Mortal Engines : Penguin Modern Classics - Stanislaw Lem

Mortal Engines

By: Stanislaw Lem

Paperback | 14 November 2016 | Edition Number 1

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Mortal Engines is a selection of the best of Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary miniature space epics, chosen by his heroic translator Michael Kandel, who has somehow battled through Lem's jokes, parodies, fabricated technological terms and unreliable robots and brilliantly converted them from Polish into English. Encompassing his Fables for Robots and stories from his protagonists Ijon Tichy (from The Star Diaries) and Pirx the Pilot, this is a highly entertaining but also deeply alarming view of the glories and absurdities of Outer Space.

'He was a robot-hypochondriac. On his squeaking cart he carried a complete set of spare parts.'

A freighter pilot leads a manhunt across the Moon for a robot gone berserk; a shapeshifting assassin falls in love with the man she's programmed to kill; a paranoid King converts his kingdom into his artificial mind, but his dreams rebel. These stories range from surreal fables that satirically turn the fairy tale on its head, to longer works including the man vs. robot thriller, 'The Hunt', and possibly fiction's strangest love story, 'The Mask'.

In Mortal Engines Stanislaw Lem lays bare humanity's clash with machines, masterfully exploring science fiction's furthest frontiers.

About the Author

Stanislaw Lem was a Polish author best known for his 1961 science fiction novel Solaris. He also wrote several other SF works including Eden (1959) and His Master's Voice (1968). Lem's books have been translated into over 40 languages and sold over 45 million copies. He was awarded numerous honours for his writing, including the City of Kraków's Prize in Literature, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Lem died in 2006, aged 84.

Industry Reviews
A giant of 20th-century science fiction * The Guardian *
Stanislaw Lem was for 50 years Poland's premier intellectual of the imagination -- John Clute * The Independent *

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