Melanti's Reviews > The Cyberiad: Stories

If I had to pick just one word to describe Lem's fiction, it would be "experimental." All the books by him that I've read so far have been so incredibly different from one another - and often different from anything else I've read as well!

This particular book is a book of short stories about a pair of robots who run around the universe constructing other robots. In many places, it really reminds me of folklore trickster tales, in other places The Arabian Nights Entertainments, and in still others just common silliness. It's a lot of fun and a whole lot more accessible than some of his other work (such as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub that inspired the "lemming" of Sword & Laser infamy) and I think it would appeal to even those who aren't die-hard sci-fi fans.

In addition, I've got to say this is one of the most phenomenal pieces of translation I've come across in a long, long time. All the fantastic jokes and wordplay - including made up words, alliteration, poetry, word games - are all translated wonderfully. They're not word-for-word translations, of course. Such a thing wouldn't work at all with this sort of book. But Kandel took enough liberties with the text that if a joke just couldn't be directly translated and still be funny, he replaced it with a similar reading English joke. Which is rather daring, but that's really the only way this sort of book could ever be translated.

There's more than a few OCR errors through out but it's not NEARLY as bad as the other Stanislaw Lem books I've bought so I guess they at least ran this particular volume through spell check. Whew!