Mortal Engines

Fourteen stories about machines, assembled and translated by Michael Kandel from across Lem's work. Eleven come from the Fables for Robots, cautionary tales told in the register of fairy stories, where the princesses and ogres have been replaced by intelligent machines. Beside them sit an Ijon Tichy story and two longer pieces, "The Hunt" and "The Mask". Together they show how far Lem was willing to follow the question of what a thinking machine would actually be, and how unsettlingly human the answer keeps turning out to be.