Recommended, especially for some Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy humor taken to an Umberto Eco level. After reading Solaris, this book gives a very different experience of what the author can do.

I laughed out loud a few times and was surprised by the light and comic touch.

I found the book entertaining, though sometimes Lem goes overboard in making up words or being extremely silly. Lem satirizes ideas from science, philosophy, and literature. The comedy has the wit of Jonathan Swift and the whimsy of Douglas Adams and the intellectual bent of Umberto Eco. They encounter strange worlds (like the square planet with a square sun) and even stranger requests. They travel all over the galaxy, like Aeneas in The Aeneid (hence this book's title). Trurl is usually the one to deliver, being both more egotistical and more gullible than Klapaucius. Rulers want ultimate power (with which they might oppress their people and dodge paying the robots) or fantastic entertainment. The two robots have many comic misadventures as they try to satisfy customers and to make the customers pay for their services. Often, those others are government officials or royal personages, the sort of beings who can pay handsomely for the work. They are robots that build other machines for their own entertainment or at the requests of others. The English translation of Summa thus invites new and rich interpretations of The Cyberiad, perhaps Lem's most well-known work in the Anglophone world.This book is a series of short stories featuring two 'constructors' named Trurl and Klapaucius. Ideas mentioned but scorned in Summa as being too much like ungrounded sf speculation form the bases for several of The Cyberiad's stories, appearing there as witty satires that explore the ethical, cultural, and linguistic significance of scientific and pseudoscientific ideas mentioned in Summa. The same kind of mirror relationship is apparent in the conceptual structures of the two texts. It is as if the strain of writing a text that Lem hoped would establish his credibility as a serious thinker in the international scientific community registered stylistically as ponderous prose, creating a kind of inverted mirror text to the linguistic creativity and freedom on display in The Cyberiad. Whereas the prose of Summa is serious to the point of being stilted and awkward (according to Summa's translator), the language of The Cyberiad is pyrotechnic, with allusions, puns, neologisms, metaphors, and alliterations abounding. Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae (1964), published for the first time in English nearly fifty years after its first publication in Polish, is of interest today primarily for the ideas Lem formulated that have not yet been taken up in a serious way, and for the light it sheds on his fiction, especially The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, published a year after Summa.

The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem