| Sumario: | Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae (1964), published for the first time in English nearly fifty years after its first publication in Polish, is of interest today primarily for the ideas Lem formulated that have not yet been taken up in a serious way, and for the light it sheds on his fiction, especially The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, published a year after Summa. Whereas the prose of Summa is serious to the point of being stilted and awkward (according to Summa's translator), the language of The Cyberiad is pyrotechnic, with allusions, puns, neologisms, metaphors, and alliterations abounding. It is as if the strain of writing a text that Lem hoped would establish his credibility as a serious thinker in the international scientific community registered stylistically as ponderous prose, creating a kind of inverted mirror text to the linguistic creativity and freedom on display in The Cyberiad. The same kind of mirror relationship is apparent in the conceptual structures of the two texts. Ideas mentioned but scorned in Summa as being too much like ungrounded sf speculation form the bases for several of The Cyberiad's stories, appearing there as witty satires that explore the ethical, cultural, and linguistic significance of scientific and pseudoscientific ideas mentioned in Summa. The English translation of Summa thus invites new and rich interpretations of The Cyberiad, perhaps Lem's most well-known work in the Anglophone world.
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