Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanislaw Lem, nine of them never before published in English. Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanislaw Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first new book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought provoking and scathingly funny. Written from 1956 to 1993, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, The Truth, a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; The Journal appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of infinite universes--until, in a classic Lem twist, it turns out to be no such thing; in An Enigma, beings debate whether offspring can be created without advanced degrees and design templates. Other stories feature a computer that can predict the future by 137 seconds, matter-destroying spores, a hunt in which the prey is a robot, and an electronic brain eager to go on the lam. These stories are peak Lem, exploring ideas and themes that resonate throughout his writing.

A classic work of reportage about the Katyń Massacre during World War II by a soldier who narrowly escaped the atrocity himself. In 1941, when Germany turned against the USSR, tens of thousands of Poles--men, women, and children who were starving, sickly, and impoverished--were released from Soviet prison camps and allowed to join the Polish army being formed in the south of Russia. One of the survivors who made the difficult winter journey was the painter and reserve officer J zef Czapski. General Anders, the army's commander in chief, assigned Czapski the task of receiving the Poles arriving for military training; gathering accounts of what their fates had been; organizing education, culture, and news for the soldiers; and, most important, investigating the disappearance of thousands of missing Polish officers. Blocked at every level by the Soviet authorities, Czapski was unaware that in April 1940 the officers had been shot dead in the Katyn forest, a crime for which Soviet Russia never accepted responsibility. Czapski's account of the years following his release from the camp, the formation of the Polish army, and its arduous trek through Central Asia and the Middle East to fight on the Italian front is rich in anecdotes about the suffering of the Poles in the USSR, quotations from the Polish poetry that sustained him and his companions, encounters with literary gures (including Anna Akhmatova), and philosophical thoughts about the relationships between nationalities.