Introductions

"The Invincible" is a tailor-made screenplay for a great battle film telling the story of the clash of Earthly Astronauts with a spontaneously created population of microautomata destroying all intelligence. But it is mechanical devices – also those created by man – that are programmed for a reflexive fight until self destruction.  Only beings that reason can understand the strangeness and free themselves from the fatalism of destruction.

"The Futurological Congress" is one of the most daringly told stories about Ijon Tichy. Tichy is invited to a futorological convention in a Latin America republic shaken by revolution. Eventually Tichy is transferred to a world where in a grotesque convolution both the utopian and anti-utopian visions of the future have been realized. Mockery of futorology – as always with Lem – is accompanied by serious reflection about human disposition for discord with reality.

At first glance "The Chain of Chance" is a detective story – a series of mysterious deaths of people visiting  Naples' baths is examined. The protagonist, an American Astronaut, prematurely retired because of allergies, tries to solve this riddle. He experiences a number of extraordinary adventures but eventually the greatest of them all is the adventure of the mind having to find its way in the chaos of the contemporary world.

"Golem XIV" is one of Lem's most far-fetched intellectual adventures: for the purpose of this book Lem constructs the character of a supercomputer of the future that infinitely overshadows human intelligence. Golem, whose history we follow from its birth until his inexplicable departure from the human world, not only mercilessly criticizes humanity, claims of our culture and delusions about allegedly refining mechanisms of evolution, but also creates a breathtaking vision of further development of artificial intelligence – beyond our cosmos and cognition available within its limits.