Mortal Engines

By Stanislaw Lem

I read this over the start of May, 2025. It’s a collection of short stories by Lem on robots, the ‘mortal engines’ of the title. Lem’s robots are quite distinct from the gleaming metal contraptions you might expect from movies, or the logic-driven machines of Asimov. They are, perhaps, closer to what we consider cybernetics, in that they are intelligent inorganic beings, with emotions and depth and philosophy, and yet inarguably alien.

These stories are unutterably beautiful. It’s impossible to read passages of his work and not be struck by vivid imaginings of their settings. Consider, for example,

The gems, cut and ground from frozen gases, added color to their eternal night, in which burned - like imprisoned spirits - the thin polar lights, resembling enchanted nebulae in blocks of crystal. More than one cosmic conqueror wished to possess these riches, for all Cryonia was visible at the greatest distance, its facets twinkling like a jewel rotated slowly on black velvet.

Or,

But ten miles beneath the surface unfolded a region of exuberant industry; the Enterites, hollowing out their mother planet, filled its interior with crystal gardens and cities of silver and gold; they raised up, inside-out, houses in the shape of dodecahedrons and icosahedrons, and also hyperboloid palaces, in whose shining cupolas you could see yourself magnified twenty thousand times, as in a hall of giants […] they pumped light into the heart of the planet, filtering it now through emeralds, now diamonds, and now rubies, and thanks to this they had their choice of dawn, or noon, or rosy dusk […] they even had their own sky, where in webs of molybdenum and vanadium flashed spinels and rock crystal, which they cultivated in fire.

These stories are almost like a higher version of Star Wars, in that they are fantasy stories couched in scientific language, and yet for all that they have a depth of philosophy about the nature of intelligence and self-expression.

A brief summary of the stories:

• The Three Electroknights, telling the tale of three metal knights who attempt to steal beautiful jewels from a frozen planet, and their exploits and failures
• Uranium Earpieces about a Uranium despot, who is overthrown through the secretive build-up of a critical mass
• How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface, where a series of robots go after a human who stole a robot’s heart, and the one who succeeded
• Two Monsters, in which a horrifying constructed organic entity wages war on a cybernetic civilisation
• The White Death about a crystalline, robotic planet being devastated by a spore of mould
• How Microx and Gigant Made the Universe Expand, a Just-So-like tale about the creation of the Universe
• Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon, about a constructed intelligence that escapes its creator, and how it is eventually defeated (it’s a dragon on the moon)
• The Advisers of King Hydrops, in which a king desires a new son and asks his advisers to design his mind, upon which they develop schemes within schemes to design the mind so they are favoured above all else
• Automatthew’s Friend, where a robot, being stranded on an island, is told by the miniature adviser in his ear that the next logical step is to commit suicide
• King Globares and the Sages, where a King asks his Sages to entertain him with stories, and threatens to kill the ones who don’t
• The Tale of King Gnuff, in which a robot king extends his body into an entire city, whereupon his far-flung regions slip into dreamlike states where he has nightmares of revolution, and becomes unable to tell what is real or not
• The Sanatorium of Dr Vliperdius, about a series of robotic maladies and afflictions, including a robot hyperchondriac, who carries around an entire set of spare parts on a trolley
• The Hunt, the most I, Robot-like one of the collection, of a man chasing a machine on the moon
• The Mask, the single best story in the collection, of a robotic assassin who is initally clothed in the skin of a young woman, and doubts whether she loves her target or wishes to kill her

That last story has a moment of beautiful grace, where the robot, in confession to a priest, is told that she is his sister, equal in the eyes of Providence, because she is consumed by doubt.

They’re sci-fi in the best vein of the genre, particularly because he was writing in a period before we knew much more about atomics or cosmology, and so he can write sentences which wouldn’t even occur to anyone with a modern scientific understanding, because they are so antithetical to everything we know: about the burning of star intelligence, about shelling atoms like peanuts, about the features on the moon. They’re like Italo Calvino’s The Distance of the Moon, combined with Asimov’s robotics and atomics. Really good.

P.S. I love the title. I never really considered the full heft of the word ‘mortal’, cousin of ‘corporal’, and ‘vital’: relating or pertaining to death. These engines are dangerous and alive, because they might cause death and die.