“Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King’s polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann’s Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,Ĭancel me not-for what then shall remain?Ībscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,Įllipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!īernoulli would have been content to die, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love Īnd so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,įor what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, I'll grant thee random access to my heart, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
"Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit." Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Hailed as "the most completely successful of books," The Cyberiad is an outrageously funny and incomparably wise collection of short stories, taking an insightful look at mechanics, technology, invention, and human ambition ( The Boston Globe).“Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like."
Friends and rivals, they are constantly outdoing and challenging each other to reveal the next great evolution in cybernetics, and the exploits of these brilliant men are nothing short of incredible.įrom tales of love, in which a robotic prince must woo a robotic princess enchanted by pleasures of true flesh, to epics of battle, in which the heroic constructors must use their considerable wit to outsmart a monarch obsessed with hunting, to examinations of humanity, wherein Trurl and Klapaucius must confront the limits of their skills and the meaning of true perfection, these stories are rich with profound questions, unimaginable marvels, and remarkable feats. These are the stories of Trurl and Klapaucius, master inventors and engineers known as "constructors," who have created marvels for kingdoms. "Lem has an almost Dickensian genius for vividly realizing the tragedy and comedy of future machines." - The New York Times Book Review
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