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Stanislaw Lem | ||
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1976, Penguin, pbk In stock, click image above to buy for £17.20 (vg condition), not including post and packing, which is Amazon UK's standard charge (£2.80 for UK buyers) Alternative online retailers to try: Click here to access our prebuilt search for this title on Alibris Click here to access our prebuilt search for this title on Biblio |
Storyline: A heavy cruiser, an armed interstellar space ship called 'Invincible' lands on the planet Regis III which seems uninhabited and bleak, to investigate the loss of its sister ship, Condor. During the investigation, the crew finds evidence of a form of quasi-life, born through evolution of autonomous, self-replicating machines, apparently left behind by an alien civilization which had inhabited the planet a very long time ago. The crew speculate that a kind of evolution must have taken place under the selection pressures of inter-robot conflict, with the only surviving form being swarms of minuscule, insect-like micromachines. Individually, or in small groups, they are quite harmless and capable of only very simple behaviour. But, when they feel threatened, they assemble into huge clouds, are able to travel at a high speed and can even to climb to the top of troposphere. These swarms display complex behavior arising from self-organization and can incapacitate any intelligent threat by a powerful surge of electromagnetic interference. This is what happened to the crew of the Condor - they suffered a complete memory erasure as a consequence of attacks from these "clouds". Invincible's crew comes to the decision that the must mount an escalating series of attacks on the perceived enemy, but this is fruitless and pointless and they come to recognize the futility of their efforts. The robotic "fauna", dubbed necrosphere are such an integral part of the planet's ecology that it would require a disruption on a planetary scale (such as a nuclear winter) to destroy them |
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1976, Avon, pbk In stock, click image above to buy for £3.85 (vg condition), not including post and packing, which is Amazon UK's standard charge (£2.80 for UK buyers) Alternative online retailers to try: Click here to access our prebuilt search for this title on Alibris Click here to access our prebuilt search for this title on Biblio |
Storyline: Far in the future, a young man wanders pointlessly in the designed destiny of a vast underground labyrinth - the final stronghold of the American Pentagon. In 'Memoirs Found in a Bathtub', Stanislaw Lem projects a future America where a Uranian virus threatens the destruction of all paper. The final stronghold of the "papyrocracy" is the hermetically sealed underground structure known only as "The Building". Its labyrinthine net of corridors is a world of complete subterfuge - with polygraphy mittens, bugged percolators, and microphone pillows. Into the clockwork precision of this vestigial Pentagon plunges a young wanderer, unaware of the self-devouring complex of espionage that is a way of life, the rhythm of The Building |
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1977, Futura, pbk In stock, click image above to buy for £2.99 (vg condition), not including post and packing, which is Amazon UK's standard charge (£2.80 for UK buyers) Alternative online retailers to try: Click here to access our prebuilt search for this title on Alibris Click here to access our prebuilt search for this title on Biblio |
Storyline: Back from space and hardly recovered from space-lag (which makes jet-lag seem positively pleasant in comparison), Tichy finds himself volunteered as a delegate to a conference on the population explosion. What does he know about the explosion, except how to help it along? Then, housed in the 116-storey conference hotel, he begins to notice odd things about his immediate environment, and finds himself uncovering a state of affairs which he would really prefer to know nothing about |
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1978, Futura, pbk In stock, click image above to buy for £3.99 (vg condition), not including post and packing, which is Amazon UK's standard charge (£2.80 for UK buyers) Alternative online retailers to try: Click here to access our prebuilt search for this title on Alibris Click here to access our prebuilt search for this title on Biblio |
Storyline: Cosmonaut, time-traveller and battered hero of The Futurological Congress, ljon Tichy makes his triumphant return, recording a dazzling array of voyages in time and space. Caught in a time-warp, pleading a shaky case for humanity and the intergalactic United Nations, spying ineptly on a planet whose robot inhabitants speak a grubby version of Chaucerian English, Tichy's diaries are bizarre, unpredictable, frantic, and sometimes deeply disturbing. About the author: author of Solaris, and one of Europe's most popular, prolific and articulate writers. His work has been translated into thirty languages |
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