Imaginary Magnitude
These wickedly authentic introductions to twenty-first-century books preface tomes on teaching English to bacteria, using animated X-rays to create "pornograms," and analyzing computer-generated literature through the science of "bitistics." "Lem, a science fiction Bach, plays in this book a googleplex of variations on his basic themes" (New York Times Book Review). Translated by Marc E. Heine. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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- I have a couple I would highly recommend:
The first is Stanislaw Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude."
Most stories there are written as sort of prefaces to non-existent technical/scientific books, papers, articles, etc. The last one, Golem XIV, goes a bit beyond and includes an entire lecture.
The content is incredibly detailed and technical, Lem knew his Technology and Science for sure, so sometimes it's incredibly accurate and prophetic. Even though it was written in the 1970's, Lem was already describing things that look uncannily like neural networks, emergent communication systems, and machine-generated literature, decades before they existed.
And... most of them are also really really funny.
Here are small summaries that ChatGPT helped me write for some of the stories there:
---- Eruntics ---- A faux-scientific introduction to a field studying “erunts”: biological (or semi-biological) agents, think bacteria/neural colonies, that can learn to read, write, and communicate.
These bacterial colonies learn to communicate through several learning iterations across many mutations and generations, much like, say, Neural Networks, and they even develop their own proto-language as they evolve.
Eruntics is a sort of "meditation" on emergent intelligence and how writing or meaning might arise in nonhuman systems.
---- A History of Bitic Literature ---- Purports to be a critical history of literature produced not by humans, but by machines or other non-human authors, the fictional discipline of bitistics.
It treats computer-generated texts as a full literary tradition, with schools, tropes, and structural analysis.
It also goes into detail on how at a certain point Bitic Literature required models to read what other models had generated and "validate" what they had written, since the complexity they reach in terms of things like neologisms, subtext, and interconnectedness to other texts and ideas, becomes so absurdly high that no human being can even attempt to read them or make sense of them.
---- Golem XIV ---- This is like half of the book, and oh boy...
It presents itself first as a report/lecture series from a U.S.-military supercomputer, framed with forewords, editorial notes, “instructions,” etc, but it quickly shifts into the machine’s own philosophical monologues about humanity, evolution, intelligence gradients, and existential insignificance/significance.
It contains some really iconic phrases, in particular during Golem's "Lecture":
" 'The meaning of the transmitter is the transmission' [...] To be sure, the corollary holds: 'The meaning of the transmission is the transmitter.' But the two members are not symmetrical."
" 'The construction is less perfect than what constructs' [...] Let us give it more substance: 'In evolution, a negative gradient operates in the perfecting of structural solutions'"
Golem XIV becomes a genuine “book within a book,” a hard, speculative essay on what a post-human intellect might think.
The second set of "books" that I would recommend are kinda related, even in tone:
Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in The Shell" and its sequel "Ghost in the Shell: Man-Machine Interface."
ChatGPT summaries:
--- Ghost in the Shell ---
At its core, the original Ghost in the Shell manga is a cyberpunk procedural about identity in a hyper-connected world.
It follows Major Motoko Kusanagi, a fully cybernetic government operative working for Public Security Section 9, a counter-cyberterrorism and intelligence unit. The cases involve:
- cyberbrains and identity hacking
- political corruption
- AI autonomy
- blurred boundaries between human and machine
- networks where memories, skills, and consciousness can be stolen or overwritten
The central philosophical arc centers on Project 2501, the “Puppet Master,” an emergent artificial consciousness born from networked information systems rather than human intention. It challenges the legal, biological, and metaphysical definitions of “life.”
The manga’s key concern:
When minds become software, what counts as a person? What counts as being alive?
It’s high-speed political action wrapped around deep questions about autonomy, embodiment, and consciousness.
--- Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface ---
Man-Machine Interface is not a continuation in the conventional sense, but more of a "post-human" sequel.
Here, Motoko Kusanagi, the main character from Ghost in The Shell, no longer exists as a single embodied entity. After merging with the Puppet Master at the end of the original story, Motoko becomes something new: a distributed, multi-bodied, evolving posthuman intelligence often referred to as Motoko Aramaki or Motoko 2.0.
The sequel follows her as:
- a partially decoupled consciousness running across networks
- an entity capable of switching avatars, bodies, and instantiations
- a mind that operates above nation-states, legal frameworks, and even human-scale cognition
Plot-wise, it deals with:
- AI-industrial warfare
- megacorporations fighting over distributed intelligences
- metaphysics of identity in a world of multiple selves
- data-ecologies and collective minds
- the emergence of “post-persons”
But the real shift is tone and philosophy.
Where the first manga explores the crisis of identity, the sequel explores post-identity.
Its main question:
What does “self” mean when consciousness is fluid, redundant, multi-threaded, and no longer tied to one body or one narrative?
Man-Machine Interface is dense, maximalist, metaphysical, and sometimes abstract , much closer to Lem’s Golem XIV in its treatment of posthuman consciousness than the first part.
Third, another set, Peter Watts’ Blindsight and its sequel Echopraxia.
--- Blindsight ---
Hard sci-fi first-contact novel about a crew sent to investigate an alien signal. The aliens they encounter demonstrate astonishing intelligence and adaptability, but seemingly zero consciousness. The book’s central question is brutal:
Does consciousness provide any evolutionary advantage at all? Or is it an expensive, unnecessary hack?
It’s one of the most rigorous modern explorations of intelligence without awareness, cognition without qualia, and post-biological life. Also features resurrected vampires as humanity’s most efficient problem-solvers.
--- Echopraxia ---
A follow-up set in the same universe, focusing more on Earth, zombies, hive-minds, military religious cults, and what Watts calls baseline humans becoming obsolete. It complements Blindsight by following the implications of a world where non-conscious “intelligence engines” outperform conscious humans.
Finally...
--- Greg Egan's Permutation City ---
At its core:
A group of people upload themselves as software (“Copies”) into a virtual environment where consciousness is implemented as a computational process. But Egan pushes the idea far past “mind uploading” into deep mathematical and philosophical territory.
The central premise:
If consciousness depends only on logical consistency, not computation performed in real time, then a simulated mind does not require a universe running on stable physics or an external computer at all.
Egan calls this the Dust Theory.
What the novel explores:
1. Copies — software persons - Human consciousness is scanned and instantiated as a digital mind. These Copies struggle with:
- psychological trauma from being disposable
- questions about their moral status
- fears of erasure
- pressure to perform labor for “real” biological humans
They are conscious, but economically and ontologically precarious.
2. The “Autoverse” A lifelike world governed by artificial chemistry and evolution. It explores how complexity and life can arise from arbitrary rules, not carbon-based biology.
3. Dust Theory A mind is simply a pattern, not a process. If any arrangement of matter in the multiverse instantiates that pattern, even for a moment, consciousness exists.
This implies that a mind could “run” without a computer — as long as the pattern exists somewhere, even scattered across physical chaos (“dust”).
Permutation City becomes a sandbox for minds that no longer require a substrate.
4. “Permutation City” itself The ultimate simulation, constructed to be self-sustaining in a way that breaks free from dependence on any external reality. Inside it, Copies evolve new forms of existence beyond human constraints.
Why it’s important:
It’s one of the most serious, mathematically grounded attempts in fiction to grapple with:
- the ontology of simulated minds
- the meaning (or irrelevance) of physical reality
- identity as a computational equivalence class
- consciousness divorced from biology or substrate
- universes that exist because their patterns are self-consistent
It anticipates debates around:
- substrate independence
- functionalism
- consciousness as pattern-matching
- AI personhood
- anthropic reasoning
- simulation theory
Before most of those ideas entered mainstream discussion.
- I'd pitch the short story (really, a fictitious book review) "Eruntics" by Stanislaw Lem. I believe it's published within the "Imaginary Magnitude" Anthology. Published in 1985.
- Stanislaw Lem, Imaginary Magnitude.
The introduction to "Bitistics" seems eerily prescient of what LLMs might do. The Golem XIV chapter gives one outcome of AGI.
- Solaris is a great book and I would recommend everyone checking other works by Lem. The guy has many different flavors, most of his work is actually kind of hilarious, Solaris is probably his most "serious" one, still amazing.
Here's my "please read these Lem books" list:
- A Perfect Vacuum: A collection of Prefaces and Reviews of Non-Existent books (including one non-existent book called "A Perfect Vacuum") and of a fictional scientific talk. A lot of fun. One of my favorites: A review of a book written by an author who decides to write fiction without lying to the reader by affirming absolutely nothing existentially, confining itself to what did not occur, during the whole fictional book. The fictional book begins with the phrase "The train did not arrive. He did not come."
- Imaginary Magnitude: This one blew my mind. An exploration of fictional science models and books, including the idea of building an "AI" model out of bacteria, creating AI models to check how good or bad are novels and papers written by other AI due to their inhumane sizes (millions of pages to check... so little time...), as well as a conversation with the only AI that didn't get bored with us humans and decided to explain how things really work... Really clever stuff.
- The Futurological Congress: No spoilers here. One of the trippiest books ever written.
- His Master's Voice: A bit more serious than the previous three, but still more playful than Solaris. I always felt this was Carl Sagan's Contact but for Grownups. The book is told from the point of view of a Topologist (Combinatorics and Topology if I remember correctly). A signal from outer space is received, a multitude of scientists from many different branches are invited to get together at a certain location to try to decipher the message, among them our main character. The ideas and concepts of the limits of knowledge, the "micro-worlds" of science, the exploration of the human mind, and the origins of consciousness are all explored along the way. Mini-Spoilers: No"they're instructions to build a machine" here.
As a side note, if you like Lem, you'll also almost surely like anything by The Strugatsky Brothers. Their entry point is almost always Roadside Picnic (famous for a rather open adaptation as Tarkovsky's movie Stalker), but all of their books are really good.
- Some of my favorite fiction books:
- Seiobo There Below, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
- The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
- Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
- Cuentos Completos, by Jorge Luis Borges (or at least the "Labyrinths" compilation)
- A Perfect Vacuum, by Stanislaw Lem (Forewords to Non-Existent Books)
- Imaginary Magnitude, by Stanislaw Lem
- His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem (Along the same lines as Sagan's Contact, but better, way better.)
- Buddha's Little Finger, by Victor Pelevin
Some my favorite "non-fiction" books:
- The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, edited by Robert Strassler
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon
- Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb
- The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
- The Road to Reality, by Roger Penrose
- Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
- I would never think of Golem XIV as anything other than an SF story - sure, Golem keeps trying to lecture the humans about philosophy but I'd say the larger elements of the story were
- Some Humans fear the AIs (pretty standard Frankenstein situation) and conspire against them
- The conspirators are eliminated as a threat, the narrator tells us they believe Annie did this because Golem would have done something subtle to avoid alerting humans whereas Annie simply considered the conspirators a nuisance and nothing above that - IIRC we're likened to insects, swatted away and, when they persist, crushed.
- With the AIs gone humans go on as if nothing happened, seemingly learning nothing from it at all
All of Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum are awesome in my opinion (I have read them only in translation)
