The Cyberiad

The Cyberiad ( original title Cyberiada ) is a cycle of fifteen stories by the Polish author Stanisław Lem, which emerged from the late 1950s until the early 1970s. Stories of Cyberiad play in a future, the cybernetic age. In a peculiar combination of literary genres fairy tales and science fiction, the adventurous deeds and travels of the designer duo Klapaucius and Trurl be portrayed in a predominantly populated by robots cosmos. The central themes of the held in a heroic- comic tone philosophical fables out of the discussion and the blending of ethics and technology as well as the failure of an associated absolute belief in progress.

The Cyberiad is one of the most popular and widely praised by the critics also works Lem, which alone reached four first editions in Polish 110,000 copies. Lem himself wished that she should survive him before any other of his writings.

Environment and background

The Cyberiad is both a critical technology as well as a literary work. The title itself suggests. He is a contraction of the word cybernetics, the science that is behind the design and control of complex technological systems, and the suffix - ( i) ade (see Robinson Crusoe or the Iliad ), with the broad narrative implementation of a concept is characterized.

On the linguistic- literary level, the Cyberiad is a highly original creation. It combines two conventions of fantasy, the tale and science fiction, and this amalgamated their narrative conventions and word fields. Their world is only apparently a physically dominated. Although Trurl and Klapaucius can construct anything but follow the objects at the end of linguistic and non-technical principles. The Cyberiad also parodies the philosophical fable in the style of Voltaire and mimics the oriental narrative box after. The robots face the same everyday problems or individual shortcomings as man, that is greed, stupidity, lust for power, and are in no way become more successful or advanced; conspicuously include the Cyberiad on to the Polish Baroque culture of the 17th century and plays repeatedly in feudal structured worlds. The creation or improvement of worlds end result or fails.

The immediate literary context of Cyberiad was the only poorly developed tradition of Polish science fiction or science fantasy. In addition, the futurological reflection based on utopias or dystopias remained through intensifying the Stalinist repression since 1948/49, very limited, until the thaw in 1956 allowed a more extensive exploration of the relationship between technology and society, as well as formal freedoms that go beyond the conventions of socialist realism went out. 1957, first published in The Star Diaries, actual Münchhauseniaden, one Space driver named Ijon Tichy already show striking similarities with the Cyberiad because of their linguistic games and parody content. This is also closely related to the slightly older robot fairy tales in which the two protagonists, however, not mentioned above occur, and where the fairy tale genre much more comes into play.

Socially and technically this period was marked by one to the 1970s continued belief in progress, not least combined with the first " electronic brains " and the beginnings of space travel. A key term here made ​​cybernetics, which was created only in the 1940s by the drawing together of different disciplines such as communications, control, decision and game theory and statistical mechanics. It was the time of writing the Cyberiad a very young science, with the idea all-round technical feasibility intimately linked, as they are about in the published about 1950 works Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener and I, Robot by Isaac Asimov reflected in part. Lem dealt with these works. He learned English on the basis of Cybernetics. Critical with this hope, the problems and conflicts of human society through future to be able to solve particular technical developments, Lem addressed already in its technology - philosophical work Summa Technologiae from the mid-1960s and continued into the Cyberiad many developed there thoughts and models narrative around.

Content

The Cyberiad consists of fifteen short stories that were created 1957-1971. A first partial edition in Polish appeared in 1964, in German 1969 ( complete 1983). A sixteenth story, The demographic implosion, as a treatise on the problems of overpopulation of 1985 falls in content and style from the scope of the original Cyberiad.

The stories can be divided into three groups: communication with other machines (1, 2, 3, 5) research trips to other ( mechanical ) civilizations (4, 6 to 12) and the creation or improvement of the Worlds ( 14 and 15). The Thirteenth Tale is obtained as a box of history under all three categories.