I like to consider myself open-minded, rejecting the parochial and artificial boundaries between genres like 'scifi' and 'litfic', but I gotta say, if a book spends over 400 pages telling us about a space mission to make first contact with mysterious aliens that might possibly be doing a time travel, only for the mission to whimper out in the depths of space, the astronauts having learned nothing beyond coming to terms with their own interiority, it's defo a litfic.
I absolutely loved "The Cyberiad" and I started reading it to a girl I was dating.
I don't know if you've ever read aloud from "How Trurl Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg" where the first four pages is literally just a travelogue of how to get to where they are going in this weird hallucinogenic space world, but she didn't let me finish to the part where it turned awesome.
@mozz@bookstodon@ergative "The Cyberiad" is my absolute favourite! Lem is capable of being very dry and boring (no disrespect, his boring novels are still masterpieces), but "The Cyberiad" is such a witty, sparkling romp. It reads like Douglas Adams at his best.
@mozz@bookstodon@ergative What I didn't realise until a couple of years ago is that "The Cyberiad" is rooted in the futurology and science of the 1960s, such as Shannon's information theory and Ashby's cybernetics. Lem's "Summa Technologiae", his book of techno-philosophy, reads like a roadmap for the next 60 years of science fiction and certainly lays the groundwork for all the ideas he explores in "The Cyberiad".
@ergative yeah, doesn’t sound like that was straight scifi. I was so mad when Alias suddenly shifted from a spy show to a bizarre scifi/fantasy thing. Both genres are great but that’s not what I signed up for when I started watching.