Book #21

The Three Electroknights by Stanisław Lem

'What use to a being that lives beneath a sun are jewels of gas and silver stars of ice?' 

From a giant of twentieth-century science fiction, these four miniature space epics feature crazy inventors, surreal worlds, robot kings and madcap machines.

This surprised me; I knew I was getting science fiction, I knew there would be tumultuous alien races, and outer space antics, but these felt so much like fairy tales, or fables, that I was immediately taken in. Imagine a Grimm story set in a far flung galaxy - lessons and moral teachings with kings and farm girls transformed into cosmic entities.

I’d never encountered Lem before, but it’s clear his imagination is boundless. His skill lies in relating these surreal tales to our lives on this far less exciting planet. He shows us greed, power, paranoia, and even a pandemic, to help us question our own morals.

A good introduction to Lem, and thought-provoking in its extraterrestrial allegory.