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...PERFECT VACUUM by Stanislaw Lem...
...writers who truly comprehend the vocabulary of science. Thomas Pynchon made physical laws part of the structure of Gravity's Rainbow, and science-fiction novelists routinely construct their speculative entertainments from the hard-and software of physics and chemistry. Among the masters of the genre is Stanislaw Lem, a mordant, satirical Pole whose novels and stories have been praised by readers as disparate as Critic Leslie Fiedler and Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Lem has written nearly 30 books, and his European sales are in the millions. (Ten of his works have been translated into English; most of them were...
...Lem story can have the crushing gravity of a collapsing star. His sentences are frequently dense with logic and his points aphoristic: "The progress of human knowledge was a gradual renunciation of the simplicity of the world." Lem's own worlds are complex, twittering word machines ingeniously wired to philosophy, probability theory, cybernetics and literary conventions, which he parodies brilliantly. Unlike most science-fiction writers, he animates his creatures with lively explanations, as in the Cartesian send-up from The Cyberiad: "Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides and iodides mingled with the water...
...Lem has a major theme, it is the implications of artificial intelligence. What is natural and unnatural, what is imaginary and what is real-and does it really matter-are questions that stream through the pages of A Perfect Vacuum like ghostly neutrinos. Each story is cast in the form of a review of a nonexistent book. Lem, of course, is both reviewer and conceiver of the unwritten texts. Some are fairly straightforward social and literary satires. Les Robinsonades dismisses Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a puritanized fiction based on a brutish factual account of a castaway (which...
...Lem's rationalists have a weakness for rationalizing. A man who considers himself a genius of the highest order also believes that such elite members of the race are never recognized. In another story Lem overloads the probability theory to suggest playfully that no one should exist. Each man's chances of being, says Lem's Professor Kouska, is a "teragigamegamulticentillion-to-one shot." In physics, one chance in a centillion is considered an impossibility because there are fewer than a centillion seconds before the end of the universe. The origin of this fact is unclear...