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More Tales of Pirx the Pilot
Commander Pirx, who drives space vehicles for a living in the galaxy of the future, here faces a new series of intriguing adventures in which robots demonstrate some alarmingly human characteristics. Translated by Louis Iribarne, assisted by Magdalena Majcherczyk and Michael Kandel. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
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705 people want to read
About the author
Stanisław Lem
504 books4,506 followersStanisław Lem (staˈɲiswaf lɛm) was a Polish science fiction, philosophical and satirical writer of Jewish descent. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is perhaps best known as the author of Solaris, which has twice been made into a feature film. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon claimed that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world.
His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humankind's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult and multiple translated versions of his works exist.
Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech. Between 1956 and 1968, Lem authored 17 books. His works were widely translated abroad (although mostly in the Eastern Bloc countries). In 1957 he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogi (Dialogues), one of his two most famous philosophical texts along with Summa Technologiae (1964). The Summa is notable for being a unique analysis of prospective social, cybernetic, and biological advances. In this work, Lem discusses philosophical implications of technologies that were completely in the realm of science fiction then, but are gaining importance today—like, for instance, virtual reality and nanotechnology. Over the next few decades, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological, although from the 1980s onwards he tended to concentrate on philosophical texts and essays.
He gained international fame for The Cyberiad, a series of humorous short stories from a mechanical universe ruled by robots, first published in English in 1974. His best-known novels include Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (Głos pana, 1968), and the late Fiasco (Fiasko, 1987), expressing most strongly his major theme of the futility of mankind's attempts to comprehend the truly alien. Solaris was made into a film in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972; in 2002, Steven Soderbergh directed a Hollywood remake starring George Clooney.
He was the cousin of poet Marian Hemar.
His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humankind's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult and multiple translated versions of his works exist.
Lem became truly productive after 1956, when the de-Stalinization period led to the "Polish October", when Poland experienced an increase in freedom of speech. Between 1956 and 1968, Lem authored 17 books. His works were widely translated abroad (although mostly in the Eastern Bloc countries). In 1957 he published his first non-fiction, philosophical book, Dialogi (Dialogues), one of his two most famous philosophical texts along with Summa Technologiae (1964). The Summa is notable for being a unique analysis of prospective social, cybernetic, and biological advances. In this work, Lem discusses philosophical implications of technologies that were completely in the realm of science fiction then, but are gaining importance today—like, for instance, virtual reality and nanotechnology. Over the next few decades, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological, although from the 1980s onwards he tended to concentrate on philosophical texts and essays.
He gained international fame for The Cyberiad, a series of humorous short stories from a mechanical universe ruled by robots, first published in English in 1974. His best-known novels include Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (Głos pana, 1968), and the late Fiasco (Fiasko, 1987), expressing most strongly his major theme of the futility of mankind's attempts to comprehend the truly alien. Solaris was made into a film in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972; in 2002, Steven Soderbergh directed a Hollywood remake starring George Clooney.
He was the cousin of poet Marian Hemar.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
August 12, 2022
Relatos muy amenos y entretenidos, que reflexionan sobre la naturaleza humana y la inteligencia artificial con una gran base científica y un trasfondo ético y filosófico.
Ágiles y brillantemente narrados.
Ágiles y brillantemente narrados.
December 26, 2015
Stanislaw Lem is an almost criminally underrated Sci-Fi author, and translations of his books are rare in the US. I grew up reading him, though, so it's nice to revisit the classics. He tells stories of space travel that are cerebral, but that also raise some interesting issues of emotion and what it means to be human. His ongoing Pirx the Pilot novels are great--and I'm glad I have this one.
August 4, 2020
Let me start by saying that, although machine intelligence is the dominant theme in this collection, “Pirx’s Tale”, the sole story not revolving around enigmas of machine decision-making, was excellent. The way Lem paints human frailty into a picture of outrageous cosmic luck is too classic.
As for the rest of the collection, the stories of course recalled my experience with Asimov’s Complete Robot, as Lem and Asimov wrestle with similar issues and proceed from some of the same starting points.
In these Pirx tales, robots are emotionally dormant yet curious, adventurous; they perhaps (perhaps, for the intellectronicians would never buy it) display compassion, generosity; they are, of course, helplessly logical; they lack intuition and improvisation is there Achilles heel; and they are hopeless slaves of humanity, deeply imprinted and influenced by their creators, set in paths and put to tasks predetermined by humankind and ingrained so deeply in their nature that they could never conceive of another kind of existence. In “The Accident”, Pirx admits to seeing “something inherently unfair, something fundamentally wrong, about a situation whereby man had created an intelligence both external to and dependent on his will.” Pirx reflects that robots were “crippled even before the day they were born” and an android later corroborates this opinion, holding that a machine’s pre-programming is more determinative than its training, nurture—although “Ananke” demonstrates the dramatic influence human trainers can have on a robot whose complex functions depend on machine learning.
Perhaps the most insightful moment in Lem’s playful yet shrewd exploration of the characteristics of machine intelligence was Pirx’s conversation with Burns in “The Inquest”. According to Burns, a purported non-linear (i.e. robot), “an artificial intelligence differs from the human brain in its inability to handle several mutually contradictory programs.” Surely no one would deny that the human brain is capable of contradicting itself in every which way; but machines are enslaved to logic—they depend on mathematical precision, their every move is statistically optimal based on available information.
Most informative of the character of this non-linear, however, is its impression of humanity. Burns tells Pirx that it has “two abiding sensations: one is astonishment, the other a sense of the comical, both in response to the arbitrariness of your world.” Yep: life, multicellular life, humanity, our society, each individual, is the product of impossibility, mathematical probabilities so infinitesimal as to be virtually non-existent. Nothing had to be this way. Or did it? Is everything precisely the way it had to be, the only way it ever could be, for this simply is the way it is and the past is irreversible and ironclad? This robot seems to believe more in infinite possible variations of existence, infinite forking paths in the garden of time. And, wonderfully, its favourite definition of a human is “[a] creature who likes to talk most about what he knows least.” Our “religious, philosophical views are the consequence of [our] biological structure: bound by time, we crave knowledge, understanding, answers”, and this is why we invent stories and practice blind faith: to connect the impossible with the possible, to feel we know what we should know is unknowable. “And what is science if not a surrender? … Science is the acceptance of mortality, of the randomness of the individual spawned by a static game of competing spermatozoa. It’s an acceptance of the passing, of the irreversible, of the lack of any reward, of a higher justice, of final illumination”—this robot thinks such acceptance must logically inspire either fear or a sense of the absurd, and it chooses the latter, because it can afford to, whereas humanity, it implies, cannot. Can we? (I'm looking at you, Camus.) Can we focus on the absurdity, the arbitrariness? What of it?
But Burns doesn’t just harp on about humanity, refusing to share details about the nature of machine intelligence. The ostensible non-linear explains: “I may lack any moral instinct … but I know when one ought to show compassion, and I can discipline myself to do it. By necessity, you see. So, in a way, I fill the void in myself through logic. You might say I obey a ‘bogus morality,’ a facsimile so exact as to be authentic.” The difference, then? Robots “act by the logic of accepted norms, not by instinct.” Humans, in this robot’s view, obey almost nothing but their impulses. And that is how Pirx prevails in the end over a devious little rascal of a non-linear with aspirations to world domination: an impulse, which he struggles later to explain, to remain silent, inert, when all logic points to action. But our impulses—the illogic that defines our humanity, our empathy, our love—fail us time and time again. Indeed, Burns hints that human morality is, in a way, morally inferior to machine logic: as technological advancement enables ever-greater social anonymity and destructive capability, the human psyche stays the same if not worsens in terms of moral aspiration: humans persistently struggle to extend compassion to strangers: the glow of our “moral responsibility barely grazes the first few links in the chain of cause and effect.”
Well, now that that’s on the table, how does it all hold up to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics? Let’s see:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Clearly that is not the case in Pirx’s world. Robots do not perpetrate crime because it is illogical, impractical. For now.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. This holds up in a way. It is not so much that computers are bound to obey orders as some sort of defining principle. Rather, their programming defines their responses to human instruction; they are programmed to perform certain functions, their logic is to fulfill those functions, and they obey orders insofar as to do so is necessary for the performance of those pre-programmed functions. In both Asimov’s and Lem’s conception, machine decision-making processes are purely a question of mathematics, yet mathematicians are often unable to predict or explain machine behaviour. And in both, as the artificial “brains” become more and more complex, as the functions the robots are designed to serve expand, so do the machines' capacities to behave in wholly unanticipated ways, circumventing human instructions both intentionally and unintentionally.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. While the machine in “The Hunt” at one point demonstrates excellently the way in which the First Law trumps the Third Law in a proper functioning Asimovian robot, it does so after a long stretch of disobeying this entirely, that is, not merely putting its survival above the life of humans, but its function. Perhaps it is entirely unaware of the humanity of its casualties—this actually seems likely—but still, there’s nothing First- or Third-Law-like at all about Lem’s robots.
Although Lem doesn’t necessarily imply this, I agree with his vision: if machine intelligence is to be a worthy replica of human intelligence, machines cannot be limited at the most fundamental level by bright-line rules like the Three Laws; such limits may be wholly inconsistent with the kind of intelligence bestowed in machines in Asimov’s robot stories. In that sense and others, Lem’s perspective is a little more removed and significantly more nuanced, although he wrote far fewer robot stories.
Well, this turned out WAY longer than I intended. Flipping back through the book, I realized how much I enjoyed some of the quotes. So here’s a nice one to conclude with, something for you, valued Reader, to think about, a parting gift courtesy of Lem from the perspective of Burns, the ostensible robot:
“Man is a perfectly astigmatic creature,” … “It was inevitable, given your type of evolution. Consciousness is a product of the brain, sufficiently isolated to constitute a subjective entity, but an entity that is an illusion of introspection, borne along like an iceberg on the ocean. It is never grasped directly, but sometimes it is so noticeably present that it is probed by the conscious faculty. From that very probing the devil was born—as a projection of something that, though actively present in the brain, can’t be located like a thought or a hand.”
As for the rest of the collection, the stories of course recalled my experience with Asimov’s Complete Robot, as Lem and Asimov wrestle with similar issues and proceed from some of the same starting points.
In these Pirx tales, robots are emotionally dormant yet curious, adventurous; they perhaps (perhaps, for the intellectronicians would never buy it) display compassion, generosity; they are, of course, helplessly logical; they lack intuition and improvisation is there Achilles heel; and they are hopeless slaves of humanity, deeply imprinted and influenced by their creators, set in paths and put to tasks predetermined by humankind and ingrained so deeply in their nature that they could never conceive of another kind of existence. In “The Accident”, Pirx admits to seeing “something inherently unfair, something fundamentally wrong, about a situation whereby man had created an intelligence both external to and dependent on his will.” Pirx reflects that robots were “crippled even before the day they were born” and an android later corroborates this opinion, holding that a machine’s pre-programming is more determinative than its training, nurture—although “Ananke” demonstrates the dramatic influence human trainers can have on a robot whose complex functions depend on machine learning.
Perhaps the most insightful moment in Lem’s playful yet shrewd exploration of the characteristics of machine intelligence was Pirx’s conversation with Burns in “The Inquest”. According to Burns, a purported non-linear (i.e. robot), “an artificial intelligence differs from the human brain in its inability to handle several mutually contradictory programs.” Surely no one would deny that the human brain is capable of contradicting itself in every which way; but machines are enslaved to logic—they depend on mathematical precision, their every move is statistically optimal based on available information.
Most informative of the character of this non-linear, however, is its impression of humanity. Burns tells Pirx that it has “two abiding sensations: one is astonishment, the other a sense of the comical, both in response to the arbitrariness of your world.” Yep: life, multicellular life, humanity, our society, each individual, is the product of impossibility, mathematical probabilities so infinitesimal as to be virtually non-existent. Nothing had to be this way. Or did it? Is everything precisely the way it had to be, the only way it ever could be, for this simply is the way it is and the past is irreversible and ironclad? This robot seems to believe more in infinite possible variations of existence, infinite forking paths in the garden of time. And, wonderfully, its favourite definition of a human is “[a] creature who likes to talk most about what he knows least.” Our “religious, philosophical views are the consequence of [our] biological structure: bound by time, we crave knowledge, understanding, answers”, and this is why we invent stories and practice blind faith: to connect the impossible with the possible, to feel we know what we should know is unknowable. “And what is science if not a surrender? … Science is the acceptance of mortality, of the randomness of the individual spawned by a static game of competing spermatozoa. It’s an acceptance of the passing, of the irreversible, of the lack of any reward, of a higher justice, of final illumination”—this robot thinks such acceptance must logically inspire either fear or a sense of the absurd, and it chooses the latter, because it can afford to, whereas humanity, it implies, cannot. Can we? (I'm looking at you, Camus.) Can we focus on the absurdity, the arbitrariness? What of it?
But Burns doesn’t just harp on about humanity, refusing to share details about the nature of machine intelligence. The ostensible non-linear explains: “I may lack any moral instinct … but I know when one ought to show compassion, and I can discipline myself to do it. By necessity, you see. So, in a way, I fill the void in myself through logic. You might say I obey a ‘bogus morality,’ a facsimile so exact as to be authentic.” The difference, then? Robots “act by the logic of accepted norms, not by instinct.” Humans, in this robot’s view, obey almost nothing but their impulses. And that is how Pirx prevails in the end over a devious little rascal of a non-linear with aspirations to world domination: an impulse, which he struggles later to explain, to remain silent, inert, when all logic points to action. But our impulses—the illogic that defines our humanity, our empathy, our love—fail us time and time again. Indeed, Burns hints that human morality is, in a way, morally inferior to machine logic: as technological advancement enables ever-greater social anonymity and destructive capability, the human psyche stays the same if not worsens in terms of moral aspiration: humans persistently struggle to extend compassion to strangers: the glow of our “moral responsibility barely grazes the first few links in the chain of cause and effect.”
Well, now that that’s on the table, how does it all hold up to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics? Let’s see:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Clearly that is not the case in Pirx’s world. Robots do not perpetrate crime because it is illogical, impractical. For now.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. This holds up in a way. It is not so much that computers are bound to obey orders as some sort of defining principle. Rather, their programming defines their responses to human instruction; they are programmed to perform certain functions, their logic is to fulfill those functions, and they obey orders insofar as to do so is necessary for the performance of those pre-programmed functions. In both Asimov’s and Lem’s conception, machine decision-making processes are purely a question of mathematics, yet mathematicians are often unable to predict or explain machine behaviour. And in both, as the artificial “brains” become more and more complex, as the functions the robots are designed to serve expand, so do the machines' capacities to behave in wholly unanticipated ways, circumventing human instructions both intentionally and unintentionally.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. While the machine in “The Hunt” at one point demonstrates excellently the way in which the First Law trumps the Third Law in a proper functioning Asimovian robot, it does so after a long stretch of disobeying this entirely, that is, not merely putting its survival above the life of humans, but its function. Perhaps it is entirely unaware of the humanity of its casualties—this actually seems likely—but still, there’s nothing First- or Third-Law-like at all about Lem’s robots.
Although Lem doesn’t necessarily imply this, I agree with his vision: if machine intelligence is to be a worthy replica of human intelligence, machines cannot be limited at the most fundamental level by bright-line rules like the Three Laws; such limits may be wholly inconsistent with the kind of intelligence bestowed in machines in Asimov’s robot stories. In that sense and others, Lem’s perspective is a little more removed and significantly more nuanced, although he wrote far fewer robot stories.
Well, this turned out WAY longer than I intended. Flipping back through the book, I realized how much I enjoyed some of the quotes. So here’s a nice one to conclude with, something for you, valued Reader, to think about, a parting gift courtesy of Lem from the perspective of Burns, the ostensible robot:
“Man is a perfectly astigmatic creature,” … “It was inevitable, given your type of evolution. Consciousness is a product of the brain, sufficiently isolated to constitute a subjective entity, but an entity that is an illusion of introspection, borne along like an iceberg on the ocean. It is never grasped directly, but sometimes it is so noticeably present that it is probed by the conscious faculty. From that very probing the devil was born—as a projection of something that, though actively present in the brain, can’t be located like a thought or a hand.”
October 8, 2011
I like "Pirx the Pilot". First off, he's a spaceman working the dangerous but necessary profession of space transport. His universe isn't like the clean, Art Deco-inspired spaceships of the traditional Star Trek franchise. It could be right around the corner in a gas station bay, a machine shop, or the engine of a small tramp steamer; capable but messy. Secondly, the man himself teems with thoughts and ideas but show little of this to those around him. Only we, the readers, see the metal gyrations that he goes through while resolving the dilemma or mystery that faces him. For ultimately, each "tale" is a mystery that Pirx must solve and he does so in his very unique way. And last but not least, Mr. Lem crafts each tale with ingenuity and hidden depths that draw the reader in.
This is the second collection of stories about Pirx. The first book, "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" dealt with his training and early missions. In these five tales we read about his working days as a "seasoned spaceman". In each Pirx confronts an unlikely but deadly or potentially so situation. The author spins a strange and provocative story in each. Whether the phrasing is a result of translation or a faithful copy of how Mr. Lem wants the story to flow (my bet), I find the pacing to be different than contemporaneous American science fiction. Its one of the things that sets the tone of the universe that Pirx inhabits.
In the first his crew is stricken by illness (the mumps) with just a couple of others unaffected to man the essential stations. But because of their individual foibles (one a bootlegger and a drunk, another unqualified, etc.) Pirx must stage-manage them through a return voyage. Sounds pretty ho-hum until Pirx realizes that he has encountered the first, indisputable proof of advanced alien civilization. It's the greatest discovery ever, but through no fault of his own it will elude mankind forever.
Two of the others involve robots (as commonly depicted in SF literature, television, and movies). In one case Pirx, an accomplished climber it seems, discovers that a missing exploration robot has shown an initiative that surprises all of them. It has resulted in the destruction of the robot, but this is only discovered when Pirx realizes why the robot had set off on its journey. His two companions would not and indeed cannot comprehend his insight - after all it was only a machine. The other robot is a heavy-duty mining and construction model that suffers damage to its "brain" during a severe moonquake. Pirx helps a collection of scientists and workers track and locate the killer (it has lasered several men to death). The task is difficult: the robot is rugged, designed for the lunar environment and has an invisible very high-power laser that can cut you down before you know it has fired. In the end another person makes the kill, but not before Pirx has created a kind of rapport with it.
The fourth story involves humanoid "robots" (one would more likely imagine them as "androids") that are described as "nonlinears" by themselves and their creators (its the slang of the day). Pirx is asked to take a crew of strangers into space that will contain some actual humans and some "nonlinears". He's not supposed to know which are which but he is asked to keenly observe their actions. Pirx understands that those in power would like to use such nonlinears to replace men in many professions, including his own. Pirx tries to be an honest man, but a few crew members come to him in confidence to reveal themselves or label others. The essence of this tale is psychological because the machines are "good enough" to fool an observer. An ordinary writer would just proceed with the story and Pirx's solution, but not Mr. Lem. He begins this tale with an formal case where Pirx is up on charges of negligence; the result of his allowing a situation to develop where the humans and nonlinears were put to an extreme test. You'll have to read the book to see what happens.
The last tale involves another psychological dilemma. A new, monster spacecraft comes in to land on Mars. All goes well until the last few kilometers then all hell breaks loose. The ship begins to lose trim, the onboard computer announces an imminent meteorite impact and switches to full main drive power, the ship goes out of control and dives into the surface killing all aboard. Pirx is the only trained pilot who sees the disaster and has access to the ground and ship-based records (such as they are) and he is asked to stay over and participate in the investigation. To make things interesting, there are two identical sister ships on their way scheduled to land in a few days. Its a tense couple of days as the Mars-based members of the commission are set against the Earth-based ones, including representatives of the shipyard that built the vessels. Although the factual evidence is slight, Pirx uncovers the "why" behind the crash, but only after dredging up memories from his own past.
Like many other widely esteemed authors, Stanislaw Lem is a man who trained for another profession, but had a greater love for writing. His style is unmistakable and his concepts and plots are among the best. When I read several of his books long ago, I liked them, but perhaps did not appreciate them as much as today. Sure I, like Pirx himself, will read trashy sci-fi, but I generally enjoy the good stuff better. "More Tales of Pirx the Pilot" is definitely one of the better books to read.
This is the second collection of stories about Pirx. The first book, "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" dealt with his training and early missions. In these five tales we read about his working days as a "seasoned spaceman". In each Pirx confronts an unlikely but deadly or potentially so situation. The author spins a strange and provocative story in each. Whether the phrasing is a result of translation or a faithful copy of how Mr. Lem wants the story to flow (my bet), I find the pacing to be different than contemporaneous American science fiction. Its one of the things that sets the tone of the universe that Pirx inhabits.
In the first his crew is stricken by illness (the mumps) with just a couple of others unaffected to man the essential stations. But because of their individual foibles (one a bootlegger and a drunk, another unqualified, etc.) Pirx must stage-manage them through a return voyage. Sounds pretty ho-hum until Pirx realizes that he has encountered the first, indisputable proof of advanced alien civilization. It's the greatest discovery ever, but through no fault of his own it will elude mankind forever.
Two of the others involve robots (as commonly depicted in SF literature, television, and movies). In one case Pirx, an accomplished climber it seems, discovers that a missing exploration robot has shown an initiative that surprises all of them. It has resulted in the destruction of the robot, but this is only discovered when Pirx realizes why the robot had set off on its journey. His two companions would not and indeed cannot comprehend his insight - after all it was only a machine. The other robot is a heavy-duty mining and construction model that suffers damage to its "brain" during a severe moonquake. Pirx helps a collection of scientists and workers track and locate the killer (it has lasered several men to death). The task is difficult: the robot is rugged, designed for the lunar environment and has an invisible very high-power laser that can cut you down before you know it has fired. In the end another person makes the kill, but not before Pirx has created a kind of rapport with it.
The fourth story involves humanoid "robots" (one would more likely imagine them as "androids") that are described as "nonlinears" by themselves and their creators (its the slang of the day). Pirx is asked to take a crew of strangers into space that will contain some actual humans and some "nonlinears". He's not supposed to know which are which but he is asked to keenly observe their actions. Pirx understands that those in power would like to use such nonlinears to replace men in many professions, including his own. Pirx tries to be an honest man, but a few crew members come to him in confidence to reveal themselves or label others. The essence of this tale is psychological because the machines are "good enough" to fool an observer. An ordinary writer would just proceed with the story and Pirx's solution, but not Mr. Lem. He begins this tale with an formal case where Pirx is up on charges of negligence; the result of his allowing a situation to develop where the humans and nonlinears were put to an extreme test. You'll have to read the book to see what happens.
The last tale involves another psychological dilemma. A new, monster spacecraft comes in to land on Mars. All goes well until the last few kilometers then all hell breaks loose. The ship begins to lose trim, the onboard computer announces an imminent meteorite impact and switches to full main drive power, the ship goes out of control and dives into the surface killing all aboard. Pirx is the only trained pilot who sees the disaster and has access to the ground and ship-based records (such as they are) and he is asked to stay over and participate in the investigation. To make things interesting, there are two identical sister ships on their way scheduled to land in a few days. Its a tense couple of days as the Mars-based members of the commission are set against the Earth-based ones, including representatives of the shipyard that built the vessels. Although the factual evidence is slight, Pirx uncovers the "why" behind the crash, but only after dredging up memories from his own past.
Like many other widely esteemed authors, Stanislaw Lem is a man who trained for another profession, but had a greater love for writing. His style is unmistakable and his concepts and plots are among the best. When I read several of his books long ago, I liked them, but perhaps did not appreciate them as much as today. Sure I, like Pirx himself, will read trashy sci-fi, but I generally enjoy the good stuff better. "More Tales of Pirx the Pilot" is definitely one of the better books to read.
April 17, 2024
These are five prescient stories of men and machines—and I do mean “men.” It’s unfortunate that Lem’s view is limited to the male gender, here and almost always elsewhere. But I’m inclined to think that, if he had expanded his field of view, he would still have found the same limitations, pierced through only rarely, by persons such as the title character in this and a preceding collection.
Pirx the pilot would make a good detective, and in a way that’s a role he often plays in both collections. He’s not without flaws; he just works around them better than most.
In one story, he stumbles upon and looks into an interstellar object that could be a spaceship, now lifeless, but he knows no one is likely to believe him. It’s almost uncanny how much this anticipates the object known as ’Oumuamua that passed through our solar system a few years ago. In another story, Pirx realizes that a robot that had unaccountably gone mountain climbing was probably not malfunctioning, as those around him assume, but had developed a sense of initiative—a sense of adventure, really. There’s a story about a robot that definitely was malfunctioning but that does one unexpected and inexplicable thing. In this one, the questions of what machines do and why can easily call to mind the mistakes of self-driving cars, the output of generative AI, and more.
The plot isn’t really the point in any of these, especially the final two. One, the longest in the book, involves a narrowly averted disaster aboard a spaceship crewed partly by humans and partly by humanoid machines; unlike the others, this tale avoids calling them robots. It’s told in a nonlinear way, and it essentially dramatizes humans and machines facing complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The story is at first hard to like because it’s hard to grasp, but that just means it presents readers with the same challenge its characters face.
The final story is the most elaborate in terms of moods, themes, and motifs. It presents an investigation into the crash of a spaceship on Mars, which is like what the Air Disasters series on U.S. TV has presented for years. Now that I think about it, that program is rather Lem-like; both show us repeatedly that, in the dance of humans and machines, things go wrong. But this story goes way beyond the investigation. It’s shadowed by a recurring and elusive nightmare. A turn of the plot hinges on the Greek name for a goddess of destiny, which also denotes a compulsion. The tale includes a meditation on aging, a critique of the contrivances (as Pirx sees them) of Edgar Allen Poe’s horror stories, and a survey of the delusions about “canals” on Mars into which many astronomers fell. Though it’s somewhat elusive, I think what it’s really about, at least partly, is the human mind as both a help and a hindrance. Without ever saying so directly, this story declares the importance of attempting to see what’s really there. It calls for looking instead of dreaming.
Pirx the pilot would make a good detective, and in a way that’s a role he often plays in both collections. He’s not without flaws; he just works around them better than most.
In one story, he stumbles upon and looks into an interstellar object that could be a spaceship, now lifeless, but he knows no one is likely to believe him. It’s almost uncanny how much this anticipates the object known as ’Oumuamua that passed through our solar system a few years ago. In another story, Pirx realizes that a robot that had unaccountably gone mountain climbing was probably not malfunctioning, as those around him assume, but had developed a sense of initiative—a sense of adventure, really. There’s a story about a robot that definitely was malfunctioning but that does one unexpected and inexplicable thing. In this one, the questions of what machines do and why can easily call to mind the mistakes of self-driving cars, the output of generative AI, and more.
The plot isn’t really the point in any of these, especially the final two. One, the longest in the book, involves a narrowly averted disaster aboard a spaceship crewed partly by humans and partly by humanoid machines; unlike the others, this tale avoids calling them robots. It’s told in a nonlinear way, and it essentially dramatizes humans and machines facing complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. The story is at first hard to like because it’s hard to grasp, but that just means it presents readers with the same challenge its characters face.
The final story is the most elaborate in terms of moods, themes, and motifs. It presents an investigation into the crash of a spaceship on Mars, which is like what the Air Disasters series on U.S. TV has presented for years. Now that I think about it, that program is rather Lem-like; both show us repeatedly that, in the dance of humans and machines, things go wrong. But this story goes way beyond the investigation. It’s shadowed by a recurring and elusive nightmare. A turn of the plot hinges on the Greek name for a goddess of destiny, which also denotes a compulsion. The tale includes a meditation on aging, a critique of the contrivances (as Pirx sees them) of Edgar Allen Poe’s horror stories, and a survey of the delusions about “canals” on Mars into which many astronomers fell. Though it’s somewhat elusive, I think what it’s really about, at least partly, is the human mind as both a help and a hindrance. Without ever saying so directly, this story declares the importance of attempting to see what’s really there. It calls for looking instead of dreaming.
February 6, 2023
Als jemand der äußerst selten Science Fiction Literatur liest, war ich vollkommen überrascht, wie sehr mich die Geschichten des Piloten Pirx gefesselt haben. Die Ausgangspositionen der sechs Kurzgeschichten waren jedes Mal Alltagssituationen, die nicht unbedingt viel Spannung versprachen. Jedoch sind allein diese Alltagssituationen für Menschen, die in einer Zeit leben, in der Raumfahrt über den Mond und den Mars hinaus mit solch einer Regelmäßigkeit und Selbstverständlichkeit in weiter Ferne liegt, faszinierend. Und genau hier unterscheiden sich Lem's Erzählungen von der Science Fiction Literatur, mit der ich vertraut bin.
1. Stanislaw Lem verfügte über ein Wissen, das zahlreiche Gebiete wie die Mathematik, die Kybernetik und die Informatik umfasste. Er nutzte dieses Wissen, um eine Zukunft zu skizzieren, die so realistisch wie möglich erscheint. Dementsprechend kommt es dem Leser vor, als erzähle das Buch Geschichten, die sich in Zukunft tatsächlich so ereignen könnten. Bis zum heutigen Zeitpunkt ist mir kein Autor bekannt, der einen so hohen Anspruch auf Realismus in Science Fiction stellt.
2. Obwohl die Geschichten in ferner Zukunft situiert sind, sind ihre Themen unglaublich relevant im Kontext der Herausforderungen, denen wir heutzutage gegenüberstehen. Die jüngsten Diskussionen um ChatGPT zeigen, dass unsere Gesellschaft gespalten ist, wenn es um das Thema der künstlichen Intelligenz geht. Der Pilot Pirx lebt zu einer Zeit, in der die künstliche Intelligenz allgegenwärtig ist und den Alltag der Menschen bestimmen. In "Die Verhandlung" gehen seine Zeitgenossen sogar soweit, dass sie den Versuch wagen, Roboter zu entwickeln, die vom Menschen nicht mehr zu unterscheiden sind. Pirx steht solchen Ambitionen kritisch gegenüber und weist auf die Grenzen der Technik hin. Das Buch wirft Fragen auf, die für den technologischen Fortschritt, den wir heute erleben, bedeutend sind.
1. Stanislaw Lem verfügte über ein Wissen, das zahlreiche Gebiete wie die Mathematik, die Kybernetik und die Informatik umfasste. Er nutzte dieses Wissen, um eine Zukunft zu skizzieren, die so realistisch wie möglich erscheint. Dementsprechend kommt es dem Leser vor, als erzähle das Buch Geschichten, die sich in Zukunft tatsächlich so ereignen könnten. Bis zum heutigen Zeitpunkt ist mir kein Autor bekannt, der einen so hohen Anspruch auf Realismus in Science Fiction stellt.
2. Obwohl die Geschichten in ferner Zukunft situiert sind, sind ihre Themen unglaublich relevant im Kontext der Herausforderungen, denen wir heutzutage gegenüberstehen. Die jüngsten Diskussionen um ChatGPT zeigen, dass unsere Gesellschaft gespalten ist, wenn es um das Thema der künstlichen Intelligenz geht. Der Pilot Pirx lebt zu einer Zeit, in der die künstliche Intelligenz allgegenwärtig ist und den Alltag der Menschen bestimmen. In "Die Verhandlung" gehen seine Zeitgenossen sogar soweit, dass sie den Versuch wagen, Roboter zu entwickeln, die vom Menschen nicht mehr zu unterscheiden sind. Pirx steht solchen Ambitionen kritisch gegenüber und weist auf die Grenzen der Technik hin. Das Buch wirft Fragen auf, die für den technologischen Fortschritt, den wir heute erleben, bedeutend sind.
September 16, 2018
[Call it 3.5 stars on average, though some stories are 4 and some 3]
Once again, Lem’s tales of Pirx are mainly focused on the fallibility of man, as revealed by the fallibility (all-too-often neglected by sci-fi writers) of his machines. The collection leads off with “Pirx’s Tale”, intended to destroy any expectations the reader may have of romance or adventure in space. Pirx starts by confessing that he likes to read trashy, obviously untrue science fiction, full of adventures, as a distraction from the reality of space, which is that “[t]he days of space adventurers were over, because for the most part there weren’t any more adventures to be had.” He then goes on to describe his first job, collecting junked hulls in Mercury orbit to be returned to Earth to be melted down for scrap. The ship he pilots is only barely in better shape than the hulls he is picking up. The crew are a collection of castoffs, and anyway when the story proper (written before the advent of vaccination in Poland, I guess) opens, almost all are down with the mumps, with the exception of a radiotelegraph operator, who is a drunkard, and the second engineer, who turns out to be a civil engineer, rather than astronautical one. Thus, when news arrives of a meteorite swarm — from, unusually, another solar system — Pirx is essentially running the ship all by himself. As a result, there is nobody there to confirm his sighting of a gigantic, ancient, likely-dead alien vehicle in the center of the swarm, and the tape that was supposed to be recording the data has run out and, due to an oversight (caused by all the work Pirx has had to do in single-handedly dealing with the rustbucket ship), not been replaced. Plus, the only reason Pirx was able to get a good look at the object is that he is, to save money, illegally flying in the plane of the ecliptic, and as a young pilot the resulting to-do might well end his career. Therefore, Pirx opts not to report his sighting, and a great space adventure is forestalled by a combination of bad luck, incompetence, penny-pinching, and technical problems. It’s a brilliant statement of Lem’s attitude towards science fiction.
“The Accident” pivots towards the collection’s sub-theme, robots. The story starts with a nice breakdown of how three people, in close quarters for two months, can start to annoy each other no end. However, the second half is a long description of rock-climbing that I found kind of boring. The point about the titular accident being caused by programming which was, in a way, too successful, rather than buggy, is well made, but the emphasis on the rock climbing seems unnecessary.
“The Hunt” starts in a similar fashion to “Pirx’s Tale”. Pirx arrives at the Moon, but a mixup means that his cargo isn’t there: he has to argue with the bureaucrats to get a room at Luna Base, deal with the time change that suddenly shifts him from noon shipboard time to 10 pm lunar time, eat a mediocre meal at the hotel restaurant and then go to his cramped, uncomfortable room, without hot water. Lem even has him say that “[t]hese were not the romantic days of astronautics!” Which makes it a bit surprising when, the next morning, an announcement summons all men with military training. Pirx goes, feeling that this is simply more of his usual bad luck and making fun of the possibility of derring-do. The problem turns out to be a malfunctioning mining robot (a Setaur), damaged in an unexpected meteor shower (another chance to point out the fallibility of modern science: predictions of meter showers on the Moon are just as poor as weather predictions on Earth, Pirx complains), and now apparently gone rogue (it has already killed at least one person). The handful of men with military training — there are no enemies to fight on the moon, so there aren’t many — are mobilized, with what weapons can be improvised, to track it down. In fact, it turns out that the Setaur, malfunctioning though it is, is better equipped as a hunter than the humans, making it a little ambiguous at times who is hunting who. Indeed, for Pirx the hunt itself is largely uncomfortable and confusing. Communications are hampered by solar activity which makes the use of satellite transmission impossible; finding the Setaur is very difficult due to the terrain and the presence of metal junk everywhere; the jury-rigged weapons are likely to be useless against a small, mobile target; the transporter they travel in imposes considerably physical discomfort. The whole thing has the quality of a highly technical bad dream, especially given the increasing identification between Pirx and the Setaur. To say that Pirx survives and the Setaur does not is not to spoil anything: what matters is the identification between man and machine, an identification that is made even stronger, Lem insists, when the machine malfunctions.
“The Inquest” tries to get at the same questions, but doesn’t do as good a job. In this case the robots are extremely human-like androids, which leads Lem into a lot of unnecessary and not particularly enlightening noodling about the real nature of humanity. The story itself, a murder mystery of sorts, isn’t bad, but the conclusion, that Pirx triumphs thanks to the unpredictable bumbling of human nature, is somewhat mechanistic, despite Lem’s desire to demonstrate how non-mechanical people are. In a way, it’s probably easier to interrogate human nature via the obviously non-human Setaur from “The Hunt”.
“Ananke” starts out in typical fashion, demolishing a romantic notion of space exploration: in this case, the focus is Mars, which, Pirx declares to himself, is a fraud. The fraudulence of the dream of Mars and its canals is a proof of the frailty of human nature, and it is by meditating on said frailty that Pirx is in the end enabled to discover the software bug that is at the center of the story. (Bugs are a dominant feature of our interactions with all sorts of devices, one that has not diminished one bit as the sophistication of our computers increase, so it continues to surprise me how rarely they play an important role in science fiction stories.) The only problem with the story, in fact, is Lem’s overly mechanistic attitude towards human psychology: for the story, it’s perhaps necessary that “a man’s personality [can be] laid bare, distilled, reduced to a handful of reflexes, as pitiful as they were inescapable”, but I don’t think that this is not a particularly accurate description of the functioning of actual human beings. Nonetheless, the elegiac, wistful tone of the story, with its constant references to the astronomers who fought for centuries over the question of whether or not Mars had canals, only for the very idea to be discarded out of hand, makes for a fitting conclusion to a collection of stories which try to do to Buck Rogers what modern astronomy did to Schiaparelli.
Once again, Lem’s tales of Pirx are mainly focused on the fallibility of man, as revealed by the fallibility (all-too-often neglected by sci-fi writers) of his machines. The collection leads off with “Pirx’s Tale”, intended to destroy any expectations the reader may have of romance or adventure in space. Pirx starts by confessing that he likes to read trashy, obviously untrue science fiction, full of adventures, as a distraction from the reality of space, which is that “[t]he days of space adventurers were over, because for the most part there weren’t any more adventures to be had.” He then goes on to describe his first job, collecting junked hulls in Mercury orbit to be returned to Earth to be melted down for scrap. The ship he pilots is only barely in better shape than the hulls he is picking up. The crew are a collection of castoffs, and anyway when the story proper (written before the advent of vaccination in Poland, I guess) opens, almost all are down with the mumps, with the exception of a radiotelegraph operator, who is a drunkard, and the second engineer, who turns out to be a civil engineer, rather than astronautical one. Thus, when news arrives of a meteorite swarm — from, unusually, another solar system — Pirx is essentially running the ship all by himself. As a result, there is nobody there to confirm his sighting of a gigantic, ancient, likely-dead alien vehicle in the center of the swarm, and the tape that was supposed to be recording the data has run out and, due to an oversight (caused by all the work Pirx has had to do in single-handedly dealing with the rustbucket ship), not been replaced. Plus, the only reason Pirx was able to get a good look at the object is that he is, to save money, illegally flying in the plane of the ecliptic, and as a young pilot the resulting to-do might well end his career. Therefore, Pirx opts not to report his sighting, and a great space adventure is forestalled by a combination of bad luck, incompetence, penny-pinching, and technical problems. It’s a brilliant statement of Lem’s attitude towards science fiction.
“The Accident” pivots towards the collection’s sub-theme, robots. The story starts with a nice breakdown of how three people, in close quarters for two months, can start to annoy each other no end. However, the second half is a long description of rock-climbing that I found kind of boring. The point about the titular accident being caused by programming which was, in a way, too successful, rather than buggy, is well made, but the emphasis on the rock climbing seems unnecessary.
“The Hunt” starts in a similar fashion to “Pirx’s Tale”. Pirx arrives at the Moon, but a mixup means that his cargo isn’t there: he has to argue with the bureaucrats to get a room at Luna Base, deal with the time change that suddenly shifts him from noon shipboard time to 10 pm lunar time, eat a mediocre meal at the hotel restaurant and then go to his cramped, uncomfortable room, without hot water. Lem even has him say that “[t]hese were not the romantic days of astronautics!” Which makes it a bit surprising when, the next morning, an announcement summons all men with military training. Pirx goes, feeling that this is simply more of his usual bad luck and making fun of the possibility of derring-do. The problem turns out to be a malfunctioning mining robot (a Setaur), damaged in an unexpected meteor shower (another chance to point out the fallibility of modern science: predictions of meter showers on the Moon are just as poor as weather predictions on Earth, Pirx complains), and now apparently gone rogue (it has already killed at least one person). The handful of men with military training — there are no enemies to fight on the moon, so there aren’t many — are mobilized, with what weapons can be improvised, to track it down. In fact, it turns out that the Setaur, malfunctioning though it is, is better equipped as a hunter than the humans, making it a little ambiguous at times who is hunting who. Indeed, for Pirx the hunt itself is largely uncomfortable and confusing. Communications are hampered by solar activity which makes the use of satellite transmission impossible; finding the Setaur is very difficult due to the terrain and the presence of metal junk everywhere; the jury-rigged weapons are likely to be useless against a small, mobile target; the transporter they travel in imposes considerably physical discomfort. The whole thing has the quality of a highly technical bad dream, especially given the increasing identification between Pirx and the Setaur. To say that Pirx survives and the Setaur does not is not to spoil anything: what matters is the identification between man and machine, an identification that is made even stronger, Lem insists, when the machine malfunctions.
“The Inquest” tries to get at the same questions, but doesn’t do as good a job. In this case the robots are extremely human-like androids, which leads Lem into a lot of unnecessary and not particularly enlightening noodling about the real nature of humanity. The story itself, a murder mystery of sorts, isn’t bad, but the conclusion, that Pirx triumphs thanks to the unpredictable bumbling of human nature, is somewhat mechanistic, despite Lem’s desire to demonstrate how non-mechanical people are. In a way, it’s probably easier to interrogate human nature via the obviously non-human Setaur from “The Hunt”.
“Ananke” starts out in typical fashion, demolishing a romantic notion of space exploration: in this case, the focus is Mars, which, Pirx declares to himself, is a fraud. The fraudulence of the dream of Mars and its canals is a proof of the frailty of human nature, and it is by meditating on said frailty that Pirx is in the end enabled to discover the software bug that is at the center of the story. (Bugs are a dominant feature of our interactions with all sorts of devices, one that has not diminished one bit as the sophistication of our computers increase, so it continues to surprise me how rarely they play an important role in science fiction stories.) The only problem with the story, in fact, is Lem’s overly mechanistic attitude towards human psychology: for the story, it’s perhaps necessary that “a man’s personality [can be] laid bare, distilled, reduced to a handful of reflexes, as pitiful as they were inescapable”, but I don’t think that this is not a particularly accurate description of the functioning of actual human beings. Nonetheless, the elegiac, wistful tone of the story, with its constant references to the astronomers who fought for centuries over the question of whether or not Mars had canals, only for the very idea to be discarded out of hand, makes for a fitting conclusion to a collection of stories which try to do to Buck Rogers what modern astronomy did to Schiaparelli.
July 15, 2019
Conocí al piloto Pirx como una momia congelada dentro de un megapasos en una luna de Saturno. Todo el mundo sabe que Pirx, y no Parvis, fue traído de nuevo a la vida e intervino en el Fiasco monumental, y que su muerte fue la más épica de todas, en Quinta Harpiyae. Me fascina la manera en que el pesimismo obsesivo de Lem le hacía ver un desastre potencial en cada avance tecnológico, cómo llevó la ciencia ficción a una playa de arena gris y mar negro, el hecho de que haya comprendido que ningún avance tecnológico eliminará la ineptitud humana. No me canso de leer a Lem.
April 18, 2022
Das Buch enthält in der deutschen Ausgabe von 1973 sechs Kurzgeschichten, die nicht aufeinander aufbauen und in beliebiger Reihenfolge gelesen werden können. Allen, die nicht das ganze Buch lesen möchten, empfehle ich die Kurzgeschichten "Die Patrouille" und "Pirx erzählt."
1) Die Patrouille: Unerwartete Handlung - 4*
Handlung:
2) Die Jagd: Zunächst spannend, dann langatmig - 3*
Handlung:
3) Der Unfall: Langatmig - 2*
Handlung:
4) Pirx erzählt: Spannende Kurzgeschichte mit unüblichem Ende - 5*
Handlung:
5) Die Verhandlung: Spannender interessanter Einstieg, dann sehr langsame Aufarbeitung der erfolgten Ereignisse - 1*
Handlung:
6) Ananke: Spannender Start, enttäuschendes Ende - 2*
Handlung:
Gesamtbewertung: (4 + 3 + 2 + 5 + 1 + 2) / 6 = 2.83
1) Die Patrouille: Unerwartete Handlung - 4*
Handlung:
2) Die Jagd: Zunächst spannend, dann langatmig - 3*
Handlung:
3) Der Unfall: Langatmig - 2*
Handlung:
4) Pirx erzählt: Spannende Kurzgeschichte mit unüblichem Ende - 5*
Handlung:
5) Die Verhandlung: Spannender interessanter Einstieg, dann sehr langsame Aufarbeitung der erfolgten Ereignisse - 1*
Handlung:
6) Ananke: Spannender Start, enttäuschendes Ende - 2*
Handlung:
Gesamtbewertung: (4 + 3 + 2 + 5 + 1 + 2) / 6 = 2.83
November 9, 2016
I was just recently thinking about how science fiction authors tend to forget how variable the distance between the planets is, especially those beyond Earth’s orbit: that Mars, for example varies from 54 million kilometers to 401 million kilometers from the Earth and the Moon. A trip that might take seven days when Mars is near would take almost two months when Mars is far—with similar increases in fuel use.
Of course, I should have expected Lem to do so. And not as the technical background of a story but the political background. With Mars moving further from the earth, super freighters become essential, both to get as many supplies as possible to Mars while it is still relatively inexpensive, and, I suspect, to keep supply costs down as fuel costs rise. Pirx, as a captain of a smaller ship, recognizes what’s happening. But is still elated at the sight of those technological wonders.
The real transition in these stories, however, is the rise of the computer. They are gaining more than just intelligence. They are gaining laziness, ambition, and neuroses. And Pirx, nearing forty by the end of the book, has seen the change—with an occasional front row seat.
Of course, I should have expected Lem to do so. And not as the technical background of a story but the political background. With Mars moving further from the earth, super freighters become essential, both to get as many supplies as possible to Mars while it is still relatively inexpensive, and, I suspect, to keep supply costs down as fuel costs rise. Pirx, as a captain of a smaller ship, recognizes what’s happening. But is still elated at the sight of those technological wonders.
The real transition in these stories, however, is the rise of the computer. They are gaining more than just intelligence. They are gaining laziness, ambition, and neuroses. And Pirx, nearing forty by the end of the book, has seen the change—with an occasional front row seat.
January 18, 2020
Each story follows Pirx in a situation that involves his background as a space pilot. After the first story, the collection seems to focus more on robots and computers and the concept of either how the robot evolves or how a computer responds to what we put into it.
It's hard to put a finger on this book. It's clearly not as dense and philosophical as Lem's major works, but it does have its moments. It opens with a sense of being more traditional "hard science fiction", but the technology is a little dated at times. In short, the work just feels a little uneven. The weakest of the three is the middle story, "The Hunt," while "The Inquest" is indeed a unique look. The first and second stories needed a strong third story to follow up, and that seemed to be the problem. There are times where I felt the fourth and fifth stories, "The Inquest" and "Ananke" were quite strong, but felt -- and this is a rare statement for me to make -- overwritten.
It's hard to put a finger on this book. It's clearly not as dense and philosophical as Lem's major works, but it does have its moments. It opens with a sense of being more traditional "hard science fiction", but the technology is a little dated at times. In short, the work just feels a little uneven. The weakest of the three is the middle story, "The Hunt," while "The Inquest" is indeed a unique look. The first and second stories needed a strong third story to follow up, and that seemed to be the problem. There are times where I felt the fourth and fifth stories, "The Inquest" and "Ananke" were quite strong, but felt -- and this is a rare statement for me to make -- overwritten.
November 20, 2018
Although I gave this collection of stories a "4" overall, it is worth noting that one of the short tales, "The Inquest" was 5-star worthy. It was phenomenal, gripping, and overall an excellent example of how sci-fi can be written to withstand the test of time and delve into complex topics that span both generations and continents. With the tale covering the intersection of AI, robotics, anthropomorphism, and deception, I kept thinking about how it would fit seamlessly along with episodes of the modern TV show "Black Mirror" (an excellent show, basically a modern day "Twilight Zone"), despite "The Inquest" having been written in the 1960s.
The collection considered as a whole was still great, and as usual, Lem did not disappoint. I will have to keep working my way through his works as I have yet to come across writing of his that disagreed with me.
The collection considered as a whole was still great, and as usual, Lem did not disappoint. I will have to keep working my way through his works as I have yet to come across writing of his that disagreed with me.
February 3, 2021
I enjoyed them all. The Inquest and Ananke were particularly interesting.
Lem deals with the thin discontinuity between an entity and its creator. Can the creator ever trust what it has created, especially if the expectation is for it to resemble itself in structure and norms? Pirx also deals with these infinitely braided metaphysical and physical relationships through his thoughts and actions as a well-read space pilot and he manages to reach conclusions that continue to be relevant as of this typing.
When will they no longer be relevant?
Lem deals with the thin discontinuity between an entity and its creator. Can the creator ever trust what it has created, especially if the expectation is for it to resemble itself in structure and norms? Pirx also deals with these infinitely braided metaphysical and physical relationships through his thoughts and actions as a well-read space pilot and he manages to reach conclusions that continue to be relevant as of this typing.
When will they no longer be relevant?
September 18, 2022
Read only the three first stories, but liked them. Lem has a wry sense of humour. The stories explore the relationship between humans and robots, and also the everyday absurdity of human life, through the lens of the time of their writing in the 70's/80's in the Eastern Bloc. A nice bit of sci-fi history.
May 29, 2018
Five more stories of Pirx the Pilot, as a somewhat older man, including the often anthologized story "The Hunt"; the writing is more involved than the earlier stories, but still essentially in a straightforward narrative style and "hard" science fiction about technology.
February 21, 2019
Very smart and very funny!
November 7, 2019
These were great.
May 11, 2020
Más de lo visto en la primera parte, solo que Pirx está más maduro. El último relato es mi favorito
September 14, 2024
Read "The Inquest" because of the movie adaptation news; and then continue into some others. Cerebral stories, indeed...
June 5, 2023
De este libro saqué la frase que de mi perfil.
May 11, 2020
Esta colección se centra bastante en la inteligencia artificial y debo decir que me encantó El proceso. Es toda una intriga y es muy interesante en cierto momento tratar de adivinar quién decía la verdad. Todos los elementos son muy buenos y tiene muchas posturas que me parecen acertadas y encantadoras.
La cacería (y su referencia a Terminus) me conmovió bastante, aunque al principio me costó encontrar el ritmo de la historia. El accidente me pareció también muy interesante en relación con las motivaciones de las inteligencias artificiales.
El cuento del piloto Pirx me hizo mucha gracia y fue bastante agradable (en retrospectiva, la situación me recuerda un poco a Tichy).
Finalmente, Ananke me dejó una sensación muy curiosa sobre la influencia que los programadores/"profesores" pueden tener en las computadoras.
La cacería (y su referencia a Terminus) me conmovió bastante, aunque al principio me costó encontrar el ritmo de la historia. El accidente me pareció también muy interesante en relación con las motivaciones de las inteligencias artificiales.
El cuento del piloto Pirx me hizo mucha gracia y fue bastante agradable (en retrospectiva, la situación me recuerda un poco a Tichy).
Finalmente, Ananke me dejó una sensación muy curiosa sobre la influencia que los programadores/"profesores" pueden tener en las computadoras.
December 8, 2009
I took this along on a recent trip to Asia. Lem, the recently deceased author of the truly disturbing 'Solaris'(btw, the Russian film version of the novel is also supremely creepy; I haven't seen the newer version) brings on world-weary Pirx for these five wonderful stories (world weary at the age of 40; such is the lot of interplanetary space pilots, who must undergo rigorous annual physical and mental examinations: age takes its toll).
These stories are very entertaining and masterfully written: in 'The Accident' is a description of technical rock-climbing, albeit on a planet in an alien solar system, that far surpasses Jon Krackauer. The best story in my opinion is 'Ananke' (the Greek Goddess of destiny or compulsion as we learn), set on Mars. Mars is not a glamorous place: 'the closer one got to it, the more it lost its solid red exterior, the more it ceased to be the emblem of a war god, the more it revealed its drabness, spots, stains...a gray-brown blight rocked by eternal wind.' A catastrophic event traces back not to an alien presence (as I initially thought, thinking of Solaris) but to human compulsion (remember Ananke!) transferred to computer software.
Stanislaw Lem's writings tend to the dark and pessimistic, probably due in part to growing up in Poland in the nightmare years of WWII and living in the post-war Soviet era. These are probably his lightest stories, and well worth reading.
These stories are very entertaining and masterfully written: in 'The Accident' is a description of technical rock-climbing, albeit on a planet in an alien solar system, that far surpasses Jon Krackauer. The best story in my opinion is 'Ananke' (the Greek Goddess of destiny or compulsion as we learn), set on Mars. Mars is not a glamorous place: 'the closer one got to it, the more it lost its solid red exterior, the more it ceased to be the emblem of a war god, the more it revealed its drabness, spots, stains...a gray-brown blight rocked by eternal wind.' A catastrophic event traces back not to an alien presence (as I initially thought, thinking of Solaris) but to human compulsion (remember Ananke!) transferred to computer software.
Stanislaw Lem's writings tend to the dark and pessimistic, probably due in part to growing up in Poland in the nightmare years of WWII and living in the post-war Soviet era. These are probably his lightest stories, and well worth reading.
June 2, 2017
Few books are more aptly titled that "More Tales of Pirx the Pilot" -- if you have read "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" you know exactly what you are getting: more of the same. It's a little less original this time around, and you aren't really getting to understand the main character any better than you did in the first collection, there's just more.
More well done little stories. They feel a little hollow, but only because they are frequently treading the same ground that was tread (trodden) equally well in the first book.
More well done little stories. They feel a little hollow, but only because they are frequently treading the same ground that was tread (trodden) equally well in the first book.
July 10, 2009
The Pirx stories aren't quite up to Lem's usual standard of originality and depth, but they're still well ahead of most others. Pirx continues his career as a qualified astronavigator, starting the collection in the first person with an anecdote about the vagaries of chance in bringing him to the verge of a possibly shattering discovery, and including "The Hunt", "The Inquest" and "Ananke", tales of pursuit and detection exploring the relationships between human and artificial intelligence.
January 27, 2015
These are the later stories from Pirx' career. While Lem has tried to write a good adventure story, that's not what I think he does best (or what I enjoy the most). Luckily the stories do include some nice diversions to discuss the philosophical and introspective matters that have always been his forte. I think this is required reading in Polish high schools, though I'd only recommend it to people who are already familiar with Lem.
June 17, 2013
Coping with robots, computers, the programmers of computers, in a world where human existence is dependent on those things -- Pirx, our hero, survives by distrusting both machines and their creators. I liked these stories, the first that have kept me awake and reading in a long time.
March 31, 2016
Pirx is one of my favorite SF characters and Lem's neat philosophies and technologies are just as evident here as in his other great works. These stories are centered around robots, computers, and Pirx's relations to them. Not as good as the first collection, but still excellent.
July 27, 2007
aw Pirx, such a schlub! He wants to be a tough-as-nails space pilot, instead he's stuck winning, losing and otherwise muddling along thru sheer sweaty persistence. Big love for these stories.
May 2, 2017
An average sap stumbles into these situations on other planets and out in space, and manages somehow to save the day. I wish he'd written more Pirx stories!
April 22, 2008
Pirx has his few comfortable moments. This set of short stories from the prolific imagination of Lem once again demonstrate his breadth of knowledge both of people and science. A fun read.
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