Search Worlds Without End

A six-man crew crash-lands on Eden, fourth planet from another sun. The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger, and everywhere there are images of death. The crew's attempt to communicate with this civilization leads to violence and to a cruel truth-cruel precisely because it is so human.

The planet Quinta is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approach Quinta, a dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding.

Scientists studying the phenomenon of neutrino radiation suddenly realize that the cosmic emissions are conveying a message for humanity, and the race is on to decode the alien transmission.

The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community.

In this bold and controversial examination of the past, present, and future of science fiction, Lem informs the raging debate over the literary merit of the genre with ten arch, incisive, provocative essays

These fourteen science fiction stories reveal Lem's fascination with artificial intelligence and demonstrate just how surprisingly human sentient machines can be.

Hal Bregg is an astronaut who returns from a space mission in which only 10 biological years have passed for him, while 127 years have elapsed on earth. He finds that the earth has changed beyond recognition, filled with human beings who have been medically neutralized. How does an astronaut join a civilization that shuns risk?

Who's testing whom? When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. Scientists speculate that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, its purpose in doing so unknown.

The first of Lem's novels to be published in America and now considered a classic, SOLARIS raises a question: Can we truly understand the universe around us without first understanding what lies within?

Lem himself, who read English fluently, repeatedly voiced his disappointment about the Kilmartin-Cox translation of the French translation, and it has generally been considered second-rate. In 2011, the first direct Polish-to-English translation by Bill Johnston was released as an audiobook narrated by Alessandro Juliani, and then as an e-book.

The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Throughout his writings, comprising dozens of science fiction novels and short stories, Lem offered deeply philosophical and bitingly satirical reflections on the limitations of both science and humanity.

In Summa Technologiae--his major work of nonfiction, first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time--Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance. Indeed, many of Lem's conjectures about future technologies have now come true: from artificial intelligence, bionics, and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload, the concept underlying Internet search engines, and the idea of virtual reality. More important for its continued relevance, however, is Lem's rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity.

Preceding Richard Dawkins's understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker by more than two decades, Lem posits evolution as opportunistic, shortsighted, extravagant, and illogical. Strikingly original and still timely, Summa Technologiae resonates with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.

A former astronaut turned private detective goes on the trail in a futuristic Italy to discover why a number of people have died mysteriously. The investigation takes him to a hallucinatory world where life is cheap and accidents a matter of course.

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.

A young officer at Scotland Yard is assigned to investigate a puzzling and eerie case of missing-and apparently resurrected-bodies. To unravel the mystery, Lt. Gregory consults scientific, philosophical, and theological experts, who supply him with a host of theories and clues.

Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanislaw Lem, nine of them never before published in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought-provoking and scathingly funny.

Written from 1956 to 1996, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, The Truth, a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; The Journal appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of infinite universes--until at the end, in a classic Lem twist, it turns out to be no such thing; in An Enigma, beings debate whether offspring can be created without advanced degrees and design templates. Other stories feature a computer than can predict the future by 137 seconds, matter-destroying spores, a hunt in which the prey is a robot, and an electronic brain eager to go on the lam. These stories are peak Lem, exploring ideas and themes that resonate throughout his writing.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword - essay by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Hunt - [Pilot Pirx] - novelette
• Rat in the Labyrinth - novelette
• Invasion from Aldebaran - (2011) - short story
• The Friend - novelette
• The Invasion - novelette
• Darkness and Mildew - (2011) - short story
• The Hammer - novelette
• Lymphater's Formula - novelette
• The Journal - novelette
• The Truth - novelette
• One Hundred and Thirty-Seven - short story
• An Enigma - [Robots' Fables] - short story

Stanislaw Lem died on 26 March, 2006. No one can literally bring back his mortal engine to life. But his voice can be heard afresh for the benefit of all those who believe that, with his passing, a quintessential element of twentieth-century artistic and intellectual heritage has come to an end.

Peter Swirski's edited and annotated translation of Lem's fifteen-year correspondence with his principal American translator offers an unparalleled testimony to the raw intellectual powers, smouldering literary passions, and abiding personal concerns from the central period of the writer's life and career. Even as they reposition Lem as a consummate litterateur and an intellectual oracle, the letters reveal tantalizing glimpses of the man behind the giant. Fighting depression, at times hitting the bottle, plagued by ill health, obsessed by his legacy, driven to distraction by lack of appreciation in the United States, Lem the arch-rationalist emerges here at his most human, vulnerable, and... likeable.

An interstellar 2nd-class cruiser called Invincible, lands on Regis III which seems bleakly uninhabited, to investigate the loss of sister ship, Condor. The crew finds evidence of a form of quasilife, born thru evolution of autonomous, self-replicating machines. The evolution was controlled by robot wars. The survivors are swarms of minuscule, insectoid machines. Individually or in small groups they're harmless & capable of only simple behavior. However, when bothered, they form huge swarms displaying complex behavior arising from self-organization & are able to defeat an intruder by a powerful surge of EMI. Some members of the crew suffer complete memory erasure as a consequence. Big clouds are also capable of high speed travel to the troposphere. The angered crew attempts to fight the enemy, but eventually recognize the meaninglessness of their efforts in the most direct sense of the word.

The novel turns into an analysis of the relationship between different life domains & their place in the cosmos. It's a thought experiment demonstrating that evolution may not necessarily lead to dominance by intellectually superior life forms. The plot also involves a Conrad-like dilemma, juxtaposing human values & the efficiency of mechanical insects.

Ijon Tichy is the only human who knows for sure whether the self-programming robots on the moon are plotting a terrestrial invasion. But a highly focused ray severs his corpus collosum. Now his left brain can't remember the secret and his uncooperative right brain won't tell. Tichy struggles for control of the lost memory and of his own two warring sides

Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure. Translated by Michael Kandel.

Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride. Line drawings by the Author.

Ijon Tichy is an ordinary space traveler who always follows his extraordinary curiosity, especially when it leads him to scientists working on the fringes of knowledge. Their plans are grandiose, and the bargains they make too often Faustian, for the ends they pursue concern humanity's greatest obsessions: immortality, artificial intelligence, and consumer goods. By turns philosophical, satirical, and absurd, Lem's stories find Tichy both a participant in and an observer of strange experiments. One scientist has created artificial consciousness in black boxes, fooling machines into thinking they're human; another has created a gelatinous substance that shows disturbing signs of free will; still another has fallen victim to his own doppelganger. But there are triumphs, however temporary. The revolution in laundry brought on by rival manufacturers of intelligent washing machines gives way to chaos as ever more sophisticated machines seduce their owners or turn to crime. Faulty time machines, intergalactic tourists, intelligent (but suicidal) potatoes -- Ijon Tichy navigates them all with common sense and resourcefulness and in so doing shows why he endures as one of Lem's most popular characters.

In Pilot Pirx, Lem has created an irresistibly likable character: an astronaut who gives the impression of still navigating by the seat of his pants-a bumbler but an inspired one. By investing Pirx with a range of human foibles, Lem offers a wonderful vision of the audacity, childlike curiosity, and intuition that can give humans the courage to confront outer space.

Commander Pirx, who drives space vehicles for a living in the galaxy of the future, here faces a new series of intriguing adventures in which robots demonstrate some alarmingly human characteristics.

In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem presents a collection of book reviews of nonexistent works of literature--works that, in many cases, could not possibly be written. Embracing postmodernism's "games for games' sake" ethos, Lem joins the contest with hilarious and grotesque results, lampooning the movement's self-indulgence and exploiting its mannerisms.

Beginning with a review of his own book, Lem moves on to tackles (or create pastiches of) the French new novel, James Joyce, pornography, authorless writing, and Dostoevsky, while at the same time ranging across scientific topics, from cosmology to the pervasiveness of computers. The result is a metafictional tour de force by one of the world's most popular writers.

Table of Contents:

• The New Cosmogony - shortfiction
• Non Serviam - shortfiction
• De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi by Cezar Kouska - shortfiction
• Die Kultur als Fehler by Wilhelm Klopper - shortfiction
• Being Inc. by Alastair Waynewright - shortfiction
• Toi by Raymond Seurat - shortfiction
• Odysseus of Ithaca by Kuno Mlatje - shortfiction
• U-Write-It - shortfiction
• Idiota by Gian Carlo Spallanzani - shortfiction
• Pericalypsis by Joachim Fersengeld - shortfiction
• Rien du tout, ou la consequence by Solange Marriot - shortfiction
• Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVI by Alfred Zellermann - shortfiction
• Sexplosion by Simon Merrill - shortfiction
• Gigamesh by Patrick Hannahan - shortfiction
• Les Robinsonades by Marcel Coscat - shortfiction
• A Perfect Vacuum by S. Lem - shortfiction

These wickedly authentic introductions to twenty-first-century books preface tomes on teaching English to bacteria, using animated X-rays to create "pornograms," and analyzing computer-generated literature through the science of "bitistics." "Lem, a science fiction Bach, plays in this book a googleplex of variations on his basic themes".

Contains three apocryphal essays--"One Human Minute," "The Upside-Down Revolution ," and "The World as Cataclysm"