A charming, mind-bending and anarchic book of imagined civilizations

'Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit to...'

Trurl and Klapaucius are 'constructors' - they travel around the universe creating machines of astonishing inventiveness and power and visiting a bewildering variety of violent, peculiar and morose civilizations. The Cyberiad is oddly reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. Charming, mind-bending and anarchic, it is perhaps Lem's greatest work. This edition includes all of Daniel Mroz's hallucinatory original illustrations.

Stanislaw Lem may be the most famous science fiction writer you've never heard of ... [this] collection of stories may go some way to redressing that ... The linguistic inventiveness is extraordinary ... Lem has created a curious world in which robots and rockets rub shoulders with kings, dragons, witches and pirates * Independent on Sunday *
A Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age * New York Times *

Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) was born in Lviv, then part of Poland. He is probably the most original and influential European science-fiction writer since H.G. Wells. Best known in the West for Tarkovsky's film of his novel Solaris, Lem wrote novels and stories that have been published all over the world. He is credited with anticipating in his writing artificial reality, e-books and nano-technology. His most famous works include The Cyberiad, Mortal Engines, The Star Diaries, The Futurological Congress, Tales of Pirx the Pilot and Solaris.