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A review by zachbrumaire
The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
by turns charming and torturous, funny and profound, Lem takes up again the familiar and awesome tasks of myth-maker and godbuilder. The stories-within-stories and dreams-within-dreams of "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius" in particular confirm Lem as a forefather and patron trickster god of psy-fi elsewhere exhibited in The Futurological Congress, as does "The Fifth Sally or, The Mischief of King Balerion."
however, it was the works' political satire which I found most compelling. It is this element perhaps which constitutes an essential thread running the gamut of Lem's corpus, from the self-serious, highly technical machinations of His Master's Voice to the pharmohorror of "Congress" to the playful entrapments and rupture of his sillier, shorter voyages of Ijon Tichy. its on full display in the present volume as well. In a world of robot kings, omnipotent Nostotrons, pirates with PhDs and Demons of the Second kind, the absurd realism with which Lem portrays the major and petty indignities of oppression, the self-confounding logic of the security state, the corrosive subsumption of bureaucracy (here i must pause to congratulate the translator on their rendition of prosetry by which the Machine with the Big B is rendered in "Trurl's Prescription") name the ghost which can set up lodging and haunt its subjects wherever a sufficient concentration of wealth, weapons, triplicate forms and cold coffee can be found.
Here I ask myself, what then are Lem's politics? there's a dangerous sanitizing way to read Lem, the kind which asserts that all political structures and programs are indistinguishable, which holds up Lem as an indictment against the consequences of the Soviet project. I think that reading misses the specificity of Lem's work. if he is critical of all governing regimes, it is not a one dimensional criticism which can only fart itself into an exhausted political quietism. His is an endlessly engaged, critically distrustful but also positively creative political philosophy, an anarchism which is not content to throw up its hands and declare that the circuits of all robots are grey in the dark. there's a deep love for the creative faculties of workers, be they robot constructors or robot sages, supercomputer poets or freelance dragon hunters. Lem is in love with the entangled trifecta of imagination, craft, and resistance. the worker for Lem is always already a political subject, one perhaps more alive to the forces which she navigates and rewires than the Tyrants who sit in the their empty center of the storm, calling forth attendants to pet them, excite them, entrance them in electric dreams. if Lem is a pessimist, his pessimism is nonetheless dynamic, even joyful, endlessly overcoding the regimes in which his characters find themselves so as to turn the internal contradictions of power's demands back upon the beneficiaries of those regimes themselves. there is not much sympathy for programmatic utopian projects on Lem's part, but for the very same reason, he diagnosis in the apparent inevitability of the logic of force the very fragility on which it rests. in a post-Soviet world, we may envy Lem the opportunities latent in the same power which co-opted the revolutionary impulses of 1917. let us not overlook his insight that the inevitability of hegemony also constitutes its own crises, if we can be clever enough to short-circuit the faculties of authority and thereby bypass the over-but-outside position of the authorities.
such is the lesson of perhaps the most optimistic tale in the collection (which nonetheless takes place on the premise of world-historical acts of destruction), "The First Sally or, The Trap of Gargantus," wherein increasing interconnectedness and effectiveness of two robotic armies ultimately produces and is overcome by and subsumed to the creation of new, self-sufficient and self-transforming historical subjects, before whom the over constraints of the development of production become the circuits on which the poetry of history emancipating itself can be written. the lesson is not opaque. link up, Lem is telling us. learn your own potential, the potential of those around you. it is the same capacities which make you so valuable as a mass of servants which can transform you into New Gods.
however, it was the works' political satire which I found most compelling. It is this element perhaps which constitutes an essential thread running the gamut of Lem's corpus, from the self-serious, highly technical machinations of His Master's Voice to the pharmohorror of "Congress" to the playful entrapments and rupture of his sillier, shorter voyages of Ijon Tichy. its on full display in the present volume as well. In a world of robot kings, omnipotent Nostotrons, pirates with PhDs and Demons of the Second kind, the absurd realism with which Lem portrays the major and petty indignities of oppression, the self-confounding logic of the security state, the corrosive subsumption of bureaucracy (here i must pause to congratulate the translator on their rendition of prosetry by which the Machine with the Big B is rendered in "Trurl's Prescription") name the ghost which can set up lodging and haunt its subjects wherever a sufficient concentration of wealth, weapons, triplicate forms and cold coffee can be found.
Here I ask myself, what then are Lem's politics? there's a dangerous sanitizing way to read Lem, the kind which asserts that all political structures and programs are indistinguishable, which holds up Lem as an indictment against the consequences of the Soviet project. I think that reading misses the specificity of Lem's work. if he is critical of all governing regimes, it is not a one dimensional criticism which can only fart itself into an exhausted political quietism. His is an endlessly engaged, critically distrustful but also positively creative political philosophy, an anarchism which is not content to throw up its hands and declare that the circuits of all robots are grey in the dark. there's a deep love for the creative faculties of workers, be they robot constructors or robot sages, supercomputer poets or freelance dragon hunters. Lem is in love with the entangled trifecta of imagination, craft, and resistance. the worker for Lem is always already a political subject, one perhaps more alive to the forces which she navigates and rewires than the Tyrants who sit in the their empty center of the storm, calling forth attendants to pet them, excite them, entrance them in electric dreams. if Lem is a pessimist, his pessimism is nonetheless dynamic, even joyful, endlessly overcoding the regimes in which his characters find themselves so as to turn the internal contradictions of power's demands back upon the beneficiaries of those regimes themselves. there is not much sympathy for programmatic utopian projects on Lem's part, but for the very same reason, he diagnosis in the apparent inevitability of the logic of force the very fragility on which it rests. in a post-Soviet world, we may envy Lem the opportunities latent in the same power which co-opted the revolutionary impulses of 1917. let us not overlook his insight that the inevitability of hegemony also constitutes its own crises, if we can be clever enough to short-circuit the faculties of authority and thereby bypass the over-but-outside position of the authorities.
such is the lesson of perhaps the most optimistic tale in the collection (which nonetheless takes place on the premise of world-historical acts of destruction), "The First Sally or, The Trap of Gargantus," wherein increasing interconnectedness and effectiveness of two robotic armies ultimately produces and is overcome by and subsumed to the creation of new, self-sufficient and self-transforming historical subjects, before whom the over constraints of the development of production become the circuits on which the poetry of history emancipating itself can be written. the lesson is not opaque. link up, Lem is telling us. learn your own potential, the potential of those around you. it is the same capacities which make you so valuable as a mass of servants which can transform you into New Gods.