The Truth and Other Stories

De: Stanislaw Lem

Narrado por: David Aaron Baker

Twelve stories by science-fiction master Stanislaw Lem, nine of them never before published in English.

Of these 12 short stories by science-fiction master Stanislaw Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as anyone could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life-forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought-provoking and scathingly funny.

Written from 1956 to 1993, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, "The Truth", a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; "The Journal" appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of infinite universes—until, in a classic Lem twist, it turns out to be no such thing; in "An Enigma", beings debate whether offspring can be created without advanced degrees and design templates. Other stories feature a computer that can predict the future by 137 seconds, matter-destroying spores, a hunt in which the prey is a robot, and an electronic brain eager to go on the lam. These stories are peak Lem, exploring ideas and themes that resonate throughout his writing.

©2022 Stanislaw Lem (P)2022 Recorded Books

Some of the best Lem

I am a gigantic fan of Lem; The Cyberiad is my favorite book of all time. This collection is really exceptional and a great testament to his outstanding creative mind. Several of these stories will stick with me for the rest of my life for sure.

The author reads without any passion

The stories are amazing as almost all of Stanislaw Lem's stories are, but the author reads slowly and without passion, giving a lusterless flat affected patena to every tale.

Fantastic

Some of Lem’s best work. Mostly mysterious, heady explorations of what artificial intelligence might be like from the inside. The philosopher in Lem comes through strong in theories of consciousness and time set within imaginative and technically rigorous fictional frameworks. Extremely timely in 2025, a welcome relief to masses of misinformed AI hype.

Excellent!

I loved it! It's so nice to have new Lem translated. He is truly one of the greatest sci-fi authors to have ever lived. These stories run the gamut of his interests, from adventurous sci-fi, to something approaching cosmic horror, to philosophy and futurism. I can't recommend it enough. And the reader did a great job too. Very engaging.

Predicting and explaining chatgpt 60 years ago

I love Lem. Douglas Adam's meets aldous Huxley with a sprinkle of Philip k Dick spread on a plate of either Clarke or Stephen Baxter.

Highly recommended to stay sane in times like this.

Great Book of Stories

Fantastic stories. Important subjects such as consciousness, what is life, artificial intelligence and other told from and interesting angle with wit, imagination, and sense of humor in a couple of stories.

A lost treasure chest.

It’s a great day when a new book of Lem stories appears. Let’s have more great days.

“The Misery [and Mystery] of Human Existence”

The Truth and other Stories (2021) collects twelve sf short stories by Stanislaw Lem ranging from 1956 to 1993. Considering their historical era, mostly the late 1950s and early 1960s, the stories are consistently innovative. Lem explores the limits of human understanding (of ourselves, our technology, the universe, the other, and so on). His stories feature AIs, cyborgs, scientific breakthroughs, aliens, and the like, usually in order to demonstrate our inability to understand or to be understood, because different kinds of beings are limited by their own senses and environments and world views, etc.

Here is an annotated list of the stories.

--“The Hunt” (late 1950s) is a devastating story displaying human cruelty and reminding me of PKD. The anonymous cyborg protagonist is on the run while being hunted for sport by humans with dogs and high-tech devices. Rather than escape or survival, the best he can hope for is to prolong his life another hour or two, when he gets what appears to be some unexpected assistance from a twelve-year-old girl.

--In “Rat in a Labyrinth” (1956) two men investigate what they at first believe is a meteor landing in the wilds of Ottawa. They soon find themselves in the bowels of an alien spacecraft—or is it a labyrinth or a giant alien body? Is the alien (or aliens) trying to communicate with the men or trying to study them or to play with them? Lem’s pet theme about the difficulty (if not impossibility) of humans and aliens mutually understanding each other.

--“Invasion from Aldeberan (1959) is a black comedy of alien invasion, highlighting the difficulty (if not impossibility) of aliens understanding each other. Short and sweet and full of opaque sf jargon to describe the Aldeberan technology, science, and world view.

--“The Friend” (1959) lasts too long but is redeemed by an uncanny, scary sequence near the end narrated from the point of view of a very other, very ambitious electronic consciousness. What would you do if you were a young man in a boring volunteer job at your local short wave radio club when a strangely speaking, emaciated middle aged man comes in and asks to borrow 50’ of electrical wire and twelve plugs?

--Another story about incomprehensible alien contact, “The Invasion” (1959) reads a little like if the alien entity in Solaris came to earth. The authorities, including the military and the scientific community, cannot explain the coming to earth of alien pear-shaped glass-like UFOs that kill anyone who touches or is touched by them and then reproduce simulacra of the victims. Were they spacecraft or individual aliens? Why did they come? By chance? Who sent them, if not themselves? What does it all mean? Their advent should make us rethink our own existence in the universe.

--In “Darkness and Mildew” (1959), humanity’s predeliction for creating ever more formidable weapons comes home to roost in an eccentric man’s apartment, with proliferating black dots with invisible spheres around them changing from cutely mysterious to terrifyingly overwhelming. Despite his “experiments” on the things, the man never really understands where they came from or what they are.

--“The Hammer” (1959) is an absorbing, moving, and scary story, in which a solitary astronaut has been sent on a LONG space voyage with a ship full of “automata” (AIs), one of which becomes his conversation partner and, it seems, friend, as they discuss daydreams, dreams, sleep, human beings, senses, memories, and the like. All seems to be (too) flawlessly easy and safe, but something else may be going on behind the scenes. A proto Hal and Dave Bowman situation.

--“Lymphater’s Formula” (1961) is a weird story narrated in second person about an old crackpot scientist who is telling a mathematician (“you”) he met at a book store about how, twenty-seven years ago, he managed after eleven years of nonstop research and expense (focusing on some ants who knew how to do things without having learned it or inherited it) to create a silicon-gel brain that was the next step in evolution, rendering humanity superfluous. What would you do if you’d created such a thing?

--“The Journal” (1962) “of an electronic god” examining its own enigma for millions of years lasts a little too long but is weirdly cool. Lem writes here in the voice of a perfectly omniscient and omnipotent god-like superbeing who has created billions of cosmoses inhabited by a variety of sentient beings from its sense of boredom and its desire for imperfection, with its concomitant amused reactions to the varied misconceptions of its creations.

--“The Truth” (1964) is a scary story about three physicists who create a “solar earthworm,” an extraordinarily destructive plasma being that probably unintentionally kills his colleagues and leaves him confined to a mental institution while receiving repeated skin grafts. Was it alive? I don’t know. Is the sun sentient? I don’t know. Another story about the limits of human understanding about the universe and the limits of our ability to communicate with alien life forms—even ones we create.

--In “One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Seconds (1976), a news service editor discovers something odd about the IBM supercomputer his organization uses to generate news stories: when disconnected from the teleprinter cables that feed it information to make the news, it hesitates for 137 seconds before apparently predicting what will happen next with uncanny accuracy. How is it managing to do that? After all, a computer is only a machine like a lamp, right? An amusing, absorbing, almost ominous story.

--In “An Enigma” (1994), Lem imagines a future in which robot theologians debate the heretical theory that at some point in the distant past “soft” beings created them before destroying themselves.

Overall, I really liked the stories, which, although not as profound as Solaris or as comical as The Futurological Congress, are impressive in their own right.

And David Aaron Baker reads the audiobook just right.