I'm fairly sure that's Joss himself in the foreground in both of those videos.. Pretty admirable job of choking and collapsing in the second clip too, it was actually kinda scary.
I do think that MFiaB is a great book, but I would definitely not recommend it as an introduction to Lem. It's really quite a trip and takes a lot of patience to get through. The paper-eating blight history and archeological view is a great quick start but it gets somewhat hard to follow after that.
As others have said the Cyberiad may be the place to start, although I think the Chain of Chance is especially good to introduce people that aren't normally inclined to SF.
Another thing that's great about Lem is how easy it is to find used copies for cheap. Used Book Central has MFiaB for $2!.
I noticed that a couple months ago AV started spidering "dynamic-looking" pages (like URLs with cgi-bin in them or query strings, etc.) that they previously wouldn't touch.
Perhaps in trying to compete with google's total index size by changing their rules a bit they've spidered more than they can chew, so to speak.
It'll be a sad day when they take down their own index and just replace it with goto (ok.. overture...) results.
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I'm fairly sure that's Joss himself in the foreground in both of those videos.. Pretty admirable job of choking and collapsing in the second clip too, it was actually kinda scary.
I do think that MFiaB is a great book, but I would definitely not recommend it as an introduction to Lem. It's really quite a trip and takes a lot of patience to get through. The paper-eating blight history and archeological view is a great quick start but it gets somewhat hard to follow after that.
As others have said the Cyberiad may be the place to start, although I think the Chain of Chance is especially good to introduce people that aren't normally inclined to SF.
Another thing that's great about Lem is how easy it is to find used copies for cheap. Used Book Central has MFiaB for $2!.
I noticed that a couple months ago AV started spidering "dynamic-looking" pages (like URLs with cgi-bin in them or query strings, etc.) that they previously wouldn't touch.
Perhaps in trying to compete with google's total index size by changing their rules a bit they've spidered more than they can chew, so to speak.
It'll be a sad day when they take down their own index and just replace it with goto (ok.. overture...) results.
And you thought "M-x spook" was useless...