I need to talk about the translator before I talk about Lem, because this book does not work in English without Michael Kandel, and I mean that literally, several people at my book group session on this one had read a different translation years ago and came away lukewarm, while the rest of us were cackling. The wordplay, the invented machine names, the pseudoscientific fairy-tale diction, all of that is Kandel finding English equivalents for jokes that shouldn’t survive translation and somehow do.

Trurl and Klapaucius, the two constructor robots at the center of every story, get into and out of trouble through what amounts to competitive engineering, and Lem uses that setup to sneak in genuine philosophy about consciousness, political systems, and the nature of love without it ever feeling like homework. “The Seventh Sally,” where Trurl builds a miniature kingdom for a deposed tyrant to rule over, is the clear high point of the collection, the kind of story that reframes everything you just read once you finish it. A few of the shorter pieces, “Altruizine” especially, felt slighter to me, more clever than substantial, but nothing here is bad, which is unusual for a collection this size.

The one real caution I’d give is the same one I’d give for a lot of story collections built around returning characters, don’t put it down mid-story. I lost the thread twice trying to read it in five-minute chunks between other things, which is entirely a me problem and not the book’s fault, but worth knowing before you start. If you liked Borges or early Calvino and want something with more robots and considerably more puns, this is exactly that. Five stars, no hedging.