Dialogues

The first English translation of a nonfiction work by Stanislaw Lem, which was conceived under the spell of cybernetics in 1957 and updated in 1971.

In 1957, Stanislaw Lem published Dialogues, a book conceived under the spell of cybernetics, as he wrote in the preface to the second edition. Mimicking the form of Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Lem's original dialogue was an attempt to unravel the then-novel field of cybernetics. It was a testimony, Lem wrote later, to the almost limitless cognitive optimism he felt upon his discovery of cybernetics. This is the first English translation of Lem's Dialogues, including the text of the first edition and the later essays added to the second edition in 1971.

For the second edition, Lem chose not to revise the original. Recognizing the naivete of his hopes for cybernetics, he constructed a