Ijon Tichy travels undercover to a robot world, joining an organization to clean up world history thru time travel.

Things go crazy immediately. His spaceship runs into gravitational vortices at relativistic speeds, resulting in massive time anomalies. It may be a blessing in disguise. The reason he couldn’t get out of the way was that a meteor had shattered the drive regulator & rudder. He could no longer steer his ship. He had a spare rudder, but couldn’t install it. It was a two-man job & he was alone. So when other versions of him start appearing, all he should need do is team up with one of them, fix the rudder & leave the gravitational vortex field.

After that gets straightened out, he goes undercover. A ship’s computer has mutineed & started its own colony, reproducing itself on a previously uninhabited planet. The insurance company paid the shipowner’s claim, & now believes that the ship, it’s computer & all its progeny belong to them. Tichy disguises himself as a robot & goes to investigate.

On another voyage, he heads to a planet where the government irrigation agency has irrigated beyond all need & refused to give up power. People live in water & are jailed in dry cells if they violate the love of water.

After his modern voyages, he comes back from 2166 to recruit himself as a member of THEOHIPPIP, the Teleotelechronistic-Historical Engineering to Optimize the Hyperputerized Implementation of Paleological Programming & Interplanetary Planning. History is in a mess because of all the time travelers. THEOHIPPIP's mission is: “For World History to be regulated, cleaned up, straightened out, adjusted & perfected, all in accordance with the principles of humanitarianism, rationalism & general esthetics. You can understand, surely, that with such a shambles & slaughterhouse in one’s family tree it’s awkward to go calling on important cosmic civilizations!...If need be, alterations will be made even before the rise of man, so that he arises better.”

In this bold and controversial examination of the past, present, and future of science fiction, Lem informs the raging debate over the literary merit of the genre with ten arch, incisive, provocative essays.

Reflections on my life --
On the structural analysis of science fiction --
Science fiction : a hopeless case --
with exceptions --
Philip K. Dick : a visionary among the Charlatans --
The time-travel story and related matters of science-fiction structuring --
Metafantasia : the possibilities of science fiction --
Cosmology and science fiction --
Todorov's fantastic theory of literature --
Unitas oppositorum : the prose of Jorge Luis Borges --
About the Strugatsky's Roadside picnic

These wickedly authentic introductions to twenty-first-century books preface tomes on teaching English to bacteria, using animated X-rays to create "pornograms," and analyzing computer-generated literature through the science of "bitistics." "Lem, a science fiction Bach, plays in this book a googleplex of variations on his basic themes" (New York Times Book Review). Translated by Marc E. Heine. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community. Translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose.

Translation of: Wielkość urojona.
"A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book."
"...this English-language edition ... also incorporates 'Lecture XLIII--About Itself' and 'Afterword,' which first appeared in Golem XIV (Wydawnictwo Literackie, Cracow, 1981)"--T.p. verso.

In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem presents a collection of book reviews of nonexistent works of literature--works that, in many cases, could not possibly be written. Embracing postmodernism's "games for games' sake" ethos, Lem joins the contest with hilarious and grotesque results, lampooning the movement's self-indulgence and exploiting its mannerisms.

Beginning with a review of his own book, Lem moves on to tackles (or create pastiches of) the French new novel, James Joyce, pornography, authorless writing, and Dostoevsky, while at the same time ranging across scientific topics, from cosmology to the pervasiveness of computers. The result is a metafictional tour de force by one of the world's most popular writers.

Ijon Tichy is an ordinary space traveler whose extraordinary curiosity leads him to the very fringes of science. Their plans are grandiose, the bargains they make too often Faustian, for the ends these scientists pursue concern humanity's greatest and most ancient immortality, artificial intelligence, and top-of-the-line consumer items.

By turns philosophical, satirical, and absurd, Lem's stories follow Ijon's adventures as both an observer of--and participant in--strange experiments. Faulty time machines, intelligent washing machines, suicidal potatoes--Ijon Tichy navigates them all with common sense and in so doing shows why he endures as one of Lem's most popular characters.

Twenty-five hundred scientists have been herded into an isolated site in the Nevada desert. A neutrino message of extraterrestrial origin has been received and the scientists, under the surveillance of the Pentagon, labor on His Master's Voice, the secret program set up to decipher the transmission. Among them is Peter Hogarth, an eminent mathematician. When the project reaches a stalemate, Hogarth pursues clandestine research into the classified TX Effect--another secret breakthrough. But when he discovers, to his horror, that the TX Effect could lead to the construction of a fission bomb, Hogarth decides such knowledge must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the military.

A playful, witty, reflective memoir of childhood by the science fiction master Stanisław Lem.

With Highcastle, Stanisław Lem offers a memoir of his childhood and youth in prewar Lvov. Reflective, artful, witty, playful—“I was a monster,” he observes ruefully—this lively and charming book describes a youth spent reading voraciously (he was especially interested in medical texts and French novels), smashing toys, eating pastries, and being terrorized by insects. Often lonely, the young Lem believed that he could communicate with household objects—perhaps anticipating the sentient machines in the adult Lem's novels. Lem reveals his younger self to be a dreamer, driven by an unbridled imagination and boundless curiosity.

In the course of his reminiscing, Lem also ponders the nature of memory, innocence, and the imagination. Highcastle (the title refers to a nearby ruin) offers the portrait of a writer in his formative years.

A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.

In the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanisław Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines—perhaps the survivors of a “robot war.” Rohan and his men are forced to confront the classic quandary: what course of action can humanity take once it has reached the limits of its knowledge? In The Invincible, Lem has his characters confront the inexplicable and the bizarre: the problem that lies just beyond analytical reach.

A brilliantly funny collection of stories for the next age, from the celebrated author of Solaris. Ranging from the prophetic to the surreal, these stories demonstrate Stanislaw Lem's vast talent and remarkable ability to blend meaning and magic into a wholly entertaining and captivating work.

Translation of Powrót z gwiazd.
"A Helen and Kurt Wolff book."

Translation of Pamiętnik znaleziony w wannie.

A young officer at Scotland Yard is assigned to investigate a puzzling and eerie case of missing-and apparently resurrected-bodies. To unravel the mystery, Lt. Gregory consults scientific, philosophical, and theological experts, who supply him with a host of theories and clues.

A six-man crew crash-lands on Eden, fourth planet from another sun. The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger, and everywhere there are images of death. The crew's attempt to communicate with this civilization leads to violence and to a cruel truth—cruel precisely because it is so human.

It is 1939; the Nazis have occupied Poland. A young doctor disturbed by the fate of Poland joins the staff of an insane asylum only to find a world of pain and absurdity to match that outside.

Translation of Dzienniki gwiazdowe.