klapaucius that spend all their time constructing things in a ridiculous attempt at one-upmanship. The competition drives them to great extremes. They sometimes travel to other planets, and meet quirky characters. Each fable has little connection to the others, and the fables don't appear to be sequentially arranged. You can pick a story at random from the book without getting confused once you understand the basic idea of the universe Lem created.
  
  The edition, I own, has tiny drawings, which really add to the story. I dislike the cover art on this new edition, and I hope they did not omit the inside art work. I only wish they had more of the drawings. Some children love this book, and they especially enjoy the art work. The temperament of the child of the child would decide if this book would be a good fit. Not everything in the book is appropriate for younger children, but once a child is old enough to read the book his or herself, this book makes a great gift.
  
  I can see why many of the other reviews either love this book or hated it. Either you appreciate The Cyberiad, or you cannot.
  
  Score: 5
• Posted on 2007-08-27
  Stories held down held down by fixation on hollow science aesthetic
  
  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.
  Score: 2
• Posted on 2007-05-04
  When I'm down, I just re-read this book
  
  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.
  Score: 5