Description: COGITO ERGO LEM A Hard Nut to Crack--Pas de Deux--The Blink of the Cosmic Eye PART I: BIOGRAPHY CHAPTER 1. LIFE AND TIMES A Master of Thrills and Chills--The Reading of This Book Is Good for You--Renaissance Polymath--Lemberg--Highcastle--Well Over 180--Operation Barbarossa--Jan Donabidowicz--Lvov to Cracow--Social Parasite--The Genre In Which I Write--Borges for the Space Age--A Writing Consortium--Wissenschaftskolleg--Away From the Typewriter--On the Sidelines--Encyclopedic Oracle CHAPTER 2. IN THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF BOOKS Ariadne's Thread--The New World of Adventure--The Other Inner Planet--Different Face--Allegorical Pen--SimCity--Hylas and Philonous--The Tricky Relation--The Golden Phase--A Happy Ending--Ammer-Ka--Out Yonder In Space--Dicty--The Seat of His Pants--Of Extraterrestrial Origin--A Critical Point--Cat's Cradle-- Hypertrophic Trends--Hoary Fallacy--Homo Rationis Capax--Der Vlkermord--The Thanatos Syndrome--After the Last Goosebump Has Vanished--The Entire Human Race--Trompe l'Oeil--LEM!--My Farewell--Moratorium--The World According to Lem--Man and Machine PART II: ESSAYS CHAPTER 3. GAME, SET, LEM Ariadne's Thread--Cold War Hysteria--The Third Pentagon--Nuclear-age Quixote--The Lottery in Babylon--I-Guess-What-You-Guess-What-I-Guess--Barnaby the Scrivener--Whoops! Apocalypse!--The Mission--Minimax/Maximin--The Mission Game--Subjective Rationality--The Collusion Game--Dead Men Don't Tell Lies--An Allegorical Everyman--The Decipherment of Linear B CHAPTER 4. BETRIZATION IS THE WORST SOLUTION... EXCEPT FOR ALL OTHERS Time Machine--Word Become Flesh--Defanging the Human Beast--La bte humaine--The Hobbesian Premise--It Can't Happen Here--50-50--Bennett, Trimaldi and Zakharov--The Technological Grail--Less Than Human--Chihuahuas in Eden--Nietzschean Superman--Droids, Borgs, and Bots--One for the Old Generation, One for the New--D-i-s-a-s-t-e-r CHAPTER 5. ERRARE HUMANUM EST The Invincible Has Landed--Models of Inquiry--From Literature to Biterature--The Alien as Alien--Knowledge and Metaknowledge--Regis III--Part of the Landscape--Nature Plays Fair--Ch. I., Ch. Ph., Ch. T., Ch. B.--Omnia Vincit Armor--Dictyostelium discoideum--Overzealous Carpenters--The Infallible CHAPTER 6. A BEACHBOOK FOR INTELLECTUALS A Novel of Ideas--Gun for Hire--Whodunit with Probability as the Butler--The Devil's Parody of the Movies--The Locked Room--Terrorism Is Not a Hardware Issue--Good Cop, Bad Cop--The Garden of Earthly Delights--You, Me, Pulsars, and the Page You're Reading--Ladykillers--Hero or Not?--Runny Nose--A Writer for All Reasons PART III: CODA CHAPTER 7. FIASCO You'll See the Quintans--The War of the Worlds--Intelligent and Electronic--Let's Do It Our Way--Mark Tempe--The Digla--Crystal Ball--To Make a Long Story Short CHAPTER 8. HAPPY END OF THE WORLD! The Blink of an Eye--Glow-In-the-Dark Monkeys--Cerebroproteinal Neuroprocessor--Encyclopedia of Ignorance APPENDIX. STANISLAW LEM: BOOKS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

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