The Truth and Other Stories

(Hardback)

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Description

Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanisaw Lem, nine of them never before published in English. Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanisaw Lem, only three have previously appeared 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 1993, 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, 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 that 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.

Reviews

"The Truth and Other Stories, a new collection of Lems previously untranslated stories, shows that even the 'scatterings from his workshop,' as Kim Stanley Robinson puts it in his foreword, could outstrip a typical writers lifetime of creation." The New York Times Book Review

"[A] brilliant introduction to Lems science fiction. In its pages one can find him testing out multiple styles and themes, from the quirky to the seriously philosophical. All its tales are incubators, growing and playing with ideas that would eventually become the mainstay of his novels and treatises... More than half a century ago, Stanislaw Lem gazed into the future and saw, rather than rockets or ray guns, the evolution of the synthetic mind and the humans creating it. Thanks to these translations, English-language readers can share in his visionlong after he first imagined the internet and its thinking machines." The Wall Street Journal

"[Lems] tales from the period [the late 1950s]several of which have been adeptly translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in M.I.T. Presss new collectionThe Truth and Other Storiesfeature silicon minds that cant be distinguished from human ones, extraterrestrials with an uncanny interest in mimesis, and the idea that our universe was created by imperfect gods as a sort of joke." The New Yorker

"As our world changes faster than we can make sense of it, Lem's prescient imagination shows the power of science fiction for peering into the future." Scientific American

Author Bio

Stanisaw Lem (1921-2006), a writer called "worthy of the Nobel Prize" by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.