How the World was Saved
Trurl, a robot constructor of the future, constructs a machine with the capacity to create anything that begins with the letter “n” as long as the language is English. His fellow constructor Klapaucius (the two are recurring characters throughout the collection) tests the machine by requesting it to “do Nothing” whereupon the machines begins to create nothing by removing everything that had ever been. The machine is overridden, but not before it has removed many things which can never be replaced.
Trurl’s Machine
Trurl builds an eight-story thinking machine and begins by asking how much is two and two. After taking far longer that expected, the machine finally spews forth its answer: “SEVEN!” Klapaucius asserts that Trurl has built not just a stupid machine, but a stubbornly stupid machine. A frustrated and impatient Trurl begins kicking the machine, the machine grows angry and begins to mutiny against its creator, ultimately attempting to kill the two constructors.
A Good Shellacking
Trurl attempts to fool Klapaucius by convincing him that is a “Trurl copy” created by a machine capable of granting every wish. The other constructor locks the “copy” in his basement and proceeds to abuse it, arguing that he has the right to do so since it is merely a copy and not actually the true Trurl. Finally managing his escape, he proceeds to explain how he had to destroy the “copy” because it had defamed Klapaucius.
Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius
Trurl fulfills the request of the King to create the Perfect Advisor but rejects his offer of hundreds of thousands of his subjects as recompense in preference to gold, to which the King grudgingly complies. When the King later tries to go back on the deal and defraud Trurl, the constructor attempts to teach him a lesson by playing upon the King’s tendency toward paranoid suspicion by tricking him down a rabbit hole in pursuit of decoding a secret message which doesn’t exist. Bringing in a distinguished expert in decoding secret writings results in torture of many citizens as the result of a completely coincidental element in the message that the King only thinks is encoded.
Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal
The his fairy tale parody commences with a trope: the robot King’s robot daughter is the fairest in the all the land and seems destined for marriage with Prince Ferrix. There is, of course, the typical conflict: Princess Crystal has heart set on another. Another race, that is. The Princess has set her heart upon marrying a member of a mythic race never seen and only existing only as possibility. The robots call them “Palefaces” but you might know them better as the person looking back at you a mirror. To reconcile the conflict, Ferrix is disguised as a human, but just as the wedding is about to take place, an emissary sent deep into space to find a paleface returns and as the human stands next to the very unconvincing masquerade of Ferrix, the full extent of “how utterly revolting a paleface was” is revealed to the Princess and so she and Ferrix live happily ever after.
How Trurl’s Perfection Led to No Good
To distract an evil king from his despotic tendencies toward his citizens, Trurl creates a microcosmic kingdom contained entirely within a box with toy citizens to act out his cruelty. Klapaucius reveals the philosophical horror of this decision to his oblivious fellow constructor: because the creations in the box are exact copies of actual subjects, they are metaphysically the same and thus what Trurl has actually created with his box is nothing less than an eternal hellish existence of misery and suffering for them all. The story ends with an unexpected twist: when Trurl returns to try to fix his mistake he learns that the inhabitants in the box have escaped on their own with the added plus of exiling the cruel king.
