The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Can only be written by an unhinged genius and translated by another genius with an even higher loopiness quotient. These are tales concern two friendly rivals – the impulsive Trurl and the more circumspect Klapacious – who are Constructors on a galactic scale. They inhabit a truly weird universe inhabited by entities who are bonkers and who requisition the fabrication of machines for insane purposes. These miscegenations tell stories, fulfil wishes, answer questions, even produce objects that begin with ‘n’:

machine that could create anything starting with n… needles, then nankeens and negligees, nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numero... nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads, and natrium.

The translators brilliance shines through with the evocative word play…

dragons are thermodynamically impossible only in the probabilistic sense, as are elves, fairies, gnomes, witches, pixies and the like. Using the general equation of improbability, the two constructors obtained the coefficients of pixation, elfinity, kobolding
Though it is easier not to believe in electrons than in dragons: electrons, at least taken singly, won’t try to make a meal of you
...mysterious words as ‘discontinuous orthodragonality’, ‘grand draconical ensembles’, ‘high-frequency binomial fafneration’, ‘abnormal saurian distribution’, ‘discrete dragons’, ‘indiscrete dragons’, ‘drasticodracostochastic control’, ‘simple Grendelian dominance’, ‘weak interaction dragon diffraction’, ‘aberrational reluctance’, ‘informational figmentation…

Whimsical illustrations add to the eerie narrative

His Royal Highness Protuberon Asteristicus, sovereign ruler of the sister globes of Aphelion and Perihelion, hereditary monarch of Aneuria, emperor of all the Monodamites, Biproxicans and Tripartisans, the Grand Duke of Anamandorinth, Glorgonzigor and Esquacciaccaturbia, Count of the Euscalipii, the Algorissimo and the Flora del Fortran, Paladin Escutcheoned, Begudgeoned and of the Highest Dudgeon, Baron of Bhm, Wrph and Clarafoncasterbrackeningen, as well as anointed exarch extraordinary of Ida, Pida and Adinfinida, to invite in His munificent name Your Resplendent Grace to our kingdom as the long-awaited savior of the crown, as the only one who can deliver us from the general mortifaction occasioned by the thrice-unhappy infatuation of His Royal Highness, the heir to the throne, Pantagoon.’

Poetic

‘We are the Steelypips, we have a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect, we saved up all our atoms, put them all together ourselves, we hadn’t a care, no spats in our vats, no rules, no schools, until something flew up, landed, sat down and won’t budge.’
‘We tried a scarechrome and a servospook and a megalomechanism, all hydraulic and high caliber, spouting mesons like caissons, pi- and mu- and neutrinos too, protons and photons, but nothing worked.’
...long list of the differences between fiddle and faddle, not to be confused with twiddle and twaddle or tittle and tattle, then all the words that rhyme with ‘spinach’
...where all of us have arms he had only a gentle breeze, and where there are usually legs he had nothing but a shimmering rainbow, and in lieu of a head he sported a plumed fedora; his voice issued forth from his center, and indeed, he was a perfect sphere, a sphere of the most engaging appearance and girdled with an elegant semipermeable cummerbund
Fine, now give me that kludge-fudger, that winch-pincher, sprocketmonger, edulcorated data-dumper, that wretched reject of a widgeteer cowardly hiding in the grave!

Phew! A must-read for lovers of wacky SF in the vein of Douglas Adams.

View all my reviews