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I've read a lot of short stories from the Cyberiad, but I doubt that I found all of them in the several anthologies containing different selections of them.

We know that all the robot societies / kingdoms / planets / planet sized robots descended from man-made robots who escaped from the "slavery" of mankind, and that humans relentlessly hunt them down, and those robot societies who are found, are inevitably destroyed, without any chance of successful defense, no matter how advanced they are.

However, there are Trurl and Klapaucius, who can do insane and sometimes ridiculously grandiose feats of engineering. They can knit some art out of stars or star clusters just for fun, or can pick up individual electrons! They can manipulate probability, and alter the fabric of space-time at will. Is humanity really that advanced that they would pose a threat even to those two good friends and adventurers?

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The Cyberiad is a set of fables about the interaction of humans with their technologies. Not much should be read into the grandiose feats of the Famed Constructors. :)

In the stories, it's clear that the Robots have an open disdain for Humans (or Palefaces as they are called) but only rarely has this erupted into open warfare. (after all warfare isn't in the genre of fables and fairy tales) One of the tales discusses a robot getting into a human disguise and how disgusting this is for him.

It has a section describing the relationship of human-robot societies. I think this is in one of the last tales ("Telepathezine"), where a friend of Trurl visits the "HPLDs" who tell him that Humans create Robots, then Robots create Humans, in an endless cycle. The HPLD even asks the narrator if it is possible or necessary to know the difference.

By the way = "HPLD" means "Highest Possible Level of Development"...They have progressed to the ultimate endpoint of technology so that even they can't tell where to draw the line between natural and manufactured. (HPLDs are like the "Q" of Star Trek, with a more deranged sense of humor.)

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  • I distinctly remember a story where a monster arises and devastates a robot kingdom, and after many attempts to stop it fails, they realize that it is sent by the humans to destroy them. There are other worlds where the entire society lives in the inside of the planet, deliberately keeping the look of the planet as if it was barren, just to avoid humans. Of course, as it is a tale within a tale, I don't know how reliable the narrator is.
    – vsz
    Jan 31, 2012 at 5:38
  • I'll get out my books, it's about time I reread them. I seem to remember (maybe incorrectly) that the two stories you refer to are in the Ijon Tichy series rather than the Trurl and Klapaucius series.
    – SteveED
    Jan 31, 2012 at 16:25
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    It's not the Star Diaries. I found one of the stories in the Cyberiad. It's about a kingdom on a planet, and a scepter with an inscription about a monster that is eternal. One day, all the scrap metal formed itself into a big monster that devastated the kingdom. They created three monster-slayers to defeat it, a copper giant, a mercury giant, and a microscopical one made of antimatter. The last one destroyed the monster but it reassembled itself. The king broke the scepter, and it revealed that the humans sent the monster and there is no hope in destroying it. They then committed mass suicide.
    – vsz
    Jan 31, 2012 at 16:46
  • oh yes! I remember, this isn't in the edition of the book that I have on my shelf.
    – SteveED
    Nov 16, 2012 at 1:48
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Possibly some humans eventually pose a threat to the constructors, but humans are not regarded along the lines of Bajki robotów (i. e. as something inherently sinister). In Edukacja cyfrania Trurl revives a frozen humanoid and they then have a friendly talk without any special precaution on Trurl’s part.

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