L'unico altro libro di Lem che abbia letto è Solaris e posso dirvi tranquillamente che non sembrano frutto della stessa persona: Solaris è un romanzo profondo, complesso e pieno di interrogativi circa la natura dell'uomo per i quali l'autore non fornisce risposta alcuna. Diversamente, Cyberiade è un'antologia di racconti che narrano, principalmente, le incredibili avventure dei due inventori Trurl e Klapaucius, sottoforma di storie che rasentano, talora, lo stile fiabesco.Il contenuto fantascientifico dei racconti è volutamente naïf ed i due costruttori risultano praticamente essere onnipotenti nella realizzazione delle invenzioni. Le loro capacità li rendono estremamente richiesti in tutto l'universo e sono spesso in viaggio per soddisfare i più disparati (e talora disperati) bisogni. Per farvi capire il tono dei racconti, ve ne riporto lo spassoso indice:Come salvammo il mondoLa macchina di TrurlUna buona battituraLa prima fatica ovvero la trappola di GargantiusLa prima fatica bis ovvero il bardo elettronicoLa seconda fatica ovvero alla caccia di re KroolLa terza fatica ovvero i draghi della probabilitàLa quarta fatica ovvero come Trurl costruì un femmefatalatrone per salvare il principe Patagonzio dalle pene d'amore e come successivamente dovette ricorrere a un cannoneggiamento bamboccescoLa quinta fatica ovvero le burle di re BalerionLa quinta fatica bis ovvero l'ingiunzione di TrurlLa sesta fatica ovvero come Trurl e Klapaucius crearono un demone di seconda classe per sconfiggere il pirata PuggLa settima fatica ovvero come Trurl, a causa della sua perfezione, finì per ottenere il contrario di quello che cercavaPremessa: il cavaliere sfericoLa storia della prima macchina ovvero il consigliere perfettoIntermezzo 1 ovvero della sfericitàLa storia della seconda macchina ovvero Il benefattore del pianetaSecondo intermezzoLa storia della terza macchina ovvero Mymosh il figlio di se stessoL'altruizina ovvero come Bonhommius, l'eremita ermetico, cercò di imporre la felicità universale e le conseguenze del suo attoDal "Cyberoticon" (ovvero storie di deviazioni, superfissazioni e aberrazioni del cuore): il principe Ferrix e la principessa CristalloLe tematiche riprese nei racconti sono le più disparate, andando da questioni matematiche e fisiche, come il Diavoletto di Maxwell, a riflessioni filosofiche, come quelle legate alla ricerca della felicità e all'impossibilità dell'imposizione della stessa.Però Lem fa risultare il tutto estremamente divertente, così come si capisce immediatamente leggendo l'incipit del primo racconto:Un giorno Trurl il costruttore montò una macchina in grado di creare tutto quello che cominciava per N.Terminato che ebbe il marchingegno, lo collaudò chiedendogli di creare nacchere, poi noccioline e negligé - che la macchina debitamente fabbricò - e di nascondere il tutto in un narghilè pieno di nepente e di numerosi altri narcotici. [...] Non ancora persuaso delle capacità della macchina Trurl le fece produrre, uno dopo l'altro, nodi, narcisi, nembi, nettare, nuclei, neutroni, nafta, nettapipe, ninfe, naiadi e natrium. Quest'ultimo non comparve, e Trurl, notevolmente scocciato, pretese una spiegazione. "Mai sentito parlarne" disse la macchina."Cosa?" fece il costruttore."Ma è soltanto il sodio. Sì, il metalloide, l'elemento chimico...""Sodio comincia per S, ed io lavoro solo con le N".Già la prima riga mi ha rapito e mi ha fatto anche capire che lavoro tutt'altro che banale abbia dovuto fare l'ottimo traduttore Riccardo Valla per rendere opportunamente i giochi di parole di Lem. Ed io adoro certe libertà linguistiche.Consiglio dunque questo libro a chiunque, anche a chi non ama la fantascienza, poiché è usata come mezzo e non come fine. Soprattutto a chi conosce Douglas Adams e Jorge Luis Borges (del quale devo leggere ancora molto!).La recensione è presso il mio blog: http://www.jhack.it/blog/2011/02/14/c...
These names kick around while you get on with other bits of life: the names of authors you know you should probably have read by now. It's not a guilty thing, exactly - "Oh, Christ, I'm going to Hell because I haven't read enough Ray Bradbury!" - it's just an awareness that there is something out there that a lot of people think is awesome, and I haven't tried it. Mind you, I could say the same thing about both Ketamine and unicorn erotica, and indeed about unicorn erotica featuring Ketamine, and a surprising number of people are really into that.Yes, really.Cyberiad, then, is one of those books that has been on my radar, and I've never read it. UNTIL NOW.Okay. People, seriously: it's very good. It's wry, allegorical, quasi-fabulistic fun. Theodore Sturgeon described Lem as the most-read SF writer in the world, and reading this you can see why. It's got that broad, industrial/clunky Soviet-era taking-the-piss-out-of-the-cruel-state thing going on, and broad, industrial/clunky machines to go with. High technology breaks, falls over, runs wild. Planets are ruled by idiot princelings who spend their time hunting. This is vintage SF, concept-driven and simply and elegantly written. At the same time, it's quite clearly a literary exploration of power, intelligence, philosophy from before the point in time where marketing and shelving conventions brought down a guillotine between SF and the mainstream - a division that is at last, I trust fading away again.You know who else maybe read this before they got to work on something you know? The people who wrote Samurai Jack. If not, the inheritance is indirect, but you can sort of see it. The stories in the collection/ongoing linked narrative are very like episodes of Samurai Jack: one of the constructors (deranged, occasionally brilliant, often dense inventors) builds a machine that does something fatuous yet clever - say, it can fly during February and works as a submarine during the rest of the year. Then everything goes to hell for some unforeseen but curiously obvious reason - let's say it's leap year. And then somehow they get out of whatever mess and move on. Often someone cruel (like King Krool) is punished for being a stinker. Often the constructors score points off one another. There's no coherent sense of how a stellar civilisation predicated on idiots like these could ever function, but then if you describe the present organisation of planet Earth you'd probably think the same thing, and indeed, pretty clearly, the way we do things doesn't work very well.I find I read one, put the book down and read something else, then circle back and enjoy another one. Basic but nuanced, clever, and rightly lauded. Polish SF Borges.
What do You think about The Cyberiad (2002)?
I got to page 112, but honestly this is just not my thing. I loved Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, but somehow the circular storytelling employed in very short stories gets very repetitive. I don't find the humor funny or clever, it just feels like it is trying to hard. It smacks of Phantom Tollbooth or Hitchhiker's Guide, and these are just not my thing. Sorry, guess I'm going to lem* it. I was supposed to be on a podcast about it, but that's not going to happen!I imagine that engineers really like this book though.*lem - term coined by Sword and Laser readers to describe abandoning a book, originally chosen for the masses abandoning Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.
—Jenny (Reading Envy)
This book was not what I had expected at all. I had thought of Lem as a very serious writer, but I don't think I have ever read a book with more nerdy jokes: there are so many I fear that readers lacking a background in mathematics and/or physics will be missing out. For instance, Klapaucius and Trurl's third sally begins with an extended and very funny riff on the idea of probabilistic dragons. Presumably, any reader who is more or less aware that in modern physics many things are not deterministic will be able to get the gist of it, but no reader who has not at least taken a class in statistical mechanics will understand the great (and therefore also terrible) pun that is "grand draconical ensemble". (Presumably a ton of credit must go to the translator, too: this book is full of puns that must have been a real pain to translate from Polish but are nonetheless invariably excellent.)Aside from the physics jokes, "The Cyberiad" consists of the adventures of Klapaucius and Trurl. Like almost all characters in the book, they are robots: unlike those characters, they are "constructors", which seems to mean that they can build just about anything given the right (or, really, any) materials. Most of the stories consist of Trurl and/or Klapaucius building something -- the stupidest thinking machine in the entire world, an electronic poet, a perfect miniature world -- and the mayhem that results. At times, the constructors are commissioned to produce a work by a robotic king: sometimes, the king proves to be untrustworthy and must be outwitted, but inevitably the constructors emerge victorious, and usually loaded down with riches and honors as well. Though the title references "The Iliad", the style is actually mostly faux-medieval-romance a la "Don Quixote" (the most obvious homage being that Klapaucius and Trurl's adventures are referred to as sallies). Several of the stories have a not particularly subtle allegorical burden, but they carry it so lightly that it never becomes a problem.Yet this book -- originally published in 1965 -- is not just a ton of fun to read, it is way ahead of its time in terms of science fiction. The story of King Zipperupus (the book is also full of great names) is one of virtual reality; in the second sally, Trurl and Klapaucius build what appears to be a nanotech device (though that word is not used) which reminded me of something vaguely similar in a book by Iain M. Banks; the story of the perfect miniature world is basically about the distinction between a truly excellent computer simulation and the real world. To a certain extent, "The Cyberiad" functions as a prototype for the far-future, heavily-computer influenced likes of Banks and Hannu Rajaniemi, which is pretty amazing for a book published, again, years before the personal computer was a thing. In short, this is a science-fiction classic.
—William Leight
The stories in The Cyberiad feature two inventors of machines, Trurl and Klapaucius, who are themselves machines, inhabiting a quasi-feudalistic world of space travel and cyber-knights and galactic rulers. The two inventors are a bit like Frog and Toad: friends, accomplices, fellow-travelers, and mildly jealous and competitive with each other. There is an amazing outpouring of linguistic genius here, with puns and neologisms and clever play of idea and concept, and I applaud the translator who had to move this pile of riches from Polish to English and keep so much of the play intact. The stories are a mix of the profound and the absurd, with philosophy and mathematics and a good deal of actual science and scientific concepts thrown in for good measure. Maxwell's Demon, for example, makes an appearance to pull an unending series of facts from the motion of gas atoms. I feel it is almost certain that Douglas Adams was inspired by this book before the Hitchhiker series. Themes of love, altruism, the perfect society, empathy, greed, haste, cooperation, and technology are all touched on. There are moments of real poetic genius as well. Overall, this is a work of a clever, creative, whimsical, and masterful mind, interested in questions of philosophy and fascinated by our ability to mechanize our world.
—Mike
