Books by Stanisław Lem
“The Cyberiad is an epic cycle of short stories about the adventures of two robot friend-enemies. There’s the robot Trurl, who is a master inventor of techno-magical devices, and there’s Klapaucius, who is always there to poke holes in Trurl’s wildly ambitious projects. The bickering duo fly through the cosmos in a completely fantastical, science-fictional world, and they have all these adventures…I wanted to include it because rereading Lem’s wacky, linguistically brilliant cycle of stories invites us to think about the essence of OpenAI and Anthropic’s large language models. They’re scraping up Western civilization’s dominant texts and absorbing their specific worldview – because AI obviously doesn’t have that many female’s or poor people’s or black people’s or brown people’s texts to work with. LLMs amplify knowledge, but not everyone’s knowledge. Lem captures this — satirically, I might add. I would challenge readers: go back and read The Cyberiad in the age of AI. It feels like this weird ‘aha’ moment.” Read more...
The Best Eastern European Sci Fi
Yvonne Howell, Literary Scholar
“This is my favourite example of a truly alien alien. In the book, they are not even sure if it is self-aware or intelligent. Basically, humans have discovered an alien planet called Solaris. Its surface is covered by an ocean. But over the course of the book, you realise that this is not a body of water. It is a planet-spanning liquid body of some kind, but it seems to be an alien entity as well.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens
Jaime Green, Science Writer
Interviews where books by Stanisław Lem were recommended
The Best Science Fiction Books About Aliens, recommended by Jaime Green
Science fiction helps us work through not only the possibilities of the cosmos but also the nature of humanity itself, argues Jaime Green—science writer and author of a new book on the search for alien biology, The Possibility of Life. Here she highlights five classic works of sci-fi that explore ideas of consciousness and communication in the setting of outer space.
Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books, recommended by John Plotz
New books are constantly being published. Sometimes they slip by unremarked; sometimes their impact is so enormous as to divert the flow of literature altogether. But what of those books that made a splash on arrival, but have long since disappeared from view? John Plotz, the literary scholar, has spent five years resurfacing these forgotten classics: the ‘B-side books’ that have fallen from the public consciousness.
The Best Eastern European Sci Fi, recommended by Yvonne Howell
Science fiction writers on the other side of the Iron Curtain were profoundly free-thinking intellects and have much to tell us, argues Yvonne Howell, Professor of Russian and Global Studies at the University of Richmond. She introduces five of their best works: the play that gave us the word ‘robot’, the novel that introduced ‘stalkers’ to the genre, and stories that explore AI and ecological crisis decades before they became pressing concerns.
