More Tales of Pirx the Pilot
Commander Pirx, who drives space vehicles for a living in the galaxy of the future, here faces a new series of intriguing adventures in which robots demonstrate some alarmingly human characteristics.
Review
Five more tales featuring Pirx — a bumbling rookie in the original Tales (1979), now a seasoned and level-headed (but coolly cerebral) space jockey. The first three pieces are short, ironic, and somewhat thin on ideas: Pirx fails to intercept a drifting alien hulk thanks to a shipboard comedy of errors; he searches for a robot that has inexplicably cut loose to go mountain climbing; and he survives a close encounter with a berserk mining robot. The two long yarns, unfortunately, are not so much fiction as rather pedantic reflections on the nature of artificial intelligence: a choppy and overinvolved Turing test, in which Pirx must identify (and foil the murderous plans of) the robot among his crew as they fly through the rings of Saturn; and a talky, motionless analysi...
Author: Lem Stanislaw
ISBN: 151621381
Year of publication: 1982
Translator: Iribarne Louis
Genre: Science Fiction
Number of pages: 227
Reading time: 3 h. 47 min.
Formats: FB2, EPUB, PDF
