Description:
In Summa Technologiae, Stanislaw Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades this work has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance, resonating with contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.
Review Quotes: "Summa is a fantasia that follows certain lines of speculative thought as far as Lem can take them. Lem's sober materialism may seem dehumanizing, but he brings back to the frontier a question that has plagued civilization since the beginning, and whose shifting, always insufficient answers have always signaled revolutions in culture: what is it to be human?" --Los Angeles Review of Books
"With Summa Technologiae, his masterwork of non-fiction which has been translated into English for the first time, Lem has taken Western civilisation for a spin--with spectacular consequences. " --New Scientist