Maxima Library

Michael Kandel occasionally translates science fiction from Polish (Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad), occasionally acquires science fiction for Harcourt Brace and Company (Kage Baker’s In the Garden of Iden), and occasionally writes his own science fiction (Panda Ray, St. Martin’s Press). He works as an editor at the Modern Language Association.

These fourteen science fiction stories reveal Lem’s fascination with artificial intelligence and demonstrate just how surprisingly human sentient machines can be.

“Astonishing is not too strong a word for these tales”

(Wall Street Journal).

Nest of Worlds is the first novel to appear in English from Polish science fiction master Marek S. Huberath. A metafictional adventure through a dystopia that owes as much to Borges, Saramago, and even Thomas More as it does to Stanislaw Lem, Nest of Worlds is a meditation on the narrative nature of reality, the resilience of love, and an inquiry into the darkest aspects of the human psyche and the organization of civilization.

Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. “The heart of my Europe,” Stasiuk tells us, “beats in Sokolow, Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna.”

Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi — loose wires hanging from the dashboard — by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, “simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky.”

A brilliant tour of Europe’s dark underside — travel writing at its very best.

A brilliantly crafted collection of stories from celebrated science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem

Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. Over the course of their adventures in The Cyberiad, they travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their unsuspecting employers. Playfully written, and 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.

“From Poland we have ‘Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay Noo.’ by Marek S. Huberath, a story of monsters and mutants in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, which does a remarkable job of humanizing its characters while never shying away from their deformations.”

From

The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Science Fiction Masterpieces from the Continent

, 2007