The Star Diaries: Stanislaw Lem (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Lem, Stanislaw

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241240026 ISBN 13: 9780241240021

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2015

Synopsis

A Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age - The New York TimesStanislaw Lem's set of short stories, written over a period of twenty years, all feature the adventures of space traveller Ijon Tichy and recount him spinning in time-warps, spying on robots, encountering bizarre civilizations and creatures in space and being hopelessly lost in a forest of supernovae. This is a philosophical satire on technology, theology, intelligence and human nature from one of the greatest of science fiction writers

About this title

Review:

Lem veers between joyous slapstick, freewheeling satire, and insanely involuted logical paradoxes--with surprisingly serious excursions into issues of will and faith. Funny, unexpected, tantalizing (Kirkus Reviews)

A giant of 20th-century science fiction (The Guardian)

Stanislaw Lem was for 50 years Poland's premier intellectual of the imagination (John Clute The Independent)

From the Back Cover:

"One of the most intelligent, erudite, and comic writers working today." -Anthony Burgess

In a firsthand account, Lem's hapless cosmonaut Ijon Tichy tells warped tales from the civilizations he discovers in a deep space galaxy so unlike our own that concepts of science, the rational mind, human progress, the sanctity of life, and motherhood all no longer apply. In their place, Tichy finds sadomasochistic robots who speak a dialect much like Chaucerian English, killer potatoes with an appetite for spacecraft, and robot theologians who are being relentlessly persecuted by creators who have renounced their original faith. Full of the intellectual satire for which Stanislaw Lem is esteemed, The Star Diaries speaks volumes about contemporary society in its depiction of highly bizarre, faraway, futuristic worlds.
"A Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age, who plays in earnest with every concept of philosophy and physics..." --New York Times

Stanislaw Lem is the most widely translated and best known science fiction author writing outside of the English language. Winner of the Kafka Prize, he is a contributor to many magazines, including the New Yorker, and he is the author of numerous works, including Solaris.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0241240026
• ISBN 13: 9780241240021
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352