Death of a great constructor.
One of the few really great authors has passed away. Stanislaw Lem , was one of my favourites, “The Cyberiad” being one of the first Science Fiction books I ever read.
“The King rushed forward with
all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of
roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a
field of irrational numbers (F1) and smote it so grievously that it fell
two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an
asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent
expansion and came out, fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and
hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov
chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment to
infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through
an x-axis and several brackets–but the beast, prepared for this, lowered
its horns and wham!!–the pencils flew like mad through transcendental
functions and double eigen transformations, and when at last the beast
closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors
jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to
shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the
chandelier–perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties
of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and
Klapaucius were now shouting over and over, “Hurrah! Victory!!”
- from
Stanislaw Lem ,The Cyberiad