Rating: 
Summary: Borgesian Paranoia
Review: There is a fable in the Kabalistic tradition that the spiritual path is like a giant building with thousands of locked doors, in front of each door there is a key. Only, not a single key is in front of the door it unlocks. This idea fits well into this work of Lem. It is as if Jorge Luis Borges and Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Orwell got together to write a sci-fi novel. The protagonist finds himself (whether by chance or design) trying to find the ever elusive file which explains his mission, amidst an underground bureaucracy of espionage, spies and counter (and counter-counter) spies (from the Antibuilding, which may or may not exist), paranoia, and madness. Where everything is a code (right down to the smell of a rose), nothing is as it seems. Lem pokes fun at our attempts to search for meaning in an absurd world, all the while being humorous, philosophical, bitingly satirical, and always thought-provoking. If you liked the way Borges plays with notions of chaos/order and meaning/ meaninglessness in his short stories "Babylon Lottery" and "Library of Babel" (which Lem admits are favorites of his), or the consiracies within conspiracies of Robert Anton Wilson's fiction, you'll love this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Enter the labyrinth...
Review: These memoirs are presented in the foreword as the last remnant of a dead civilization, and its twisted hierarchical organization and jargon justify the archaeologist of the future in thinking that this is the artifact of a bizarre religion. As such, it is a religion that radically cut itself from transcendence: its Temple is a shadowy museum of illusions and deceptions, with no hope whatsoever of receiving the light of order; pseudo-heresies are created by their unknowing priests, revelations are elaborated at will only to be contradicted soon after. This is the world that the book's nameless hero must brave - he experiences several 'signification crisises', going back-and-forth between allegory as a universal rule and a complete negation of sense. The Building in which all the events take place is a sort of fiction-generating machine (like Lem's book itself), perpetually spinning tales, intrigues and conflicts. What makes the book powerful is that Lem equates his reader with the main character, both sharing an elusive mission; the work starts smoothly, until reader and agent are completely immersed in this world of mirrors, crypted informations and thwarted enigmas. The desire to understand remains, but there is nothing to understand as the personal quest (the agent's and the reader's) becomes more and more convoluted and drowned into a complex string of half-truths. A maze of a novel.
Rating:
Summary: Maddening, Labrynthian, Perfection
Review: this book drove me completely insane while reading it, as there seemed to be no real concrete...anything. And I think that was the point. A wonderfully funny, often maddening read from Stanislaw Lem, whos other books are no less good than this one. I would even hazard a guess that this would make a great movie, in the right hands.
Rating:
Summary: Needs a lot of thought, but well worth the effort.
Review: This is a wonderful book. Superficially it makes no sense. Events follow one another in an unending jumble that leaves you completely befuddled. The story is about a secret agent who is new on the job and is trying haplessly to discover what his real mission is supposed to be. However everyone he meets leads him in a different direction and the Building (Pentagon 3, which is entirely isolated from the rest of the world) is brimming with double, triple and quadruple agents.With a book like this, what you get out of it depends to a large extent on what you bring to it. Aside from all the political satire, to me this book was about how people build explanations - how the mind reacts to a steady stream of sensory impressions which can be very noisy and confusing. To illustrate - I was at the scene where he is in the bathroom, shaving, while there is someone else dressed similarly to him, sleeping next to the bathtub. As the narrator shaves, he is going over the events of the recent past, trying to make sense out of them. He builds one paranoid theory after another, convinced that the whole building (i.e. the whole world) is against him, is out to get him. While reading this I was thinking - This guy is going crazy. No sane person would think this way. But the events dont make sense either. Maybe what is really happening is that he is caught in some sort of time loop, and the person sleeping next to the bathtub is he, from the past or the future! At this point I stopped and burst out laughing because my theory was so much more preposterous than the ones the narrator was constructing! (yes, I read too much sf!). But the question of course is - if you are trying to make sense out of the world, how do you know which explanation to accept? Ockham's razor doesnt always help (who knows how to apply it in the real world anyway). And people's reactions tend to get increasingly bizarre the more pressure they are under. Anyway this is my interpretation. I am sure when you read it you will come up with something entirely different, and thats the beauty of this book!
Rating:
Summary: The craziest/best book I have read
Review: very, very good. Lem is a master
Rating:
Summary: Science-fiction with a philosophical/social bend. Get wise!
Review: What's the story. The American military assembles a huge bunker under earth, in a move to once and for all eliminate it's outer threats in forms of spies, traitors, atomic carnages and like. The place is sealed from the ravaging reality. An intricate system of command develops, to keep traitors at bay. Our hero only wants to receive his real mission, but instead gets tied up into delusions, set-ups, mix-ups, triple-framings on his thorned way to understanding of the System.
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