By Stanisław Lem
This is a book of short fiction. It’s wonderfully poetic stuff, with heady sci-fi and fantasy concepts colliding in an alternatingly vague and metafictional way reminiscent of How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly.
There are four stories; the first is the eponymous Three Electroknights, describing a civilisation of ice giants with dazzling gems of solid Nitrogen and Helium, and the exploits of the three knights who come to steal them, and are all ultimately defeated. Not a little comedic, and dazzling in its imagery.
The second is a horror/damn-that’s-messed-up story called the White Death, about a mechanical civilisation hiding from a Dark Forest-style Universe on the inside of their hollow Earth. A ship crashes on their surface, and they bring it inside and examine it, horrified by the organic mess. Their king gets wind and orders them to destroy it, which they do, but a single microscopic fungal spore survives and introduces that slow death into their world: rust.
The third is a fable about a bored king who ordered his sages to tell him stories that surprised him. The first two he hears are (imo) interesting and funny, but the very same flaws I encountered cause the king to be dissatisfied, and he kills them all. The final one becomes very metafictional, discussing the nature of surprise and story, before ending in a postmodern comedic/meaningless story that allows the sage to survive.
The final story was another horror about a king who is so paranoid that he extends himself into his capital city as a computronic brain, with buildings as transformers and processing nodes. However, the paranoia progresses, as dreams of usurpation and civil war. He realises he can no longer tell whether or not he is dreaming, and his distributed consciousness splinters with different nodes dreaming at different levels. He becomes more and more terrified of being overtaken by the rest of his consciousness and dragged into their dreams; so much so, that he burns down.
A really great set of stories.