Cyberiad

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Kyberiade (original title Cyberiada ) is a cycle of fifteen stories by the Polish author Stanisław Lem , which were written from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The tales of the Cyberiad are set in a future cybernetic age. In a peculiar combination of the literary genres fairy tales and science fiction , the adventurous deeds and journeys of the constructor duo Klapauzius and Trurl are portrayed in a cosmos populated predominantly by robots . The central themes of the philosophical fables, kept in a heroic-comic tone, are the discussion and the mixing of ethics and technology as well as the failure of an absolute belief in progress associated with it .

The Kyberiade is one of Lem's most popular and critically acclaimed works; the first four editions in Polish alone reached 110,000 copies. Lem himself wished that she would survive him before any other of his writings.

Environment and background

The Kyberiad is both a technical and literary work. The title itself indicates this. It is a combination of the word cybernetics , the science behind the construction and control of complex technological systems, and the ending -ade (cf. Robinsonade or Iliade ), with which the broad narrative implementation of a term is identified.

On the linguistic and literary level, the Kyberiad is a highly original new creation. It combines two conventions of fantasy, fairy tales and science fiction, and amalgamates their narrative conventions and word fields . Your world is only apparently ruled by physics. Trurl and Klapauzius can construct anything, but in the end the objects follow linguistic and not technical principles. The Kyberiad also parodies the philosophical fable in the style of Voltaire and imitates the oriental narrative. The robots struggle with the same everyday problems or individual deficits as humans, i.e. H. Greed, stupidity, lust for power, and have by no means become more successful or progressive; The Kyberiad is conspicuously linked to the Polish baroque culture of the 17th century and plays repeatedly in feudal worlds. The creation or improvement of worlds ends with no results or fails.

The immediate literary environment of the Kyberiad formed the poorly developed tradition of Polish science fiction and scientific fantasy . In addition, the futurological reflection on the basis of utopias or dystopias remained very limited due to the intensified Stalinist repression since 1948/49; only the thaw from 1956 onwards allowed a more extensive exploration of the relationship between technology and society, as well as formal freedoms that exceeded the conventions of socialist realism went out. The star diaries - actually Münchhauseniaden  - of a space traveler named Ijon Tichy , first published in 1957, already show striking similarities with the Kyberiad due to their language games and parodic content. This is also closely related to the little older robot fairy tales , in which the two protagonists mentioned above do not appear and where the fairy tale genre is much more important.

Socially and technically, this time was shaped by a belief in progress that lasted into the 1970s, which was not least associated with the first " electronic brains " and the beginning of space travel . Cybernetics was a key term, which only emerged in the 1940s through the merging of various disciplines such as communication, control, decision and game theory and statistical mechanics . It was the time of writing the Cyberiad a very young science, with the idea of all-round technical feasibility linked intimately as reflected for example in the published around 1950 works Computing Machinery and Intelligence of Alan Turing , Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener and I, Robot by Isaac Asimov partially reflected. Lem was engaged in these works. He himself learned English through cybernetics . Lem already dealt critically with this hope of being able to solve the problems and disputes of human society through future, especially through technical developments, in his technical-philosophical work Summa technologiae from the mid-1960s and put numerous ideas developed there in the Kyberiad and models narrative.

content

The Kyberiade consists of fifteen short stories written between 1957 and 1971. A first partial edition in Polish appeared in 1964, in German in 1969 (complete in 1983). A sixteenth story, The Demographic Implosion, as a treatise on the problems of overpopulation from 1985, falls both in content and style outside the framework of the original Kyberiad.

The stories can be divided into three groups: communication with other machines (1, 2, 3, 5), research trips to other (machine) civilizations (4, 6 to 12) and the creation or improvement of worlds (14 and 15). The thirteenth story falls under all three categories as a box story.

  1. How the world got away with it again - Trurl builds a machine that can create anything that begins with the letter "N". When Klapauzius and Trurl argue about the capabilities of the machine, the machine is ordered to produce “ nothing ”, whereupon it begins to empty the universe . After the catastrophe can be stopped and all attempts fail to build machines that could do things with an initial letter other than "N", the world remains riddled with black holes .
  2. Trurl's Machine - Trurl builds a huge, sensible machine. When he wants to test it and asks what two and two add up to, she answers with "seven". Trurl calls in Klapauzius to help repair the machine, but she stubbornly insists on her opinion. The dispute escalates and the machine breaks free and roams the country, scorching and burning. Trurl and Klapauzius can destroy the machine, their last word is "seven".
  3. The beating - Trurl gives Klapauzius a machine to fulfill all wishes, but in which he is himself to spy on his friend and rival. Klapauzius notices the disguise and wants a "Trurl", whereupon he has to step in front of Klapauzius and is beaten up by him as a soulless replica . Klapauzius lets Trurl escape, who now everywhere abuses Klapauzius' bad behavior, praises the cleverness of his escaped copy and receives admiration for it.
  4. The first voyage or the trap of Gargancjan - Trurl and Klapauzius go on the traditional waltz after graduating to offer their services to distant peoples. On a planet with two hostile realms, everyone enters the service of a king after promising to use the "Gargancjan Procedure". They set up huge, logically and intellectually networked armies. When the armies meet, there is a culmination of consciousness and everything military turns into civilian because the cosmos as such is absolutely civil.
  5. Die Reise Eins A or Trurl's Electrobard - Trurl builds a machine that is supposed to produce flawless poetry . After a few unsuccessful attempts and going through the entire history of lyric style , the machine is so successful in all traditional and avant-garde genres that the whole universe goes into raptures. Trurl, who can no longer pay the electricity bill, but is unable to turn it off due to the poetic pleading of the machine, transports it far into space and connects it to giant stars, so that it now creates the greatest seal of all in the form of gigantic prominences .
  6. The second trip or King Cruel offer - Trurl and Klapauzius have to build a monster for an absolutist king that he wants to kill while hunting. If he succeeds, they are threatened with death like all failed designers before. Trurl and Klapauzius manage to outsmart the king by turning the militant conflict into a social one; instead of venturing into an ultimately hopeless fight, they create three policemen who take the king into custody. Nobody in the royal hunting entourage offers resistance, because the courtiers and the ruler himself only know subservience to the state power embodied in uniforms .
  7. The third journey or of the dragons of probability - due to a probability machine built by Trurl , there is a plague of actually impossible dragons , which the two designers have to eliminate immediately. Klapauzius discovers that one of the dragons is Trurl himself, who uses it to collect the wages for which he has been cheated as a dragon tribute, which turns out to be quite a drudgery because of the incessant dragging of sacks of gold.
  8. The fourth trip, or how Trurl built a Femmefatalotron to relieve Prince Bellamor from the torments of love, and how the baby bombardment came afterwards - Trurl tries unsuccessfully to use erotic devices to remove his passion from a Crown Prince who is in love with the princess of the neighboring but warring kingdom cure. In order to force the marriage of the two, he lets the other realm be bombarded with small children until the king gives in.
  9. The fifth journey or the antics of King Balerion - Trurl and Klapauzius come to the foolish King Balerion, who wants the best hiding place in the world. They then present him with a device that exchanges the personalities of the people present. Balerion slips into Trurl's body, and vice versa, and jumps away. After numerous personality changes , in the end almost everyone manages to get back into their own bodies, but the king remains trapped in a cuckoo clock .
  10. The five A trip or how you consulted the famous designer Trurl - Trurl helps a people living in perfect harmony who are plagued by a gigantic "thing" that cannot be removed with weapons. He plagues him with a bureaucratic guerrilla war for his residence permit until one day it disappears from exhaustion.
  11. The sixth journey or how Trurl and Klapauzius created a second-order demon to defeat Mäuler the robber - Trurl and Klapauzius explore a legendary dangerous desert and are promptly attacked by the robber Mäuler . Above all , the latter wants to know whereupon they create a second-order demon for him , i.e. H. a machine that translates the movements of the atoms into pieces of information and thus produces a flood of data of all necessary and unnecessary knowledge that Mäuler will from now on without being aware of his environment.
  12. The seventh journey or how Trurl's perfection led to evil - Trurl creates a perfect miniature world for a king exiled on a planetoid to rule. Klapauzius shows Trurl that these miniature beings are also capable of suffering, and both want to redeem Trurl's work from tyranny. When they arrive on site, the small feudal society has developed into a space-traveling civilization thanks to technical progress . The king was chased away again and shot into space.
  13. The story of the three story-telling machines of King Genius - Trurl constructs three machines for a melancholy king of philosophers; these tell an instructive story (how Trurl disavows the adviser of a king by allegedly secret messages that are none at all, but as such are deciphered in a nonsensical way), a funny story (how Trurl tells several nested stories, the last one about a king, who gets lost in the trap of nested erotic dreams and can no longer find his way out) and a profound story (how, thanks to a coincidence, a solipsistic robot emerges from a garbage dump , which in its absolute loneliness considers itself to be perfect and, while it falls apart again and his Losing senses, fantasizing a kitschy dream world - and how the robot is destroyed again by the same chance; and as an encore, how a completely misunderstood philosopher Klapauzius complains of his suffering and finally dies of a fit of anger). At the end of this box story, the king, who says of himself that he is much more than just entertained, gives Trurl his life as the greatest possible thank you.
  14. Altruicine or the true account of how the hermit Bonhomius wanted to create universal happiness in the cosmos, and what came out of it - the robot Bonhomius is made up of beings who have reached the maximum level of development and have recognized that, despite their abilities, they cannot become others Luck can force you to give altruicine the last untried remedy . When he tries it out on a planet and every person experiences the feelings of his neighbor first hand, the emotional overload leads to great chaos.
  15. Experimenta Felicitologica - Trurl tries to construct artificial happiness . But all of his efforts - be it on the individual test model , by means of series tests in the Petri dish or with the help of a digital university - are unsuccessful. Finally, he asks his old teacher (whom he has raised from the dead and who is fuming over it) for advice. He reproaches him with the fact that he has no idea about ethics and philosophy and that eternal happiness per se cannot be achieved, since ontologically it is a contradiction in terms for intelligent beings ...

literature

  • Stanisław Lem: Kyberiad - Fables about the cybernetic age. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-458-33135-2 .
  • Stanislaw Lem: The White Death. Collected robot tales. In addition to the Kyberiad, it also contains the robot fairy tales . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-45536-2 .
  • Werner Berthel (Ed.): About Stanislaw Lem. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-518-37086-3 .
  • Jerzy Jarzebski: Chance and order. About the work of Stanislaw Lem. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-518-37790-6 .

Musical implementation

Web links