Stanislaw Lem - Mortal Engines

The Chain of Chance

The Cyberiad

Eden

Fiasco

The Futurological Congress

His Masters Voice

Hospital of the Transfiguration

Imaginary Magnitude

The Investigation

The Invincible

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Memoirs of a Space Traveler

Microworlds

More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

One Human Minute

A Perfect Vacuum

Return from the Stars

Solaris

The Star Diaries

Tales of Pirx the Pilot

First published in Great Britain in 1993 by

Andr Deutsch Limited

105-106 Great Russell Street

LONDON

WC1B3LJ

English translation copyright 1977 by The Seabury Press

Introduction copyright 1992 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Mortal Engines was first published by The Crossroad/Continuum Publishing Corporation.

The first eleven stories were previously published as part of a collection called Bajki robotw (Fables for Robots) in Cyberiada, third edition, by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Cracow, 1972. The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius was previously published as Zaklad Doktora Vliperdiusa in Dzienniki gwiazdowe, fourth edition, by Spldzielnia Wydawnicza Czytelnik, Warsaw, 1971. The Hunt, was previously published as Polowanie in Opowieci o Pilocie Pirxie, second edition, by Spldzielnia Wydawnicza Czytelnik, Warsaw, 1973. The Mask was previously published as Maska in Maska by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Cracow, 1976.

C1P data for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0-233-98819-X

Printed in Great Britain by WBC Bridgend

Introduction by Michael Kandel

The Three Electroknights

Uranium Earpieces

How Erg the Self-inducting Slew a Paleface

Two Monsters

The White Death

How Microx and Gigant Made the Universe Expand

Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon

The Advisers of King Hydrops

Automatthews Friend

King Globares and the Sages

The Tale of King Gnuff

The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius

The Hunt

The Mask

Fifteen years ago Seabury Press, for whom I had translated several books by Stanislaw Lem, gave me the chance to play anthologist and put together a Lem collection of my own, one that had never appeared in Polish. The result was this volume.

My idea: an assortment of Lems stories about robots. Some lighthearted, some grim, but all sharing the premisewhich is a cornerstone of Lems fictional worldthat robots, after all, are people too.

The title I found by the time-honored method of browsing through Bartletts. It comes from Shakespeares Othello, where the Moor, hearing of Desdemonas infidelity, bids farewell (III, iii, 350357) to the peace of mind he knew, paradoxically, in his military career. The mortal engines, whose rude throats / Thimmortal Joves dread clamors counterfeit, are thundering cannons, machines of war. In the context of science fiction and Lem, these engines become automata, and mortal takes on the resonance of a pun: mortal sometimes in the sense of death-dealing and mortal sometimes in the sense of subject to death. They are mortal, in other words, as we are mortal.

The robot theme was partly an excuse. A perfectly good theme, fully appropriate to the authorbut the truth was, I also wanted to have a little fun: I wanted to translate Lems eleven Fables for Robots, not because they featured a world peopled entirely by robots (a world, as it were, without a drop of protoplasm) but because they were in that same vein of playful fantasy I had enjoyed so much, both as reader and translator, in The Cyberiad and The Star Diaries. Of all the Lemsthe writer of traditional science fiction, the philosopher, the political satirist, the visionary, the moralist, and so onthe Lem I personally liked the best, and still do, was the storytelling humorist: the zany Baron Munchausen Lem.

A few remarks, by way of background, about the robot themethe cybernetic idea that so obsesses Lem.

The word cybernetic, coined in 1948, was the result of that dramatic and unexpected turn taken by twentieth-century science and technology in information processing: the so-called second industrial revolution. Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, presented cybernetics as the study of complex systems that could regulate their own performance or function (output) on the basis of received data about that performance (input)in other words, systems possessing feedback. Man was one example of this kind of system; a life-imitating automaton would be another. The system was the important thing, not the raw material; that could be biological or nonbiological. Thus the distinction between natural and artificial ceased to have relevance. An artificial man, Wiener said, would be better thought of as an analog man. Such a device would actually be an ally of man in the struggle against universal chaos, both machine and man islands of locally decreasing entropy.

Socialism, at least the scientific version of socialism, played an important role in introducing the idea of artificial man in the nineteenth century. For some, he (or it) was an ultimate ideal; for others, an ultimate nightmare. Here are two examples, pro and con, both Russian. (For some reason, the Russians, despite their archetypically endless fields, mud, peasants, beards, fleas, and backward technology, have always been very verbaland quite sophisticatedon the subject of artificial people.) In 1864, Dostoyevski, in his antiutopian Notes from the Underground, saw scientifically defined man as a soulless mechanism, a thing devoid of individuality and independence:

Science will teach man that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something in the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All these human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there will be published certain well-intentioned works in the nature of encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and noted that there will be no more deeds or adventures in the world.

A few years after socialism finally triumphed in the form of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet brave new world, one utopian intellectual by the name of Gastev was moved to write:

The mechanization, not only of gestures, not only of production methods, but of everyday thinking, coupled with extreme rationality, normalizes to a striking degree the psychology of the proletariat, gives it such a surprising anonymity, which permits the qualification of separate proletarian units as A, B, C, or as 325,075, or as 0. This tendency will next imperceptibly render individual thinking impossible, and thought will become the objective process of a whole class, with systems of psychological switches and locks. As these collectives-complexes move, they resemble the movement of objects, with individual human faces gone emotions gauged not by outcries, not by laughter, but by a manometer and a taxometer. We have the iron mechanics of a new collective, a new mass engineering that transforms the proletariat into an unheard-of social automaton.