I have my father’s copy of Memoirs Found In A Bathtub. The back cover promises ‘a world where everybody is a spy. But nobody knows his mission’. It delivers. Boy, does it deliver! I’ve read it I don’t know how many times. If you love the role-playing game Paranoia, you need to read this book.
I know of Solaris by its mention in Barlowe’s Guide To Extra Terrestrials. I bought a copy. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.
I read the Cyberiad several times before my Dad gave it away without asking me first. I read the love poem from Cyberiad as a toast at a friend’s wedding. Here it is "
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tred the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not–for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he known such a^2 cos(2 \phi) !"
It is coincidentally the only wedding I’ve been invited to speak at that has not ended in divorce.
