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Description
Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. They travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their employers. “The most completely successful of his books... here Lem comes closest to inventing... read more
Memorable Quotes
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“Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustram longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christroffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not--for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a dull domain.”
Trurl's electronic bard, reponding to a request to compose a "lyrical, pastoral" love poem in the language of tensor algebra (1). -
“Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in they sigh, Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 Φ!”
Trurl's electronic bard, reponding to a request to compose a "lyrical, pastoral" love poem in the language of tensor algebra (2).
First Sentence
When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, so you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller, yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade, when there was not a speck of dust to be found in outer space, nor any nebular debris-in those good old days it was the custom for constructors, once they had received their Diploma of Perpetual Omnipotence with distinction, to sally forth ofttimes and bring to distant lands the benefit of their expertise.
Table of Contents
1. How the World Was Saved
2. Trurl's Machine
3. A Good Shellacking
4. The Seven Sallies of Trurl and Klapaucius:
a) The First Sally, or The Trap of Gargantius
b) The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Band
c) The Second Sally, or The Offer of King Krool
d) The Third Sally, or The Dragons of Probability
d) The Fourth Sally, or How Trurl Built a Femfatalatron to Save Prince Pantagoon from the Pangs of Love, and How Later He Resorted to a Cannonade of Babies
e) The Fifth Sally, or The Mischief of King Balerion
f) The Fifth Sally (A), or Trurl's Prescription
g) The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of the Second King to Defeat the Pirate Pugg
h) The Seventh Sally, or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good
i) Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius
j) Altuizine
5. From the Cyphroeroticon, or Tales of Deviations, Superfixations and Aberrations of the Heart: Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal
Authors & Contributors
- Stanisaw Lem (Author)
Other Contributors:
- Michael Kandel (Translator)
- Daniel Mroz (Illustrator)
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