Mortal Engines by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stanislaw Lem, arguably the greatest science fiction writer of all time and certainly the most widely read sci-fi author, was the favorite writer of my youth. I believe I have read everything that he published, most of it in Polish. I have also reread many of his books in English translation and have reviewed five of them on Goodreads, among them two unquestionable five-star books ( A Perfect Vacuum and His Master's Voice). Also, let's not forget that Lem was much, much more than just a sci-fi writer. He was a philosopher, futurologist, humanist, literary critic, and popularizer of science. His 1960s and 1970s visions of the future predicted the ascent and ubiquity of AI.

Mortal Engines is a compilation of short stories; 11 of them have been taken from Lem's famous Fables of Robots, the other three, including the magnificent The Mask, from other sources. The Fables stories are just like the "regular" fairy tales, but they are set in a world populated exclusively by android robots. Each of them is equipped with advanced AI so that their behavior is basically the same as human. The AI is more advanced than ChatGPT, but it is amazing how accurate Lem was in 1964, when the stories were published, in predicting the capabilities of AI.

The fables are very funny, and I exploded in laughter many times reading the stories. How about "Tikcuff!!" the battle cry of the Triodius race? The universe of the Fables is strictly physics-based (let's take an example from the second story: "...he knew ways of threading photons on a string, producing thereby necklaces of light..."), yet the prose is creative and charming. Also, one has to give the highest praise to Michael Kandel, the translator. I have been able to read a few paragraphs in the original Polish and then in his translation, and nothing of the original style, mood, and beauty has been lost.

The story The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius features Ijon Tichy, the incomparable space explorer and traveler, first introduced in Lem's The Star Diaries. The intrepid star pilot Pirx (known from the popular Tales of Pirx the Pilot) is the protagonist of the engrossing action story The Hunt.

Finally, the outstanding The Mask, one of the best short stories I have ever read. The protagonist is an artificial yet sentient being, and the plot involves a metamorphosis (I am unable to explain more as it would spoil the plot, but let me at least point out that the word 'metamorphosis' itself is a hint). The story is pretty deep and invites multiple interpretations, but the main philosophical question it raises is the issue of free will in artificial sentient beings. A superb work of literature, beautifully written in a sort of Gothic romance style. Again, the translation is truly perfect.

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