The Truth and Other Stories

“The Truth and Other Stories, a new collection of Lem’s previously untranslated stories, shows that even the ‘scatterings from his workshop,’ as Kim Stanley Robinson puts it in his foreword, could outstrip a typical writer’s lifetime of creation.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[A] brilliant introduction to Lem’s science fiction. In its pages one can find him testing out multiple styles and themes, from the quirky to the seriously philosophical. All its tales are incubators, growing and playing with ideas that would eventually become the mainstay of his novels and treatises… More than half a century ago, Stanislaw Lem gazed into the future and saw, rather than rockets or ray guns, the evolution of the synthetic mind and the humans creating it. Thanks to these translations, English-language readers can share in his vision—long after he first imagined the internet and its thinking machines.” —The Wall Street Journal

“[Lem’s] tales from the period [the late 1950s]—several of which have been adeptly translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in M.I.T. Press’s new collection The Truth and Other Stories—feature silicon minds that can’t be distinguished from human ones, extraterrestrials with an uncanny interest in mimesis, and the idea that our universe was created by imperfect gods as a sort of joke.” —The New Yorker

“As our world changes faster than we can make sense of it, Lem’s prescient imagination shows the power of science fiction for peering into the future.” —Scientific American