“ Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. ” ― Rumi
Ijon Tichy is the only human who knows for sure whether the self-programming robots on the moon are plotting a terrestrial invasion. But a highly focused ray severs his corpus collosum. Now his left brain can’t remember the secret and his uncooperative
These fourteen science fiction stories reveal Lem’s fascination with artificial intelligence and demonstrate just how surprisingly human sentient machines can be. “Astonishing is not too strong a word for these tales” (Wall Street Journal). Translat
The planet Quinta is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approac
In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem presents a collection of book reviews of nonexistent works of literature--works that, in many cases, could not possibly be written. Embracing postmodernism's "games for games' sake" ethos, Lem joins the contest with hila
A “delightfully seriocomic memoir”(New York Times) from the celebrated science fiction writer that summons up a mischievous boyhood in Poland just before World War II. Translated by Michael Kandel.
The award-winning editors of Snow White, Blood Red return us to distinctly adult realms of myth and the fantastic -- with 18 wondrous works that cloak the magical fictions we heard at grandma's knee in mantles of darkness and dread. From Roger Zelansky's
Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from w
"Space opera", once a derisive term for cheap pulp adventure, has come to mean something more in modern SF: compelling adventure stories told against a broad canvas, and written to the highest level of skill. Indeed, it can be argued that the "new space o
