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Summary: The funniest science fiction book that I have ever read!
Review: I am baffled at how the previous reviewer could reduce the Cyberiad to a collection of name puns and logarithms jokes. The Cyberiad was sophisticated, humorous, profound and utterly original. Witness the pastoral poem on love and tensor algebra (with a little topology and higher calculus): 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." And even though Lem wrote the Cyberiad in Polish, the translation is excellent - there is no caveman like grammer! I'm a fan of the Herbert-Niven school of science fiction but the Cyberiad showed me that science fiction can be so much more than the ubermensch and space battles. I think the comparison to Swift is apt though Lem doesn't have Swift's um, bathroom humor. Some stories reminded me of the Canterbury Tales. I think Lem is a far superior humor writer than Douglas Adams (why is he so famous?) whose Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy is threadbare and juvenile compared to the Cyberiad. Anyway, to the point: dear reader, please purchase The Cyberiad, it is in a class of its own.
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Summary: Cybernetics in the original sense
Review: I first read a chapter of the Cyberiad in the book _The Mind's I_, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. Lem is noteworthy for his maverick approach to Fictional Science Literature. The science that Lem fictionalizes is largely the science of cybernetics; cybernetics as a science, where "cybernetics" does not vaguely mean "cyber" as in online chat and "computers and stuff", but rather, the original sense of "cybernetics" as communication, feedback, and control, in animal, machine, and man
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Summary: A fantastic futuristic set of fables
Review: I first read The Cyberiad when I was a kid, at my local library. It was unlike anything I had read before. It's also unlike anything that I have read since. It stands alone, in its own quirky, curious, and interesting genre.
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Summary: I wish I could read Polish
Review: I loved this book, although I'm unwilling to give a full 5 star rating because I didn't really like the characters, although they were often funny and Lem used them perfectly in the stories.I am amazed that the book is actually translated from Polish. The language is so clever and well used that I'm sure that the translator probably deservers almost as much credit as Lem does. My favorite is the Electronic Bard who is asked to write a poem: "This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!" and the bard came out with: Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, etc... read the rest, it's well worth your time.
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Summary: Fables for the Hacker Generation
Review: I remember reading an article in Omni magazine in 1982 just before Tron came out where Steven Lisberger was talking about how free he was to invent computational mythology because it just did not exist. He was dead wrong. Lem already wrote it.
There are few books that make the geek in me smile as much as The Cyberiad does. Read it to your children.
Rating: 
Summary: Most amusing
Review: I was initially wary of this book. As a teenager, I tried to read something by Lem (The Tales of Prix the Pilot or something like that?), and was completely unimpressed. But as soon as I started this book, I found myself both pleased and attentive. Pleased, because it touched the humor in me in much the same way that Douglas Adams did in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and, given how much I love that book, this is high praise). In places, I wondered if maybe Adams had read Lem and decided to do him one better, for many of the set pieces in Hitchhiker seem to be exaggerated and elongated versions of some of the thrown-off bits here. And I was attentive, because I started to follow how the stories were constructed--how Lem built these fables from the simple beginnings of his two robot constructors into a long, elaborate study of what it means to be an inventor in a world that combines feudal elements and modern technology (i.e., somewhat similar to our own, if you bunny-hop over to the world next door). Funny, almost to the laugh-out-loud level, and very, very interesting.
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Summary: What happened?!
Review: I wholeheartedly enjoy Lem, have done so since childhood (which is when I originally read "The Cyberiad"). It is essentially a collection of stories that are, well, fairy tales with robots instead of humans. We have the same kingdoms, kings, princes, and princesses, sinister advisers and ingenious alchemists and mechanics, who, being robots, can also pull off any trick that pulp fiction has to offer: here empires span constellations, characters cook up outrageous devices at will, and galaxies hang in the sky only to spin in the wake of our plucky hero's rocketship. This all serves to engender an atmosphere incredibly conducive to all sorts of wit, sarcasm, criticism, parody, and bombast, which is precisely the end towards which Lem works very diligently. Indeed, taken bit by bit, idea by idea, Cyberiad is full of zero-magnitude stellar gems: "Once, a terribly important war never got declared, and all because the King, decked in spangles and crystal pendants, hung three days from the ceiling and passed for a chandelier, holding his mouth to keep from laughing out loud at the ministers rushing about frantically below." Hilarious, isn't it? But something happened between my two readings of this wonderful epic. Yes, I previously read this in the original, but whoever translated this did a terrific job: even Klapaucius' "poem about a haircut... lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom... six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s" is faithfully translated, though it forces the English language to bend over backwards trying to accomodate its requirements. But, somehow, between waves of nonsense, pseudo-sci-fi terms, and downpours of Latin phrases and statements, I came away almost yawning. Perhaps it's the abridgement: I remember the original being much larger; here, for example, only the stories involving Trurl and Klapaucius, a duo of inventors, are included. I am at a loss to find anything else at fault. Just... don't start with excessively high expectation.
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Summary: Am I the only person who hated this book?
Review: I'm baffled. How could anyone consider this a brilliant book? Lem is a hopelessly overblown and self-conscious writer. He takes potentially compelling ideas and ruthlessly grinds the life out of them in page after page of look-at-me I'm-so-clever prose. He's like a bad comedian who won't quit after the first chuckle: "Maybe you'll laugh harder if I say the same thing six or seven times, getting sillier as I go." Lem compounds his crimes with garish moralizing, often dripping with condescension: "Hee hee! They so dumb, we so smart, me give them funny names like Stupidicus von Logarithm then tell logarithm jokes for 17 pages." Despite the insufferable writing, Lem's ideas are often quite good, nudging the book into the two-star category. One wonders how the book would have turned out in the hands of an author with imagination, wit, *and* writing skills: Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, or (with a few plot adjustments) Franz Kafka.
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Summary: The book of books
Review: If you have not read any other Lem then this book will be the most refreshing amazing experience and an overall break from the normal sci-fi. It's about two "constructor" robots, trurl and klapacius, who go on wacky adventures allways trying to out build eachother. The story itself is not only very funny but profound and genious. He actually makes a love poem about a giant robot who owns 16 female robots writien in calculous! This here is a great read wether you've read other Lem or not and may just be the best book IO have ever read
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Summary: Dazzling!
Review: Imagine a mixture of Borges, Calvino, Saint-Exupéry, Pynchon, Douglas Adams, Samuel Beckett, L. Frank Baum, Dr. Seuss, Lewis Caroll, and perhaps a little Philip K. Dick. That's what this is like, sort of. It is a collection of stories, some profound, others 'merely' entertaining, written by a man who was clearly drunk on sheer linguistic exuberance. The sheer virtuosity of the language is breathtaking: the book is packed to the gills with puns, rhymes, nonsense words, and general verbal japery. Huge amounts of credit must of course go to the translator, Michael Kandel, on this score. I wish the book included translation notes; he must have had to rebuild innumerable language formations from scratch in order to make them work--and work dazzlingly well--in English. Particularly impressive in this regard are 'The Fifth Sally (A), or Trurl's Prescription,' a delightful bit of frippery driven almost entirely by verbal dexterity; and an extraordinary mathematical love poem related in 'The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electric Bard.' The centerpiece of the collection, however, must surely be the 'Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius,' which, as you would expect, includes a flurry of internal stories, some of which in turn have stories inside them. One of these internal stories, that of Mymosh the Self-Begotten, is in my opinion the book's highlight. If Sam Beckett had turned his hand to science fiction, this is what he would have written. It's as strange and unsettling as any of Sam's short novels. Finally, some mention must be made of the highly stylized illustrations by Daniel Mroz scattered throughout the book; they complement the action to perfection. Lem is clearly having fun with The Cyberiad, and it's contagious. I had tried, some time ago, to read Tales of Pirx the Pilot, but I found the first tale so mind-numbingly dull that I couldn't bring myself to finish it. This, on the other hand, is a truly excellent collection, and you can rest assured tha I'll be checking out more of Lem in the near future.
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