Night and mold

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Nacht und Schimmel (original title: Opowiadania ) is a collection of ten stories by the Polish SF author Stanisław Lem , published in 1969 and translated into German in 1972 .

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  • Night and mold : a mutated matter-eating microbe escapes from a research laboratory into the house of an old lonely man, who initially takes care of it after discovery. But it multiplies so strongly (for which it needs darkness and a special mold) that it eventually destroys his apartment and gets outside.
  • The friend : In the radio operator's club, where a young man is doing his voluntary service, an awkward eccentric appears and asks for some wire - and later for help in creating an electrical circuit, as it is called, for a friend. Little by little it dawns on the youngster that the unknown friend could be a being from another world.
  • Diary : An omnipotent being monologues about himself, the creation of myriads of cosms and about the search for meaning of tiny, thinking creatures. Is that God speaking?
  • The Lymphater formula : Lymphater, an older, decrepit scientist, tells how he came to the next evolutionary stage through his interdisciplinary research and created it - with undreamt-of consequences.
  • The New Cosmogony : A fictional Nobel Prize speech that paints a cosmological picture of the earliest civilizations that have changed the laws of physics since the beginning of the universe. (This speech is also contained in the book The Perfect Void .)
  • The invasion : In Poland and later in Bavaria, glass-like spheres fall from the sky. Inside are images of living beings who died in the crash. The balls are harder than diamond and cannot be destroyed by weapons. The researchers are trying to figure out their purpose.
  • The hammer : You always send a man together with an artificial intelligence in a cube computer on years of interstellar journeys, because this constellation has proven to be the most stable psychologically. On such a trip, a man gets to know such intelligence better with its memories, personality and feelings.
  • The truth : a physicist, locked up in an insane asylum, tells of his experiments with high-temperature plasma, which nobody believes him: he and two colleagues noticed strange divisions and reunions in the plasma, which they showed biologists and which clearly identified them as unicellular. With the certainty that they had found new life, they dared a very risky follow-up experiment.
  • Two young men : a story about the virtual reality in which two men enter - the first on earth, experiences a spaceship trip, the other, in a spaceship, switches to the longed-for earth.
  • Are you real Mr Johns? : After numerous accidents, racing driver Johns is gradually being replaced by prostheses. The invoices have not yet been paid, so the manufacturer Cybernetics is examining the pending transfer of ownership through legal proceedings. How far does personal identity go?

expenditure

  • Stanisław Lem: Opowiadania . Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1969
  • Stanisław Lem: Night and Mold . (German translation by Irmtraud Zimmermann-Göllheim) Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1972