Given instructions by a mysterious Mechanism to study the people living in the shelter, the protagonist proceeds as if he is a living machine given a modicum of free will (as explained by the Mechanism). His identity confusion derives from his “birth” on an assembly line under a kind of bell jar. One might even call Robot surrealist science fiction and liken it to Kafka’s work, or even Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, since the main character spends most of his time wandering around the halls of an underground shelter, unsure of his own identity and his place in the community that has formed following an apocalyptic event on the surface. Indeed, both Robot and Lem’s His Master’s Voice (published in Polish just a few years apart) take up the fascinating but insoluble problem of whether or not we’re alone in the universe. If reading Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg’s Robot (Penguin Classics, 2021), translated by Tomasz Mirkowicz, makes you think about Stanislaw Lem’s work, you’re not alone.
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