[I find Stanislaw Lem] a master of utterly terminal pessimism, appalled by all that an insane humanity may yet survive to do.

We are pollution.

He wants us to feel no pity for Homo sapiens, and so excludes appealing women and children from his tales. The adult males he shows us are variously bald, arthritic, sharp-kneed, squinting, jowly, rotten toothed, and so on, and surely ludicrous—save for his space crewmen, who are as expendable as pawns in a chess game. We do not get to know anybody well enough to like him. If he dies, he dies.

Nowhere in the works of Jonathan Swift, even, can I find a more loathsome description of a human being than this one, taken from Lem's "Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal," one of a dozen fables for the Cybernetic Age in his The Cyberiad …: "Its every step was like the...