"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
"Dialogues is important now because it describes (or described, rather, more than half a century ago you can almost hear Lem's slow hand-clapping from the Beyond) all the ways we do not comprehend the world we have made... Peter Butko s translations of the Dialogues, and the revisionist essays Lem added to the 1971 second edition, are as witty and playful as Lem s allusive Polish prose demands. His endnotes are practically a book in themselves (and an entertaining one too). Translated so well, Lem needs no explanation, no contextualisation, no excuse-making." The Times (UK)
Preface to the Second Edition vii Dialogues I 3 II 21 III 31 IV 47 V 63 VI 99 VII 115 VIII 163 Supplement 1: The Dialogues Sixteen Years Later Lost Illusions, or From Intellectronics to Informatics 193 Applied Cybernetics: An Example from Sociology 219 Supplement 2: Additional Essays The Ethics of Technology and the Technology of Ethics 241 Biology and Values 283 Translator's Notes 335
Stanis aw Lem (1921-2006), a writer called "worthy of the Nobel Prize" by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold more than thirty million copies.
