Word: vacuumers
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...PERFECT VACUUM by Stanislaw...
...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 it was), and presents...
Logic is the perfect vacuum, admitting no impurities but capable of breeding absurdities. A Nazi war criminal sets himself up as Louis XVI in the wilds of South America where he decrees German to be French and Argentina to be imperial Spain. A Huxleian world in which sexual indulgence has resulted in a "genitocracy" is suddenly cooled off by Nosex, a drug that turns lovemaking into drudgery. Sex as a recreation and mainstay of the economy is replaced by eating, with its own pornography and taboos. People who eat fruit while kneeling, for example, are branded perverts...
...that surrounds us is already artificial. " With such delightful leaps of the imagination, Lem outdistances nearly all of the most popular star trekkers. He is the Borges of scientific culture, whose "mortal engines" promise that mystery will not end with the last flesh-and-blood human. Reading A Perfect Vacuum, one can easily imagine banks of Lemian cybernoids arguing whether man exists and how many science-fiction writers could fit on the head of a microchip. - R.Z. Sheppard
...baffling the grader or fencing with him but like this: "It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we first note the progress of that age on all intellectual fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum...