‘The Mask’ stands out for its eerie prescience, even among the plentiful parables of artificial intelligence and its relation to our fractured human consciousness composed by Poland’s science-fiction maestro. The inorganic “female” entity who narrates the story wrestles with the puzzles of her origin and destiny, and of her possible relations with another kind of being. As so often in Lem, scientific advance coexists with a feudal, backward social order. A fantastic or futuristic scenario enables him to delve deep into our present dilemmas of autonomy, freedom, conditioning and choice.
First published 1976; collected in Mortal Engines, Penguin Modern Classics, 2016
