The Cyberiad
OMG I can't believe there's no description for this - but then I can because this book defies description. Stanislaw Lem is a genius and your minds will be expanded to bursting when you begin this journey into a world where machines are the dominant species. It is hugely entertaining, inventive, witty, and above all, laugh out loud funny. The book concerns two "constructors" - Trurl and Klaupacious who build machines, and who are in fact machines themselves. Find out what happens when Trurl builds the world's stupidest computer, and Klaupacious' machine that can do "anything in N" nearly ends the universe.
Stats for nerds
33recommend
67mentions
46people
2008–2026years
66% recommend34% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- People like what they like, so if that's not your jam I wouldn't sweat it. That said, Moby Dick is perhaps a poor example of "literature" to start on if you're not sure you like "literature", mostly from being so long. If I might recommend trying Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, or The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, as they are easy to dip in and out of are nominally "sci fi" while still laying some claim to "literature". Lem and Calvino may lead you to Borges or PKD or Ursula K LeGuin or China Mieville - more genre artists that arguably aspire to being more than pulp.
- I recommend 'The Cyberiad' by Stanislaw Lem. Get the Michael Kandel translation.
As an Adams fan since high school I was floored when I eventually read The Cyberiad and realized that Lem had laid all of the groundwork fourteen years earlier. It's very much the proto Hitchhiker's Guide. It's got it all: Intergalactic protagonists on a series of highly absurd adventures, enabled by fantastical tech, and a playful approach to themes at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and contemporary physics.
It is laugh out loud funny. Especially once you get into the first, second, and third sallys. The humor is fiendishly clever. Lem is incredibly punny and it blows my mind to know that it was translated from Polish(!). I hope Michael Kandel gets his due for keeping the spirit of this book intact, because it really hinges on some very clever use of language.
- Re-reading Stanislaw Lem (i.e. The Cyberiad) in the era of LLMs has been a joy for me.
- You need to study Stanislaw Lem if you want a glimpse into the future... in Cyberiad he invented the Electronic Bard whose description is uncannily close to chatgpt. Including the poets losing jobs and protesting.
And more... Adams is kind of more approachable version of Lem.
- I like the list.
It's the kind of list an English professor might make, not necessarily a sci-fi fan. In particular, Dick's genius was recognized only after his death.
Even though sci-fi sometimes rises above other genre literature, it's not taken that seriously by literary types. Baudrillard talks a lot about Dick and Ballard and that's it. Stanislaw Lem (whose Cyberiad ought to be on that list instead of The Futurological Congress) himself said that Phillip K. Dick was on a whole other level than other sci-fi writers.
Notably the list subverts the category of "novel" by adding a lot of things (comic books, concept albums) that aren't really novels.
I think Fred Pohl is missing (say Gateway) and also Joe Halderman (Worlds!). I'd rather see any Frank Herbert book but Dune (say Whipping Star or The Santaroga Barrier.) For that matter I'd like to see something from Heinlein before he had the stroke like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Glory Road. I'd also want to see Niven's Neutron Star (a set of short stories that read like a novel) but despite some "new wave" sensibilities Niven comes across as reactionary today because the Tor Books revival (Forge of God and Enders Game) of sci-fi in the 1980s liked Heinlein and Niven and Doc Smith better than LeGunn, Dick, Ballard, Herbert, etc.
On the other hand, put a sci-fi fan in charge of making this list and it's no doubt they'll add a stick of books from some author who is a "no account" in literary circles like Piers Anthony -- still I would try to slip him in at his most psychedelic.
- I would point to the problem that chatbots fail not at having a “spark” but at things ordinary computer software does well. The other day somebody pointed out in an HN conversation that I had gotten the 1984 Superbowl confused with the 1986 Superbowl.
That’s a very human mistake, I’m sure somebody can tell you who played in every Superbowl and what the score was but people do misremember things frequently and we don’t call it a hallucination. (which is a defect in perception)
“Superhuman intelligence” is easy to realize for sports statistics if you do the ontology and data entry work and put the data in a relational or related database.
The thing is that chatbots get 90% accuracy for cases where you can get 99.99% accuracy (sometimes the data entry is wrong) with conventional technology. There is a kind of faith that we can go to 10^17 or 10^30 parameters or something and at some point perfect performance will “emerge” but no I think it is more like it will approach some asymptote, say 95% and you will try harder and harder and it will like pushing a bubble around other a rug. It’s a common situation in failing technology projects, quite well documented in
https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-Livingston-1990-1...
but boy people are seduced by those situations and have a hard time recognizing that they are in them.
In a certain sense chatbots already have superhuman powers of seduction that, I think, come from not having a “self” which makes mirroring easier to attain. People wouldn’t ordinarily be impressed by a computer program that can sort a list of numbers 90% correctly but give it the ability to apologize and many people will think it is really sincere and think it is really promising, it just needs a few trillion more transistors. (See the story Trurl’s Machine in Stanislaw Lem’s excellent Cyberiad except that machine is belligerent and not agreeable)
Now an obvious path is to have the chatbot turn a question into a SQL query and then feed the results into conversation and that’s a great idea and an active research area, but I’d point out the dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
which people mistakenly think is about symbolic A.I. but that is really about the problems of solving problems where the correct solution has a logical aspect. Even though logic isn’t everything, the formulation of most problems (like “Who won the soccer game at Cornell last night?”) is fundamentally logical and leads you straight to paradoxes that can have you forever pushing a bubble under the rug and thinking “just one more” little hack will fix it…
