The Cyberiad
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The Cyberiad is a cycle of short, amusing and somewhat cartoonish science fiction stories by Stanislaw Lem. It was first published in Polish in 1967, and in English in 1974. It details exploits of two robots, Trurl and Clapaucius, in a fictional universe populated practically entirely by intelligent and highly anthropomorphic robots (hence the name Cyberiad). However, some of the stories involve main characters other than these two, typically some knight trying to win the heart of a princess. The stories focus on problems of individuals and societies (as seen in the somewhat absurd fairy tale cum scifi framework) and on the vain search for human happiness through technological means.
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Trurl and Clapaucius
Trurl and Clapaucius are brilliant engineers, called "constructors" (because they can construct, or make, wonderful things at will), capable of almost God-like exploits. For instance, on one occasion Trurl creates an entity capable of extracting facts from the random motion of gas particles, known as Maxwell's demon.
The duo are best friends and rivals. They spend much of their time working on projects of interest to them, for instance constructing a perfect society, and travelling by spaceship to help people out, exploring the world, and overthrowing evil tyrants.
The world and its inhabitants
The universe they live in is pseudo-Medieval. There are kingdoms (each planet contains at least one kingdom), knights, princesses etc. Robots are perfectly anthropomorphic, i.e. there exist different sexes, there is love and marriage. There are physical and mental disabilities, old age and death, particularly in case of accidents or murder. However the death issue is a bit murky since it is theoretically possible to repair robots. In fact, the teacher of Trurl and Clapaucius, Master Cerebron, is deceased, but can still be reanimated at his tomb in order to heap criticism upon his erstwhile students for their not having read his papers, messing things up, and asking stupid questions. There exists economic life and money, but this issue is little discussed (much like in a prototypical heroic or romantic novel). The level of technology of the vast majority of inhabitants is pseudo-Medieval also, with swords, robotic steeds, and gallows widespread. Still, there is space travel, wonderful technology made by the Constructors, and even a civilization that has attained HPLD, the Highest Possible Level of Development.
Romantic stories
Some stories are basically self-conscious parodies of romantic novels about knights, with more profound issues of psychology and social dynamics under a cartoonish and swashbuckling facade.
A typical example is the fairy tale O królewiczu Ferrycym i królewnie Krystali) (About Prince Ferrice and Princess Crystalia). A princely (robotic) knight falls in love with a beautiful (robotic) princess. Unfortunately, the princess is a bit eccentric, and is captivated by stories of an alien non-robotic, "muddy" or "pale face" civilization (the humans). She declares that she will only marry a "muddy". Therefore, the knight decides to masquerade as a muddy. He covers his body with mud and starts to resemble one, and then comes to woo her. Meanwhile, a real "muddy" captive arrives, given as a gift to the king. The human "bad guy" immediately declares that he is the muddier one, woos the princess and promises to love her in the muddiest possible fashion. There is a contest scheduled between the two suitors to select the worthier one. The noble knight loses and is exposed: the goo he used to cover himself is scraped off, but when the muddy charges at the robot, he splatters himself at his metal chest. The princess, beholding the beauty of the exposed robot (compared with the ugliness of the "muddy"), changes her mind. The knight and the princess live happily ever after.
Romantic stories involving technology and the Constructors
Most of the stories involve Trurl and Clapaucius using their wonderful technological abilities to help the inhabitants of the medieval planets, usually involving neutralizing tyrants. For example:
A gigantic computer which is the tyrannical ruler of a planet, has decided to prevent revolution by his subjects by ordering all of them to wear armor containing large quantities of enriched uranium (radiation does not hurt robots). That way whenever three individuals would come together to plot a revolution, there will be a critical mass and they will be pulverized by atomic blast. Along comes Trurl and helps them out: he gives them clothing containing lead (or some other like metal) which shields the neutrons. Freed from danger, the people come together and overthrow the tyrant.
Both Trurl and Clapaucius come to a planet ruled by a king who loves hunting. He has already hunted down all animals available, and now hires constructors (engineers) to make new, mighty robotic beasts to hunt. Unfortunately, he has already executed all of the previous constructors to visit because they could not build beasts that would be challenging enough to hunt. When the two famous Constructors arrive, he arrests them and orders them to build such a wonderful robot. The two face a dilemma: if they make something that the king will kill, they will be executed by the mad king. But if the king himself is killed, then they will be executed, for the next king will be pressured to show his respect for the previous. They solve the problem by building an animal that survives the hunt (involving both cyber-hounds and nuclear tipped missiles unleashed upon it, in the characteristic cartoonish manner) and takes the king hostage by, nothing less, turning into two police officers and presenting an order for his arrest. All the king's men fail to find and free the king (partially because searching for those policemen one half of the police force arrests the other half), and he is released only upon freeing the Constructors.
Trurl is captured by an evil interstellar bandit. Trurl offers him process of turning hydrogen into gold (which he demonstrates by hand, mixing up protons and putting electrons around). However, the bandit is highly educated and cares not for the riches, but for knowledge (and in fact points out that gold will become cheap that way). So Trurl makes a modified Maxwell's demon for him, an entity that looks at moving particles of gas and reads information that is, coincidentally, encoded in their random perturbations. The demon prints out this information on a long paper tape, and the satisfied bandit is eventually buried under the endless rolls of tape and ceases to bother anyone. (This was written in the days when computers often used punched paper tape for input/output, and definitely before the arrival of Wikipedia that often has a similar impact on its curious readers).
Stories involving the search for happiness and ideal society
Lem is very interested in the issue of the nature of an ideal society: compare his Peace On Earth, The Futurological Congress and Observation on the Spot. His treatment of the topic in The Cyberiad boils down to scepticism about possibility of such a society and a strong critique of collectivism (compare the obvious anti-Communist message of Observation on the Spot). Naturally, building an ideal society is a very prominent goal of Trurl and Clapaucius. The following is a summary of their exploits and discoveries in this area:
The Highest Degree of Development civilization. An old monk comes to Clapaucius and tells him that he has searched for, and found, the highest development stage civilization (from here on HDSC). He has inferred the existence of such a civilization by figuring that if there are different stages of development, there will one that is the highest. He was then faced with a problem of identifying that one; as he noted, everyone claimed that theirs was the HDSC. Upon much research and thought, he decided that the only way to find it is by looking for a "wonder", i.e. something that has no rational explanation (compare the current search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by looking for anomalies in radio emissions in space). Eventually he discovered one such wonder: a star in the shape of a diamond, orbited by a planet shaped like a trunk (box) with the huge letters HDSC written on it. He lands and meets its inhabitants: a group of about 100 individuals lying around doing nothing. He is informed that their ancestors have built the "Godtron" -- a machine that is capable of fulfiling all of their wishes (even the seemingly physically impossible ones, including modifying the shape of their sun). Now they have nothing else to strive for (since they are the highest stage, there is none higher), so they do nothing. When questioned why don't they go out and help the less fortunate peoples, they explain that their attempts to do so in the past proved extremely counter-productive. For instance, having dropped some millions of small wish-fulfillment devices on some planet, they saw it blow up in a matter of hours. Eventually, the HDSC people get tired of him, give him lots of presents and "altruizin" -- a substance capable of making people share feelings (of pain and happiness) so that he could try change the world on his own, and teleport him away.
Altruizin. The monk described above obtains this substance, which makes humans within some radius feel what their neighbors feel, travels to some planet and uses it to drug the water supply. He hopes that making people feel the pain and pleasure of their neighbors will promote social harmony. He himself is immune because he is a robot. Some of the results include villagers feeling the birth pains of a cow, depressed people being violently attacked and driven off to get rid of their bad vibes, and a crowd storming the house of the newlyweds to better share in their making love. Eventually, the monk is identified (because he does not flinch when a man strikes another one), suffers grievous physical damage, and flees to tell Clapaucius the uselessness of achieving happiness with technological fixes.
Trurl and the construction of happy worlds. Trurl is not deterred by the cautionary tale of altruizin and decides to build a race of robots happy by design. His first attempt are a culture of robots who are not capable of being unhappy (e.g. they are happy if seriously beaten up). Clapaucius ridicules this. Next step is a collectivistic culture dedicated to common happiness. When Trurl and Clapaucius visit them, they are drafted by the Ministry of Felicity and made to smile, sing, and otherwise be happy, in fixed ranks (with other inhabitants). Trurl annihilates both failed cultures and tries to build a perfect society in a small box. The inhabitants of the box develop a religion saying that their box is the most perfect part of the universe and prepare to make a hole in it in order to bring everyone outside the Box into its perfection, by force if needed. Trurl disposes of them and decides that he needs more variety in his experiments and smaller scale for safety. He creates hundreds of miniature worlds on microscope slides (i.e. he has to observe them through a microscope). These microworlds progress rapidly, some dying out in revolutions and wars, and some developing as regular civilizations without any of them showing any intrinsic perfection or happiness. They do achieve inter-slide travel though, and many of these worlds are later destroyed by rats. Eventually, Trurl gets tired of all the work and builds a computer that will contain a programmatic clone of his mind that would do the research for him. Instead of building new worlds, the computer sets about expanding itself. When Trurl eventually forces it to stop building itself and start working, the clone-Trurl tells him that he has already created lots of sub-Trurl programs to do the work and tells him stories about their research (which Trurl later finds out is bogus). Trurl destroys the computer and temporarily stops looking for universal happiness.pl:Bajki robotów